#uncoffeed...

Creative types are indoctrinated to the P-word as soon as they get excited about something they made. If you're like me, you got excited after someone else did - in other words, you accepted someone else's excitement as permission to be proud of your own work. And then someone else came along and took your joy by saying you didn't think of it yourself. Yeah, THAT P-word. The very nature of what we do (you can take that "we" to mean creative types or the Royal We as makes you comfortable - either one is accurate) is to translate the world around us and how we interact with it, or don't. We use languages we think will come close to our interpretation - spoken word, written, paint, texture, song, or sounds - in an effort to pin down the butterfly. We hope you find something in our message that speaks to you. I've been stepping outside my comfort zone in all directions and mostly liking what I discover. I'll intentionally do things on my own bec

I followed my own advice:  when you don't know what to do, garden. Pulling weeds does something to clarify the bigger picture.  What keeps growing back is native; understand its purpose. Study your soil and weather - and the local wildlife - when choosing to interject a garden into what's already there. You can take risks and plant something you really like, but know that it may not survive the environment even if you dedicate yourself to protecting it. Decide which way you're gonna play this - in my opinion, there are no wrong answers. Sometimes I feel like I'm standing a planet away from what should be my peers. As a rebellious teen cliché, I gravitated toward highly intelligent people who did not hold degrees. They made sense to me, and I seemed to make sense to them. They were happy in their hippie lives, happier than I was in mine. They presented a version of stability to which I could aspire. I get very clear signals from time to time that I did