Dear @marielle.hasselblad,
I have been meaning to reply to this thread for at least a week now. This response will have to do for now!
I do greatly appreciate your drawings and the intuitive design and the chance for deep contemplation. These remind me of my days in the wilderness with a beautiful chunk of alone time. To get to the core of what is meaningful (for me), I need ample space, ample time, and a blank page.
I like that you are writing in a clear tone, so that the audience can understand. My ramblings on the above-mentioned rambles tended to be for my eyes only with words and drawings that only make sense to me (or so I believe) … perhaps if I revisited my notebooks again I will find that the words are more relevant now than when I wrote them.
I hope to respond directly to some of your insightful scribblings soon. For now, I will share a project I have been working on for 208 days now… Below is a response from Day 200…
I find your presence on the forum a warm welcome. Like our friend @Michael_Stumpf who seeks to communicate a bit beyond the written word with images (see the thread When One Metaphor Isn't Enough -The Lives of Metaphorical Fluid People - #125 by Michael_Stumpf for example), your intuitive illustrated inquiries allow for the viewer to insert alternate forms of reality into a somewhat static forum.
Today is Day 200 of my “word of the day” (for lack of better words) For Day 200 I dedicated it to the word “scribblings” … I essentially select a word from a recent reading or from out of the air and, if the day permits, I sit and ponder upon it. Some days are more thoughtful than others. I started the project when my son converted his lifespan into the total number of days he had lived … at that time we decided he was close to 2,200. After some thinking about leap years, my life counted up in days turns out to be about 13,500 days. Approximately 26,000 remaining! Or maybe just under one hundred…whatever it may be…here I am; here you are; here we go!
This word of the day project began a week or two before the announcement of the pandemic (at least to my ears). Something about counting the days after this gave life a bit more eerie meaning. Now it has passed over 200 days. A small number it seems. And, to count the days of a lifetime and still only reach a few thousand…well, this is a good exercise on perspective for me. And it is opposite of what is called “counting the days” here in the US. Rather than wait for something to happen, wait for our death, count down to “something”, why not count up the days?
I have also been keeping a watercolor dream journal for over a year, so these two projects meshed together. (and pardon my rotation skills for the images!)
Day 6 Remembering and Forgetting
I also had a lucid dream on that previous night. I chose the words “remembering and forgetting” because I had come across a shelf of books and trinkets and art supplies in that dream. In one row of books, I saw the years dated 1982-2020 …the span of my life in years. What most interested me was a book next to 1982 labeled 1981 … was this about me before I was born into this body?! I awoke before I could explore this any further and have tried in vain to return to this location to read it.
Day 12 - Annihilation
Day 204 - Planetary (images from dreams that night)
Again I wish to state that I really appreciate you beginning this thread and hope that we can continue to share our experiences from alternate sides of the earth!