This is my note of surrender. After slowing down my blog-writing some months ago to the point where I felt people weren’t expecting a piece every day and then stopping altogether, I decided that life was easier without a blog. No more waking up in the morning with a huge question-mark, “what shall I write about today?” hanging over my head.
I wandered into the painting studio dipped a brush into the red and off I went, turning out a very respectable painting over the next two hours. I brought the almost-finished work upstairs to our apartment and went to work on the finishing touches. Who needs to write, I thought, when I can sit here all day dabbing colors onto canvas? So at the great rate of about one a month I have been churning out paintings, with great satisfaction.
The trouble started about a month after I posted the last blog. “Where are you?” cried a message on Facebook. “What’s happed to you?” asked an email. “Have you stopped writing?” said a neighbor as she passed me in the corridor. She had been reading my blog? Then came a threatening letter from someone in China and the last straw was a polite note in an email asking me if I was still here, a highly pertinent question to a resident of a retirement home, followed by a phone call to make sure.
What I cannot ignore is not the “I miss your articles” messages but the “are you all right?” inquiries. My faith in humanity is restored. Mozart is also back. He always accompanies my blog writing but is not here when I paint. There is a message hidden somewhere in there. After all, Mozart, king of the creative process, knows about these things.
