Friday 26 August 2016

The 55 Days of Crazy, Part 4



Well, The 55 Days of Crazy turned into The 74 Days of Crazy before I quit counting: trying to sort out everything that happened, especially during One Yellow Rabbit’s Summer Lab Intensive, will be a process that I don’t see a definitive end for in the foreseeable future.

In some ways, that’s not a bad thing: so many ideas spinning around within the room with my fellow students has spilled over — with some interesting consequences — into the rest of my life, while at the same time, I’m dealing with some health issues that have turned the time after Day 55 into a sinkhole of emotions stemming from an ongoing health issue.



Although unresolved, I do see some (pretty darned small, but better than the alternative!) progress in the latter, and I haven’t let it get in the way of taking advantage of getting out of town when an opportunity presents itself. At the top of this post, one of the mist-covered mountains surrounding Canmore, where I took in the Sunday of their Folk Festival on the August long weekend.

Ostensibly, I was there to help staff the CJSW booth, but with a small crowd and three people, we all took the opportunity to visit with friends, check out some of the musical acts, and partake of the wonderful food on the site.

Wasp season

The rest of the stills are from last weekend’s trip west of Bragg Creek, a satellite community to the west-south-west of Calgary, where the rolling foothills being their serious shift into the Front Ranges of the Rocky Mountains. Peaceful, quiet, and a stunningly beautiful and hot day awaited us.

I was out with a friend, having a preview of an MFA thesis, which consisted of a land installation project. It’s a lovely, moving, thoughtful piece (which I’ve not shared here, for the obvious reasons), but us visitors were plagued by several large wasp colonies: they didn’t sting anyone, but they were certainly bothersome.



It was a rare break from a lot of other busy-ness: writing a grant report, then another grant, and finally editing a friend’s book: staggered deadlines — in that order — with the last one needing to be out the door over the Labour Day weekend.

The day after Labour Day, I head for Colorado to do some networking and, most importantly, a two-week, by-invitation-only, artist residency. I have much to think and write about in a new physical environment, and explore a radically changed emotional one.



Books for Sale

The shop is currently empty.