will you be found?

Yes, woodbird is still here. What has she been up to?

-shoveling snow snow snow snow snow

-teaching

-reading this phenomenal, life-changing book about cooking food “with economy and grace” (and living well)

-writing and recording more Red Heart the Ticker songs

-playing Red Heart the Ticker gigs with a nine-month-old, a four-year-old, a grandpa and a dear old friend in tow

-attending our local Town Meeting Lunch

-writing grant and fellowship applications (so that I can actually write!)

-writing Case Statements for our community’s grassroots capital campaign to buy the recently shut down store in our town and turn it into a cooperatively owned and run grocery, café, deli and community space

-helping tap out. Sugaring season is here!

-drawing yet-more chicken coops

-building block castles and sewing dolls and playing make-believe and nursing and oh, reading this wonderful, quirky story in Orion Magazine by the fire last night about maps. It’s "Cartography" by Bonnie Nadzam and here is a paragraph for you on this fine, tender morning at 5:53 am before my children wake:

There are beautiful things in the city. Mountains, rivers, little painted houses, stone avenues lined with bakeries and bookshops. There are distant fires eating trees, houses, entire towns. There are earthquakes and floods. There are crooks behind some of the most elegant doors and honest men dying alone in the shadows. Sometimes you smell smoke in the wind, and some days in the city the air makes you sick. Occasionally you hear the sound of a flare gun fired by someone else lost in the same metropolis, and the beauty of its illuminated rain burning across the sky makes you want to throw your own city map in the trash; you have no such signal, and wonder how, with your dim little sketches, you will be found. Isn’t that, somehow, the point of your art? 

I think it's the point of mine. 
Happy morning to you all. 

R