It’s something maybe I always knew. I know, I know, you always said I romanticised a wee bit, but still my childhood was rather idyllic. I have met many in my travels that would have traded places with me in an instant. Parents who loved each other, I grew up next to Grandma, never went hungry, always knew I was loved. Yadda, yadda, and all that.

Instinctively though I suspected that in order to really explore this world, to dredge up from the depths of my soul that spark of matter that gives life beauty, or that touches, or intrigues, that in order to capture even a spark of that, I had to have obstacles and some scars, be more calloused.

All around me at bealArt were lost, tortured souls, and I this dewy-eyed country girl pretending at being one of them – an ARTIST.

I imagined they looked down their noses at me, and I rarely felt like I belonged amongst them. I felt everything I did was inferior since I had been cherished, loved. How could I possibly create GREAT ART without some angst resting its weary self?

Steve Jobs always felt that through friction comes creativity. So, Jobs, I guess encouraged this friction between the various distribution channels they utilised. One of my Apple Authorized resellers, back in my disty days, told me this.

Makes perfect sense. It’s that rich vibrancy of tone that one discovers, inside themselves. You can’t capture dark until you have known darkness. But, you can’t really know the light until you have felt it. Maybe that is how I should think of it – a balance.

Or possibly it’s that through that struggle you gain texture, resiliency, strength, and a knowing of what you are capable of.

The result is that I find now I am much more likely to take chances, go in different directions, and explore places I would have been to shy or scared to, back in those halcyon days of bealArt.

It all changed though in 1999. God, I always wondered Mom what I’d be doing in 1999. Damned if I would have ever guessed right on that score.

And, btw Mom, Prince died this week. Damn, he was only 57 years old. Such memories of his music. Still no idea what happened, but regardless it’s sad to lose such a creative soul.

I suppose in his day, maybe Prince too felt the creative spark that the friction of life may provide.

I wouldn’t be here today even writing to you if not for Tim’s death. If I hadn’t been “trapped” in that paradise in Grey, if all those days of solitude had not happened. If the days Tim and I shared had not happened. If ALL the bullshit he put me through had not happened. I would not have started this blog.

I wouldn’t have had any need to sit down and finally say the things I have wanted to say. I wouldn’t have had a medium to tell my stories, share the dark, and the light, that has been my life.

But back in 1999, I was oblivious. I was married, had a house, a life, friends. I had the white bread life I had never desired, but it was safe (or so I was led to believe). That was wrong, though. Depending on someone else is never safe.

Through the litany of days, weeks, months, years that have transpired since, I am changed. They say it is thru those wounds the light gets in, and so I have found to be true.

And you Mom, you were the light. You are the thing that made me, and so it is only fitting that it is you that inspire me.

It’s like I’ve been seeking all these things my whole life, but it is only once you have ventured from home, taken a few hits in the gut, and upon returning you learn what you were seeking you already had right there inside. Yet I don’t think I could have ever seen that without all those days, weeks, months, years since that day in November of 1999 when I told roger.the.dodger to leave.

Before I was one person, and now I am another. I can never go back to the days before all hell broke loose and I lost everything I had never really wanted to begin with. It’s like something gave me this swift kick in the ass that sent me right off the rails into the ditch.

And in that damn ditch, I stayed for a while.

Not quite 2 years later you died. Fifty-four, new Grandma, and I learned again that life is, and never has been, fair. So I railed against that injustice too. Angry at the fate that had doomed me from continuing along in my safe little world I had grown so used to.

Yet instead, I turned away from that piece of soul that craved a creative outlet. I drowned it in pints of Guinness, and late night sojourns with a stream of strangers that often meant nothing to me, and I nothing to them.

And then I met Tim.

He took me away far away to his lake, and I for the first time since bealArt, I remembered who I really was. I had forgotten so many things you know. I had forgot the name of trees and flowers. Forgot how good it felt to get my nails dirty with the earth. Forgot how euphoric it felt to capture the world around me. Capture it, examined it, and begin to again look at it differently. Explore from different angles, down different paths, through the bush, and after dripping wet from the experience of all that paradise and pain, here I am.

Not that I make a living in any way shape or form by any of this. HOWEVER, dang it all Mom, I am finally acknowledging this desire, this need I suppose, that I have to express myself. Which of course you always knew.

Love,