I am spending a few days house and dog sitting in the Midtown Terrace neighborhood in San Francisco near Twin Peaks and Sutro Tower. My charge is Margot, a very sweet lab who is doing much better since the last time I looked after her. At that time she had done something to her hip, so couldn’t move around too well and we spent a lot of time just chilling out on a mattress on the floor. But now she is doing much better and we’re able to get out for twice daily walks to the local park where she can run around and roll in the grass. When we were there on Thursday night there was a group of kids playing in a big pile of mud next to the playground. They were in heaven, making mud pies and sculptures as their parents stood nearby chatting.
Now that I am not working at the Marin County Bar I’ve been putting in more time on my gap year guide and gratitude workshop project. I joined an incubator group through Idealist and have been putting together a proposal and workshop outline. Like the gap year guide, it’s been an up-and-down process. Several times I’ve hit a wall and things were just not coming together. Working with my incubator coach Carol has been great. Her support and ideas help move me forward a little bit more each time we meet. I am finding with all these projects it’s so hard to get myself started because I am just not really sure what to do, but if I tell myself I just have to spend 10 minutes on it each day and if I hate it after 10 minutes, I can stop. Almost always I am able to keep going for much longer than that.
Interspersing that work with collaging and getting out for walks has made this a very enjoyable and fertile time. I am happy now that I’m not working to have the freedom and flexibility spend time on these different projects. I don’t know if any of them will actually lead to financial profit but they are definitely passion projects. On my walks around the neighborhood here. I’ve been collecting flowers and filling bud vases with my findings.
On Friday, I went to an incredible exhibit at Heron Arts in the city. This was the third year of an exhibit they called Resonance in Light, and it was an amazing, immersive experience. There were several Gamelatrons which are sonic kinetic sculptures, a combination of gongs and glockenspiel type instruments that played melodies alternating from mellow and soothing to fast and frenetic. The Gamelatrons were hooked up to four different light sculptures which pulsed according to the sounds. Sometimes the gongs were so deep I could feel the vibrations deep in my body. I was the only one there for over an hour – it was fantastic to wander, sit and stand in different areas of the space to experience how the sound and light changed. I got to meet one of the artists who lives above the studio space and he talked about his experience with the other artists in his group in designing their sculpture. They mainly do large metal outdoor pieces, most prominently at the Lyon festival de lumière, where they are based in Lyon, France. This exhibit was something new as it involved colored metal, pulsing light currents and sound. Their art sculpture was a series of round metal discs with a lit up ring circling each of them. Depending on where you stood in the room they looked like flat sheets of metal or round, three dimensional planets. Another artist had created stained glass light boxes in a sectioned off area of the exhibit where there were large cushions to sit on. This is the second exhibit I’ve been to at Heron Arts, and it was just as impressive in a completely different way as the first. It is definitely becoming one of my favorite art exhibit spaces.
I’ve been participating in an online collage workshop with a different collage artist demonstrating their favorite techniques every day. The videos are about a half an hour long and I have gained a ton of inspiration and lots of great ideas from the artists that I’ve observed so far. There’s another 10 to go and I can’t wait! Even better I’ll have access to the videos for as long as I want so I can try out different things at my own pace.
It’s been sunny the last two days and such a treat to enjoy the warm weather, everyone seems a little dazed to be going around in T-shirts and shorts all of a sudden.