Right now I’m living at my family’s home in the country, waiting for my would-be finance to return from overseas. It’s a big place. I’m most often alone, but I usually manage not to feel that way. It gives me space enough to keep busy. A place to call home and people who help me feel safe, sometimes. And crazy otherwise.

Crazy is something I’m always perched at the edge of. It’s strange, the things that shove me to the brink of panic. My computer got murdered by a virus a few months ago, and it took me a week to cleanse and resurrect it- I was alright as long as I felt like I had things under control, but the resulting stress got me down with the flu and busted up my kidney, which hurt like a bugger. Scary because my health was another thing I thought I could rely on.

A few weeks ago we were hit by severe thunderstorms and tornadoes which cut me off from the internet. I wasn’t wisked off to Oz, but I did spend a lot of time wandering around in confusion and talking to the dog.

A lesser few weeks later I was wondering over a linoleum block I had just finished carving, and it struck me that since the prints would be mirrored, the composition was all wrong. And like a reverse epiphany, the lights went out. We would be without power for the two days after, and all I could do was keep busy, listening to the gunfire from the nearby shooting range sounding out beneath the grinding thunder, like some far-off war. Waiting for the dark to creep in unhindered and remind me that I’m really very alone here. It’s starting to become that kind of year.

I’ve got to do something. I’m tired of having nothing to report aside from the sort of animal I saw in the woods that night. (A flock of wild turkeys!) Charming as that may sound, I’m not greedy for wanting something more.

Big wild distances, quiet spaces. These are the things that once made me feel free, but they
can become walls. I need an escape plan, and some courage.

So I’ve finally opened up my journal again, that one, http://jurikova.livejournal.com, the Live one, and I was sortof frightened and amazed to see that it had been four years since I last posted. It’s dark and very maudlin and I don’t know if anyone read it. My last post found me in one of the most unsteady and desperate places I’ve been in the past decade, I remember this as a fact, but really, there doesn’t seem to be much justification for it. Though fairly, to be without a home is a scary thing, even if it’s just for an in-between time. Dread tends to creep in through the cracks if they aren’t sealed in.

Understand, I’m not fragile. But I’m a sensative person. My world is small but explicitly detailed. I don’t like a lot of noise and motion, I’m overwhelmed by things that are much larger than my self, things that could overpower me, things I could lose myself in, like cities. Like love, maybe.

I like art because it is a safe little world, it’s control, it’s focus. It’s a place where I can keep things that are precious to me. It’s a place where can peek through keyholes and wonder over unopened doors. A way for me to share these treasures and mysteries with you. Maybe that sounds sentimental, but I’m not apologizing for it.

There’s a poem I love which I keep reciting whenever I’m feeling shy and sick of myself:

there are delicacies in you
like the hearts of watches
there are wheels that turn
on the tips of rubies
& tiny intricate locks

i need your help
to contrive keys
there is so little time
even for the finest
of watches

-Earle Birney