Inspiration

Lovely, lovely weather, 60s, 70s -- beautiful for walking, beautiful for sleeping. Such days inspire me with enthusaism to get on with the thingsI want to do. No inertia, no enui. Just mental to-do lists. This is the weekend to finish the blue/white quilt; This afternoon I finished sewing the last line of border. I have only to decide on which backing fabric and then make the quilt "sandiwich" and get busy quilting it. Which I WILL do and, I hope finish and then post a picture. {The picture here is on a not very long hike in Mongolia near Lake Khovsol which is appropriate for the note below about Lake Baikal, for Khovsol is connected, like a child by an umbilicol cord -- an underground, unseen connection, but the same pure, beautiful water]

Of course there's some house cleaning ... but housecleaning is often a casualty of quilting being a priority. I've finally mumbled so much about my biographic writing project that a long time friend -- I like to think of him as a real pen pal -- finally said, quite gracefully, that I've been digging the well so long, isn't it time to share the water -- or something of the sort. He could have used a much cruder metaphor about sittiing on the pot ... At any rate, I'm taking the advice to heart. I just wrote about 250 words ... which will, in the course of time, probably disappear. But every big undertaking starts somehow ... that famous journey of 1000 miles ...

I have been oiling the gears with various writing exercises though an internet swap site. I've written three or four very short "stories" and last night delighted myself with a bit of a fantasy in the voice of a shaman drowned in Lake Baikal; I used a variety of facts that are really quite exotic. I hope they're "facts". Jim Harrison writes that in Lake Superior drowned people [and animals] are preserved by the coldness of the water, as if they are flash frozen and never thaw. If that is true of Superior, it must be true of Lake Baikal. I love having funds of knowledge in various strange subjects that I can weave into a story. It's a wonderful imaginative exercise and it is a little bit enlightening to the readers, even if they take it as a fantasy. I believe many readers of fantasy, as my daughters are, especially Leslie, are hungry for strange information and broad thoughts about big subjects.

The biography I have started is historically true, but it is so exotic it speaks to that same impulse -- perhaps that's what has made me procrastinate. It feels too big. But then making a full sized quilt is a big, labor intensive [as I sort often say] undertaking too. And we're back to that jjourney of a thousan miles...