First off:
There are five new Bebes in the shop, and a handful of Fidgets in Impressionist’s Spring left.

I’ve been working on components of things, pieces that don’t make up anything finished enough to show yet. A bit like how classes in a degree program make up your degree, only it’s components and skills, and for pens and art, not degrees. I’ve been doing a lot of making mistakes and testing limits, followed by even more thinking about the mistakes and limits and trying to understand them. It is slow going, at least to me. It involves a lot of me making frowning faces while staring off into space, or frowning at some random bit of thing I’ve made and then broken while trying to figure something out.

I’m equal parts thrilled and frustrated. I’ll get there, and I know it, but the process always involves this stretch of frustrated. It’s how I learn.

It also, lately, involves a lot of my sitting on the edge of my front porch, swatting mosquitos away, thinking. I had a moment of navel gazing about the porch sitting last week, and wrote this:

I sit on the front porch with my kale starts and slowly ripening tomatoes hanging from heavily laden vines, and

I think about the new component of a larger system I’ve been designing, and
I think about how life is more peaceful this week, even with so much change and having so much to do, and

I think about conversations I’ve had, and how much I’ve missed using all the words I can think of with abandon, discarding the worry if they’ll be understood or if I can explain them if they aren’t, and

I think about how good it feels, even if just for a few conversations, that someone understands my words enough to play with them and flip them back to me and make me laugh,and

I think about the difference feeling understood – without needing to translate or censor or hedge or shrink or… – makes in the way I experience myself, and

I sit on the edge of the front porch, my feet planted in the mulch and my elbows on my knees, and

I think about words, and plants, and the way things are built, and about how so much of being seen is our voices being heard… and understood.

I hope your words are understood more than not.

-A. Markov