I hit the wall yesterday.  I was bleary eyed, I could barely type out single words let alone sentences on the computer, I was 100% ineffective at everything I was hoping to complete.  I needed to spend the day in the studio and when noon rolled around I knew there wasn’t a chance I would be remotely effective in that space either so I shut it all down.  I stepped out of the house to peer at the sky — it looked capable of anything.  I packed a bag with my camera gear, water and two coats in case of rain or cold or both.  The dogs eagerly loaded in the truck and we were off.

More often than not, there’s so much to do around here that it can feel difficult to justify days like yesterday and I have to remind myself that going outside is how I sweep out the cobwebs and reverse the muscular atrophy that comes with too much computer work, too much photo editing, too much time spent hunched over in the studio, too much tame living.  Going outside is vital to my work.  It’s as important as answering emails, submitting images, writing my morning pages and crafting cocktail rings.

I signed another contract for a photography job this week.  I was on the fence about it for a long while.  I was afraid (I am still afraid) it might be a mistake, an overextension.  I like to do my very best, no matter what I’m working on, and I’m afraid of this job and what it might do to my life over the next few months.  Fear.  Fear.  Fear.  It will be a lot of work and I need to find a way to do it with joy and HEART, injecting soul and honesty into every image.  I talked to Rob about it.  I talked to some of my friends about it.  I wrestled with it like Jacob and the Angel of the Lord…

In the end, I committed to the work because I didn’t feel like I could say no to it.  In this business, there’s soul work and there’s survival work and sometimes the two can operate hand in hand and sometimes they can’t and you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do to get by.  I know there’s some romance hanging like a golden sunbeam over what I am doing with my life as a freelance photographer and a metalsmith but the fact is this, these are jobs.

In fact, I think there’s too much glamour attached to the notion of doing full-time creative work, I mean the image of the working artist — it’s not more noble, it’s not more soulful, it’s not more meaningful, it’s not more emotionally and spiritually centering to do art full-time for a living.  The work itself can be noble, soulful, meaningful and centering (ANY job can be these things) but doing creative work as a full-time job isn’t going to strip your life of normalcy.  You’re still going to be human   You’re still going to have your struggles.  I’m just trying to be honest about this because sometimes folks get worship-y about the lives of full-time artists.  The work is just as messy and complicated and beautiful as having a job out in the real world.

Just like you, there are mornings when I don’t want to do my work.  I want to do something else.  I want to stay in bed curled up with my animals and read a book instead of facing my inboxes or sitting down in front of a necklace design I managed to bung up when I let myself work too late in the night with muddled eyes.  There are times, too, when it’s the joy of my heart to work!

I get tired.  I get energized.  I get hurt.  I get healed.  I get empty.  I get full.

I’m just like you.

Anyway, the dogs and I went out yesterday, we had some gale force wind blowing in our ears, we found plenty of really cool dead stuff to look at, we watched the hawks hunt, we listened to the canyon wren, we heard the chukar chuckling, we gazed off in the distance and daydreamed, we kept our eyes peeled for antlers, and we walked it out, mile after mile, until the sun went down.

We don’t regret, for a moment, how we spent the day.