Good Firewood Now

The panel caught the edge of the workbench and hit the floor. I knew from the sound.

That sound. The specific, irreversible crack of cradled birch giving way. Not a clean break you can work with, not a structural problem you can disguise under wax or paint. The kind that tells you the piece is done and it isn't even finished. Good firewood now. Kindling especially with all of the encaustic wax on it.

I stood there for a moment. Thought about whether I could make the crack part of the work somehow, whether the damage could become the point. My brain wasn't working that way. That's the honest answer. I was going too fast, thinking three pieces ahead, trying to will a show entry into existence on someone else's timeline, and the panel on the workbench was paying for it. I dropped the whole idea and went to look for something else.

That was the summation of the week, really. Not in failures exactly, but in a particular kind of sideways momentum where nothing goes quite the way you aimed for and you find yourself improvising around the edges of what you planned. My first week of retirement....all that blissful freedom. Right. 

The workshop I'm teaching for the art guild is dialed in but not entirely finished. I was trying to get two pieces ready for the Nebraskaland Days show and it became clear that wasn't happening. I made a wedding card for one of my student-athletes, a young woman I've watched for years turn into someone genuinely remarkable, and it wasn't as nice as I wanted. The real gift I'd planned to give her isn't done either.

My sleeping platform for the pickup and topper is half-built. I was hoping to leave Monday for some plein air painting near Valentine. That didn't happen. Somewhere in the middle of all this I also decided I was going to get back into adventure racing. Swap out the fat tire bike for a carbon gravel bike I have had my eye on. Get a longer kayak, faster, something that could move. I was researching international races, doing the math on training schedules, feeling that particular kind of acceleration that happens when a dream gets enough oxygen.

Then I remembered I'm 66.

Not in a defeated way. Just in the way that reality eventually catches up to a good idea and has a quiet word with it. The energy isn't there. The financial runway isn't there. And more to the point, that dream belongs to a version of me that was chasing something different than what I'm actually after now. I stood with those thoughts of potential escapades for a minute, let the adventure race fantasy deflate in a mostly graceful way, and moved on. 

Kayaking, trekking, rucking, mountain biking, snowshoeing and the rest? Yeah, I will still have some outings but mostly close to home and certainly not as a competitor. A finisher. Ugh, that stings a bit, but it's real. Adventure racing doesn't have age groups.

Here is the thing about slow living that I keep having to relearn. It doesn't mean slow the way most people think it means slow. I am not a slow person. I ruck. I kayak. I cycle. I have weeks where I am running at 300 mph with my hair on fire and I love those weeks, I genuinely love them. Slow doesn't mean low gear. Slow might just mean intentional. Fully present. Doing the thing you're actually doing rather than four things ahead of the thing you're doing.

I dropped that panel because I wasn't present with it. I was in a hurry to meet a deadline for a show I care about only in a loose and general way. It's the people with the show I care about, not creating the art for it. The broken panel was the honest result of that.

So, I went to storage and started looking. Storage is a small house next door that used to be a rental. After years of repairs between renters, it now sits waiting for the first couple of artists to use it when we open the artist residency. Coming in the fall, I think. Know anyone who would like an artist retreat, access to a great studio, woodshop and metalshop in Nebraska?

Ghost Light had been in there for a couple of years. A barn owl, 24 by 28, mixed media on cradled birch, chalk paint and pan pastel and beeswax and damar resin. I painted it in 2023 and liked it well enough to keep but not well enough to continue marketing after the initial debut, apparently, because it had just been sitting in the dark. I pulled it out and stood it up under the studio lights and looked at it for a while.

It fit the Nocturne prompt exactly. Better than anything I would have made this week at the pace I was working.

Work in progress for the Nocturne show before I dropped it off the bench.

The barn owl has been called the ghost owl for a long time, before science ever explained what makes it what it is. That pale, silent form drifting through dark fields. It navigates by sound precise enough to strike prey through a foot of snow in total darkness. There's no menace in it, just a quiet authority that's easy to miss if you're moving too fast to notice. The piece had been sitting in storage doing what it does, buried colors in a dark background, waiting for someone to look slowly enough to find them.

The week had been trying to tell me something and I was too busy cracking panels to hear it.

Valentine might still happen, just late. That feels about right for a week like this. The workshop will be ready and I love it. The sleeping platform will get finished, built from bleacher lumber salvaged from my own school, wood from the 1950s that held up generations of people watching kids try hard at things, which seems like good material to sleep on. The wedding gift for my athlete will get made, even if it arrives after the ceremony.

None of that bothers me the way it probably should. I keep waiting to feel guilty about the things I didn't finish and the guilt just isn't showing up. What shows up instead is something closer to clarity. The piece that needed to exist was already made. It just needed to be found.

That seems like a decent summary of most weeks, if you're paying attention.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio

Sage 16x20 Mixed Media on panel. WIP image not finished on time for Nebraskaland Days call.