Today was a long awaited snow day for the kids. We all enjoyed the day off from our normal routines and spent time sleeping in, practicing music and reading. It was a gift. After things thawed out a bit, my daughter, who hopes to someday be a marine biologist, and I ventured out to go to the Newport Aquarium. We were rewarded with the place pretty much to ourselves. My favorite exhibits are the otters and the jellyfish.

Lately I have been doing a lot of reading, much like I did when in school; lots of books on many, varying subjects. A couple of my current favorites are Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local: The Sense of the Place in a Multicentered Society, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. Both are books that address the human desire to find a home of sorts, and to place oneself in the world at-large in context to the sense of place one feels in belonging somewhere.

This is all sort of floating around in my head with the notion of maps and mapability and finding one’s way, both physically and spiritually. Is there a way to make this into art? I think so. And so I read, and sketch and stew. I’ll keep you posted…