Skip to main content

From Luxury to Necessity: A Weekend Recap

This weekend, I have felt things keenly.

Yesterday, it was a visit to Bluebird, and a conversation with a woman who has recently made her artistic endeavours her livelihood. We had a great chat about life and art. I wanted to buy out the store.

In the evening, I felt exhaustion come over me like a wave. Emotional, mental exhaustion. So I caught up on The Mentalist (and nearly cried, but that is a whole other topic) and went to bed.

This morning, I read a blog entry from the mother of a family I have never met, but am fascinated by (and slightly in awe of). She is asking many of the same questions that have been rattling around in my mind lately, despite our geographical, generational, and general differences.

I don't usually get teary-eyed at church. Today, I teared up no less than three times. Once was a photo and a song. Once was a story about death. And once was the beauty of rescue and redemption.

During an afternoon wander through The Distillery District galleries, I struck up a conversation with an employee about light and colour and serenity in a series of portraits. It was beautiful to talk about it all, even if I am untrained in the visual arts.

Just around the corner, I looked into an Art Market booth and recognized a print I'd nearly bought at Bluebird. A brief conversation with the artist made me decide to purchase work from her in the near future.

I craved time and space to create today. It didn't happen, which left me a little sad. But I know that it will happen. The more I expose myself to art, the more deeply it moves me and the more convinced I am that it is not a luxury, but a necessity in my life.

Two other necessities in my life that I used to consider luxuries:
1. "downtime/space/alone time" - whatever you want to call it. I need an afternoon or an evening free from tasks and free from company every week.
2. massage therapy. It has changed my life...literally. I need to find someone here in Toronto who will keep my body in better shape than I can.


These three artists are among those on display in the Distillery.
Go and look and be moved.
(Take me along, if you'd like.)
Nava Waxman
Tadeusz Biernot
and Marie-Josee Roy

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thin

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro