All Our Yesterdays

"I have lost the idealism of my 20's,  as I feared I would" - Annie Dillard

Add me to the list.  I remember fondly that wonderful, take-on-the-world-and-change-it fire that burns so bright in our youthful adult years . . . it filled me with purpose and, like the separation of of a space capsule from it's booster rockets, sent me into deep space. . . far away from my childhood home.

But then, over time, across thousands of orbits of that strange unknown world, it somehow quietly slips away. Time erodes it with washes of reality and our new found angst and uncertainty over what we are here for, or to do, with this life we are given. 

Many of us just hang there. . . suspended in that slowly eroding orbit. Waiting for the crash and burn.

Some of us escape and go on to explore other worlds.

As for me, well I do not wish to return to those days. What has replaced that explosive sense of youthful power and possibility is, as I experience it daily,  even more powerful. . . and possibly what will keep me going, albeit with a different fire, for the remainder of my years on this voyage.

That voyage is not out there, into some unknown and uncharted space.
It is right here. The point of origin and the place I began.
It is the idealism born of all that came BEFORE that time.

It's the source and the core of all of the wonders I held as truths as a child.

I sit, daily now, looking out over this beautiful corner of nature I have chosen to call home and I craft visual and three dimensional art that is all connected, in some way, to the days of my formative youth. The youth that really mattered and defined who I was to be. 

As life goes, I feel we never get very far from those years.  We never evolve into anything that was not born in those early experiences and we never learn any lessons that we did not already know, in some form, back then as well.

We are simply cycling on those themes over and over and, if we are lucky, we are able to, once again, befriend that young child who we were. We take them under our wing and either embrace them or comfort them for what they have been through and brought to these adult lives.

If we are wise, we listen.
Truly listen.

We sit with them and we realize that they have as much to teach us now as they ever did. As anyone or anything ever will again.

I consider this phase of my life to be a form of "school" all over again. I am a quick learner. I am learning once more how to lose track of time. How to immerse myself into the solitude and creative bliss that I love and have craved to return to for so many years.  I am learning how to not feel bad or "less than" for doing so.  I am learning that the world responds to people working with "what they know" far more than it does to people pretending to be in the know.

It is, as any life decision will be, a choice. 
For me, it is one based in creating, above all else, simplicity.

As far as I am concerned, you can keep the world of the "adult".  Take the politics, policies and anxieties and all the future fears that fill the days and nights of the bustling, climbing, worrying human race and jetison them into deep space.  And you can do that in a little space capsule that I will build of clay and wood.

Send it off with a hearty bon voyage!

So, now then, I am here.
Right where I was all those years ago and where I will now plan to remain as long as I am alive
Creating everything that my soul can bring forth to share
Everything that I have to offer
Everything I know

There is a shaodow over my shoulder
Hello little one
I am here for you
Again

~nicolas