I shouldn’t, according to the experts, but with an artists temperament I keep odd hours. Yesterday it caught up with me and I took the rare mid day nap. Two hours later I awakened to a blackout in my neighborhood where a wind storm knocked out power. As usual, a peek outside revealed darkness on my street but the normal array of porch and Christmas lights one street to the north.

Just about everything I like to do requires electrical power. I need it to see and cook and work.  It powers my editing devices. It provides my only immediate means to communicate with the outside world.

I found matches and lit  a  candle. I should get more of them because they smell better than oil lamps and frankly put out almost as much light. From there I lit votive candles and enough oil lamps to make room to room transit collision free.

Certain that the outage affected no one I knew, I made no plans to leave the house for them. My nearest neighbors are self sufficient octogenarians who have no hesitation to ask when they really need help and who know that I’m going to come through if they do.

The day prior, my smart phone died.  With the loss of power and no phone I experienced a worse isolation than might have happened in the 1970’s because at least in those days I had a land line that still functioned.

The house began to cool and the refridgerator began to warm.

I am a painter. To do that I get inspiration. Sometimes that means seeding my imagination with stories. Not knowing how long my personal stay on Gilligans Island would be this time, I decided to work with that. Inspiration does not require electricity or light.

So I paced through the house telling the story whose imagery I wanted to paint. Voicing the narrative helps weed out plot weakness. It brings new ideas to the tale. For a few hours this went on until cabin fever drove me out. I delivered a gift to a deserving soul miles away, just leaving it on the handle of the front door in a plastic bag with a note. Then I checked on a friend for a long overdue visit.

Forest of Upidon

When I arrived home it was still dark, despite that the other side of the street was back to normal. I left the comforting assurance of my warm truck for the pitch black cave again. One by one I illuminated the candles and lamps.

In the room where I do photography hangs two paintings with sparkles on the canvas. One, a picture of little Ava casting a rainbow with a glass prism, is well populated with perfectly brilliant flecks of color and light that loves the glow of the oil lamps. It dressed up the whole room.

I designed trees of the Upidon forest in the story, which kept me engaged with fascination over the way geometry in nature makes the seemingly random make orderly sense because it is orderly. It just doesn’t look made up. The trees have a narrow bolus at the ground level while the trunk widens as it rises, eventually culminating in a bulbous symmetry that supports a smooth wide canopy which intermeshes with other trees in the forest so that canopy branches from one tree are part also of the surrounding trees. The design of the imagined trees was unlike anything I’ve seen and yet it all made sense in the design sketches. I tried profile drawings, but the most fun came in a top down view of the branch and leaf geometries which for each tree was based on rings of six then five then four then six branches .

“Ancient Script”

More “ancient text”

Being a part of a larger story that I’ve toyed with as being a ‘translation’ of ancient documents, I imagined what the script of the original text might look like, using references to song lyrics to write. It looks best to me when I write blocks with two then three then two then three lines.

When I’d fallen asleep writing several times, I retired to bed. Each night, it’s my habit to read scripture aloud to cats if they are there, or the NSA if they’re listening through my phone, or to the still air. This, followed by a prayer of thanks and inquiry, leads to the very act which brought me to that room: slumber.

First though, I am targeted by a cat whose rumbling purr and eager desire to stand between me and the book had already consigned him to a spot under the covers held closely. When the reading has ended, he is released and walks over me to a favorite curl up spot not far from my head.

At six in the morning the lights come on and the clock displays all begin blinking 12:00. Power returns. The furnace fires up, and little lights glimmerf in rooms with electronic doodads.

Life returns to normal : )