Excuse me while I meditate —

It's a gritty place. There's glass everywhere, paint tubes, containers of brushes, stacks of cut-up paper towels. Water cups. Linseed oil. Rubbing alcohol. Parchment. Sticky blue photo-resist. Packing peanuts, bubble wrap, shipping boxes, sharpies, tape dispensers. On the kitchen floor is a box with half a dozen hand-blown (and very $$$) blank vessels. Razor knives. A cat. Everything in a different stage, all of it somehow ending in a gallery in Martha's Vineyard, or Beverly Hills. Or Brooklyn.

Etc.

This week chaos has reigned, a discovery of flaws in way too many pieces. One of my jobs is to troubleshoot, to make a defective piece into a first-quality piece. There's some masquerade that happens, some sleight of hand: make the defect look intentional, embellish it with some irridescent paint, a garnish of maroon. (Works like a charm.) Sometimes I feel like a dentist with my diamond-tipped drills and sharp pokey tools as I gouge-out embedded stones the size of pinheads.  There's UV sensitive glue and a diamond wheel grinder: my bag of tricks.

Today the credit card processing device repeatedly refused to function. Credit cards were declined, gallery owners didn't answer their phones.

 Expired/refused/cancelled.

(A bit like me, at the end of the day.)

I keep about ten orders in my head at any given time, all in various degrees of completion, with infinite variations of pattern, color, shape. And then there are next week's orders, spilling from their file, with their attendant pre-planning, and early staging. And finding space in an already packed production calendar to fit in yet another thousand dollar order. (Such problems!)

Amidst all this hullabahubbub this afternoon, I suddenly had a vision, a revelation, an aha moment of where I could go for respite, for sanctuary: I could go to the new website, where everything is perfectly finished and perfectly arranged, neat cleaned-up rows of glass minus fingerprints and all the detritus left over from this thunderous production.


I know it sounds kind of wacky, but visualizing the site — without actually getting out of my chair and going over to the computer, but just imagining it — well, my frizzled synapses actually calmed a tiny bit. It's like there's this clean and quiet room, a meditation temple that I can visit any time desired, and all the chaos smooths out.

And seventeen boxes later, it was time for a nap:

photo by M. Wellsandt