There's nothing really ambiguous about this picture, except that the USA is in the middle of a deep freeze and I'm posting pictures with cherries.

However

I love the idea of delicious ambiguity. Looking forward in anticipation and savoring the moments of unknowing. Taking a minute to be gleeful in anticipation instead of dreading the future. 

Like a kid on Christmas eve...

Between Sunday's post and this one, it seems I have very specific things on my mind.

​And I feel an intense need for some constancy to be able to lift off, let go and fly.

Constancy isn't a huge part of my life. I'm a professional nomad (a bougie gypsy if you will...) and being in one place and establishing a long term routine isn't in my job description. Or my life description. But it needs to be this year.

I need a firm footing so I can take off. 

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings. 
​— Mary Oliver
​RIP

This is a late tribute to a glorious poet who died a week ago. There's no one who phrases things like she does and I strongly identify with the desire to be improbable beautiful.

Beauty comes automatically with being young. It's easy to see beauty in youth with its round freshness and glowing skin. Beauty in age and experience requires attention and depth of desire and effort and sometimes it comes in spite of itself. Through improbability.

But improbable beauty is always worth the effort. 

I think everything I want this year comes down to this quote. 

I'm thinking of getting my tarot cards read tomorrow. I'll let you know how that goes. 

The picture really defied me and I'm not sure why since there's nothing really challenging about the composition.

When I took the picture, I had in my mind something that showed the cityscape outside my window with much more clarity than I ended up getting in the photo. I took at least a dozen pictures and this was the only one I could live with, And then I couldn't find a quote to pair with it and I felt it really needed one. I sat down with the picture and researched through all my poetry and quote archives and even did a couple ridiculous internet searches trying to come up with something appropriate, I couldn't seem to figure out what it wanted to be, what it was saying or what I wanted it to say. I struggled with the whole process for a couple hours, trying different things out and then abandoned it for a couple days.

Then I heard this quote on a TV episode while I was at the gym and I stopped my exercise to write it down quickly before I forgot it, knowing that I would use it for this picture. But then the struggle continued as I couldn't figure out where to write it, and whether to filter the picture into black and white. So I did two versions. 

 
I like the color one better. At least the red panties punch up the visual interest level, but even with that help I think the quote and the picture are both a bit bland and neither is much enhanced by the other. 

Given that I've posted much less interesting pictures over the course of my time here, I have to think that this is more about me and less about the art. I'm struggling to figure out what I have to say and how to say it. 

I do know that I want something more this year. More from my life. More from my art. More in general. And like the Chinese curse, I suspect this desire will lead me to interesting times. 
​

Be fearless. Be glib. Be enigmatic. Read. Never give up.
 — Lauren Kate

It's prompt week for Sinful Sunday and I actually planned ahead and thought about this picture! Which just goes to show you that occasionally new years resolutions turn into real things. 

The prompt is the Letter F and while there are a lot of F words I'd love to be, including firm, foxy, forgiving and well-fucked, I chose some words I want to represent my coming year: 

So this little piece is about Fearless Forward motion (in Fishnets and Fuchsia)

Here's to 2019 and the first Sinful Sunday of the new year! Go check out everyone else's F words by clicking the lips below.

Things I'm thinking about for the beginning of a new year...