It was a January kind of day- at the end of March. Winter seams to not quite be ready to let go of its grasp. Earlier this week it snowed for nearly two days straight, and now there is a lingering coldness that is definitely a Winter kind of cold.
I went for a walk anyway, despite the chill in the air. It was a jazz kind of day. A rainy kind of day, even though that rain was actually snow, I refused to admit that it was still snowy outside.
Pandora did a poor job at picking out some rainy jazz, but with some guidance it eventually caught on.
The great thing about Jazz is that it acknowledges the fact that it's okay to be down, and not be completely happy, yet it boosts your spirits without forcing you to feel all warm and fluffy about yourself. It's like a good friend who will sit on the ground and do nothing but wallow with you for a while, and you somehow leave feeling better. It doesn't try to hard to make you suddenly feel better. It simply takes you as you are, and leaves you be.
Not that I was particularly depressed or sad about anything. I'm actually an extremely optimistic person, but it was just a grey day.
Eventually I made my way to a bench to do some sketching. I've been a terrible artist lately and haven't actually been practicing drawing things. Which is where your skills tend to actually improve. So I'm setting out to start doing that more. I basically just drew what I could see from the bench. And I realized something.
I started with the big things in my line of sight. A lamp post. The house behind the lamp post. The street. Then I realized something. There were about 5 trees that I hadn't even seen. It's not that I didn't see them, it's that I was looking right through them. Which is fine, and something that many of us do, but then I looked around, and I had this awakening moment of like, "Woah. There are trees everywhere."
This sounds extremely lame and like one of the most obvious things anyone has ever said. But I noticed the dead, empty trees for one of the first times in my life. The trees of winter. That's one of the cool things about drawing actually, it forces you to notice things that wouldn't usually be noticed. Because when you are drawing something you want to be accurate and you want to dictate EVERYTHING you see. Drawing is something like 60% looking and 40% actually drawing.
When I noticed all of the trees, with their sad, wintery looks, and their barren branches, I took a minute and just looked at the trees. And I was just like, there are so many things that I probably don't ever notice. Which is just a part of life, as our brains can really only hold so much information. But at the same time, it was such a wholesome moment. I even looked beyond the houses I was drawing to see the giant masses of trees spread through the valley.
It's crazy how our minds just stop recognizing things. These things stop registering to us, and we sort of just float through life in a daze of sorts. Now I'm not necessarily one of those, "We should stop to smell every rose" type of people, and that's really not the point I'm trying to get across. I suppose the point really is that sometimes we just seem to look right through things. Right through people. What a great practice it has been for me to sit and draw something right in front of me. Forcing myself to just look is one of the purist practices I have.
Eventually my ink drawing turned into more of a watercolor drawing, as it was sprinkling a little bit. Which I actually didn't mind. It gave the scene I drew such a great tone.
After some quality art time I continued my walk through my neighborhood. I live in a definite college town, and I live in (my mind) one of the most charming parts of town. It's the quiet part of town, where an equal amount of elderly, and newly weds live. I love walking past the houses. I know that my house was built in the 40's, so I would assume that many of the houses in my neighborhood are from a similar time. Most of the houses have been converted into some sort of apartment complex. It's fun to walk through and imagine what the house looks like, and what it used to look like inside. Most of these houses have little newlyweds stowed away in the basement apartment. I love the nostalgia that these houses seem to give off.
I love the artistic flow of the place I live in. Even though we just barely got a Denny's and lack a decent book store, and many other things I would like to have. I enjoy the slow, quiet pace of this little town for now. Such a great reminder to notice the things we have while we still have them. In our world, things change so drastically, we never know when we will be moving on to the next phase of our lives, and as we say in my family, "It ain't never gon' be the same."
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