Enough

I dreamed I was a Snowy Owl who could paint pictures, but I suffered from the kind of shyness I always figured was incurable. Then I met a human being who said

“My name is Jack Breakfast and I think you should consider disguising yourself behind a whimsical nom de guerre”

and I asked him “Oh, is that what you do, in life?”

but my sudden teacher deliquesced into the foggy ethereals

and so I never really got an answer

and so in easyhearted gratitude I vowed to henceforth sign my pictures

“Bubo Scandiacus Absconditus”

I dreamed we spent our off-hours waddling in gardens, winking and stinking. Our favourite wildflowers were wood poppies because we loved their tender yellows. Our life together was harmonious, and our adventures were adorable and aromatic.

Ideas — I get them, you get them, who knows where they come from, who knows if we receive them or transmit them or something in between? Anyhow the other night at crazyman o’clock while you were sleeping (or at least I hope you were because it was either very late or very early or somehow very both) I was making circles in Beak’s Sitting Room and reminiscing about the skunk who waddled into Beak’s Garden¹, how we loved him, how we feared him, how our fear contained more jubilation than trepidation, and then I told myself or heard a voice that told me:

two skunks in a luminous colourgarden surrounded by a world of sleepy blues, keep a peaceful heart and keep it sparky

Who was I to kick up a fuss? Ten or fifteen minutes later I regarded my cartoonish creation and the other voice said “almost” and I answered “what is lacking” and the other voice said “two tanagers and a fire hydrant” and I said “what will house them or contain them” and the other voice said “a dusty red egg” and I answered “let’s get cracking” and I couldn’t see my face but I believe my face was smiling

I’ve been working on a book. Will you love it? I don’t know! Will you ever see it? I hope so! It’s an artbook or a picturebook or an artist’s book, what’s in a name, and anyhow it’s full of words and pictures and the words and pictures move in and over and through each other so as to culminate in a cozy confluence, or so I like to tell myself in the middle of the night. Full disclosure: it feels false or funny to call it “work” because I adore the process even when it’s difficult, and especially when it’s difficult. Sometimes I get stuck, who doesn’t, but whenever my “creativity” goes static, I’ll scramble down some diaristic notes about my feelings and ideas. These diaries are private and probably dimwitted, but a shameless birdbrain born was I, and the upshot is I’d like to share an extract with you after I first show you this picture of two piping plovers making a living in the screaming sunshine

If somebody who we understood to be omniscient told us

for the rest of your life you will never stray too far

or

for the rest of your life you’ll be stuck in a crazyloop and if you want to make the best of it that’s up to you

or

for the rest of your life you will only make your local circles, studying, observing, looking, noticing, noting, and if you want to turn it into art that’s up to you²

would it be enough?

Would our peregrinations feel purgatorial, as if we were somehow being punished, or living out a sentence?

If our life of making local circles is a sentence, who decreed it?

If for the rest of our life while we were making local circles, we would see a lot of things but most of them would feel meaningless and we’d discard them, dismiss them, just keep moving as if we never even saw them

but sometimes

certain things would stop us in our tracks, like the old expression goes, and at first we’d wonder “why so special” and we would feel confused or irritated, but soon the thing that compelled us to pause would radiate with love, and we would feel the love completely, and we would flush and flicker and feel like the luckiest entity from world history to only be alive and making circles,

would it be enough?

Enough for what? For a life to feel worthwhile, for a life to feel meaningful?

If for the rest of our life we could only fall in love with sparrows sleeping in the twigs at twilight, warblers sleeping in the twigs in the middle of the day, redtails perched on powerpoles, an orange leaf floating in green lakewater, night herons straightening their feathers near some yellow flowers, stormwater ponds reflecting clouds with Latin names we can’t remember, making geometric confluences of blues and whites but clumped with algae pockets, the kind we used to think was duckweed until we learned the difference, duck prints in the snow, duck prints in the sand, duck prints in the mud, duck prints on the ice, pareidolias in the sky or in the water, atmospheres and light and colour, sudden beavers, sweat bees, ships at night, cormorants, the moon,

would it be enough?³

always onward; love only

1. Who’s Beak?! I’ll tell you someday

2. this is surely borrowed if not plagiarized from Walker Evans’s terrific advice: “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

3. for reasons I would rather not decipher I forgot to include the happy times with other people, i.e., other human beings — you know, things like community, togetherness, conviviality, but you can make your own list and actually I hope you will