A beautiful thing happened on Friday: I looked at my calendar and saw that I had nothing to do this weekend. So this morning I finished eating my oatmeal while patting the very attentive black Lab sitting next to me as the 9:30 ferry took me to Peaks Island. I hadn't been to Peaks since I was about 10 years old (some Girl Scout troop thing) and, surprisingly, the island weddings I've played have all been on the Diamond islands, not Peaks. This warm, sunny, perfect day was a beautiful day for an island excursion.
I had kind of a sketchy map, but figured "how lost can I get on an island?" so when I saw a sign at the side of the road marked "TRAIL", I took it. Somewhere along the trail (which eventually ended near the steel bunker) I stopped to sit and do some drawing. Today I tried pretending that I was tracing the outlines of the things I was drawing--that instead of my pencil being on paper, it was actually right where I was looking, tracing the edge of the object. That was a really weird sensation, but I think it got me closer to the feeling I want when I'm drawing. I'm really, really slow at it, but that seems right. I'm very slow at most things in the beginning, but if I very carefully allow myself to keep going slowly, one day I'm just magically fast.
After I finished drawing, everything on my walk looked more detailed and more interesting. I think that's the key to finding magic for me: realizing that I never know everything about anything, that there's always something I haven't noticed and how exciting that is.
I got lost a lot today (still need to check a real map to figure out where the heck I was), mostly because I veered off into the woods every time something looked interesting. The end of my walk, along Pleasant and Island Avenues, was the least fun; there were so many houses that I felt funny about cutting across people's lawns and so kept to the road.
There were some ridiculously large houses (mostly along the outside of the island, near the ocean) but there were some really charming cottages too. Back at home, I opened up the plans of cottages from Tumbleweed Houses and thought again about downsizing. Well, I got into the spirit of it, anyway, and removed at least 15 books from my bookshelf to donate. Flushed with the success of dejunking, I headed outside to take down the supports from this year's crop of peas and then sawed off 4 9-foot lengths of tubing for my hoop houses. It took about 15 minutes. The tubing has only been in my garage for what, 2 months? Argh.
Next weekend I see that I, again, have nothing scheduled. This could become addictive.