An Epiphany?

Spent a couple of days flat on my back with a cold this past week, which had the not-unwelcome benefit of giving me more time to think than do, so I got a lot of thinking done, along with the fun of immersing myself in a ton of gardening magazines. This diet doesn't allow for the various comfort foods that I'd normally indulge in when I'm not feeling well, so I padded out the herb tea and orange juice with magazines, and it worked just fine.

Anyway, all the thinking led to the realization that everything I'm doing is tied together, that there is no separating my art from my garden or from my other life elements, and I mean this not only in the sense of the origins of the art, but in the very fact of being an artist. And to this effect I realize that I no longer aspire to be a certain sort of artist, in the manner that I would make someone's landscape look like a certain kind of landscape. Instead, I'm an artist of whatever organically emerges from me and my efforts, the same way that my garden is emerging organically from the site and the genius loci.

I no longer care whether my art is Serious or Whimsical, Disturbing or Cute. I don't give a hoot. What comes out comes out, be it craft or painting or flower. In this way I'm most fully who and what I am, and that, of course, is what being 50 is all about--others' expectations of you no longer seem to have quite the same weight, the same impact. I can, and have done, all manner of work and art (and decorating, and dressing, and cooking, and mothering, and studying), but these days things are shaking out into their essentials.

And that is both liberating and satisfying.