if: dessert

Made this on the move, with solid watercolors because it's the only thing you can take on the plane! I am now in Wahington DC.

On our last day in Madison we visited the amazing arboretum and then ate ice-crem at the University, because -of course!- they have their own dairy store! That's Wiscosin for you!

We will miss you, Madison!

jordi

I did the ink looking at a picture of my father, and not at the paper. This makes you draw stuff you wouldn't when you are checking. Then for the watercolor I looked, of course.

The picture's from when he lived in Tulúm and I visited him after the hurricanes and we´d spend days getting the sand out of the cabins and redressing palm trees and enjoying the sea life. I was obsessed with the Harry Potter books that year and because I couldn't stop reading when night came, I read a couple of the (fat) books with an oil lamp!

I do not know a place more beautiful than those beaches. Shame on the hotels that are destroying it.

IF: diary

This is daily reality for me: the before and after of my Morning Pages ritual.

I kid you not. 

Morning Pages are 3 pages you write first thing in the morning. They can be about anything, anything at all, but they usually end up freeing you from stuff that you would otherwise carry around all day! I've been doing them for two years. It is my diary, yes, but it is so much more than that.

The truth of my mood is very simple: if I do not write I rot. Simple, huh? Yeah but easy to forget too, whenever I "forget" to do my Morning Pages... I think is because the daily act of putting pen to paper before doing anything else reminds me of my personal truths, of who I am and what I want, and allows me to "leave the drama in the page", as Julia Cameron puts it. I now think I could have saved myself entire years of therapy if I'd known about Morning Pages before!

I like to think of my monsters (and dramas and fears and anguishes) as dangerous baobabs who'll eat up my pretty planet; and of Morning Pages as the daily act of plucking them:

"It is a question of discipline," the little prince said to me later on. "When you've finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care. You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth. It is very tedious work," the little prince added, "but very easy."

 

You should try it sometime, I know you have horrible voices too, that desguise as the rosebushes of responsability or coherence and that attack you and your dreams. Let them rot forever in the pit of a diary!

IF: satellite

This watercolor now lives with my friend Camila. Camila is a poet and a yoga teacher and a zen student. She owns a vocho and a plant with strange spiky orange flowers. And this fall (when I move yet again...) we will live in the same city for a few months, which makes me smile.

if: paisley

It feels so good to finally paint something!

I've been in 3 countries in the last month,

but now I finally have a home and a desk to paint and write this summer:

Behind this wonderful tree there's a high school which is (thankfully) on vacation right now. In another wall I've set an inspiration board. I was inspired by Geninne, who seems to move even more than me, but somehow manages to unpack at ultrasonic speed and quickly set herself an amazing working space. For that and for her beautiful work, I really admire her a lot.

My new desk is in Madison, WI.  Peaceful little town except for the tornado alarm the other day, that scared the hell out of me. 

There was this eerie noise all of a sudden and my windows started trembling (since, as I now know,  the speakers for the alarm for the entire county are placed on the roof of the aforementioned high school!!) I panicked a bit, but then I remembered Dorothy and before any cow came flying by my window I ran barefoot to the basement... It was fun.

IF: detective

        Miss Marple, of course.

IF: subterranean

IF: brave