The 13th Year

In the summer of 2009, I started a project with one simple goal: draw a picture everyday for a year, maybe think about drawing, say a few things about drawing on a Blogger site that I called mynameisfaith – seemed a decent enough introduction of myself to the interwebs world.

True story, too.

I acknowledge that I made good and sure to include the tweet below my post about this – the 13th year – reiterative practice of daily drawing in whatever way feels the most honest. I’m prone to adolescent humor – call it a GenX psychiatry problem?

Thirteen years is a long time.

Almost ½ a mortgage, a teenage kid, a public education in the United States of America.

This is the 13th year of a project that began with earnest intentions and went all sorts of ways in leading up to this point, a rather sweet feeling recursion, a return to the beginning ready to complete an ending or segue into a new iteration during these next several years which will be – as every year is – marked by transitions and the closing of life stages, curtains opening to new ways of being in my circumstances and the accumulative and ever-in-flux phenomenon of this person with this name that is my name and a history that I know as my own, fumbling forward about to and in the midst of doing what I both never thought I’d actually manage to make real to do and always, much more deeply than I have ever thought anything, felt and knew I’d do, and finding that nothing is what I expect to be – if I really pay attention – and that even in my failures and mistakes I bring the life in me to some fruition, simply in the effort drag out into the light all the things I have to show, tell all the stories I might find in myself, to expose myself as a poem that never wants to end.

Right now, I’m loving the feeling of filling the small spaces of page with ink, smoothing the edges of heavy lines to make a feeling like an opening in the back of my throat, some kind of secret gasp.

Whatever forms have arisen the past several days have been entirely line-feel freedraw mechanics, automatic almost, very focused and calm. Happy.

It’s much easier to approach a blank page now than it was in 2009, when I was trying to draw certain pictures or ideas.

Lately, I make a scrawl or slash, pick some minuscule spot in the fibers and extend a line out from it.