Finding the Muse #12 Beatuful vistas and colorful stores

Oh, the clear blue skies over the salt marshes on Cape Cod MA. This is a view from the window of the Bird Barn Gallery. I fell in love with this tiny art venue that used to house birds. In fact, I felt I'd been here before... and had lived a life here near this place, so strong was my feeling of homecoming.

 There is a quality of light, and a gentleness of visual beauty here. In the olden days, barges were dragged along the shallow waterways to gather salt, Today kayaks are seen trying to navigate the many streams, but it was the birds that caught my attention.

Inside the gallery I found a young mother and her daughter. The building felt like a magical cottage, with tiny multipaned windows, open to the breeze, sound of birds and dragonflies, binoculars available to use, and my mind quieted immediately. Nothing mattered but the quality of light, the gently swaying grasses, the clean smells, the expanse of nature.
The muse lives here too. I have not felt like creating fiber art, but on this day in this place I found myself longing for my paints. My watercolors would capture the blues and greens. The light... light captures the imagination of many artists. It felt good to feel like creating again. Something deep inside stirred and wanted to see color flowing on paper. I imagined seeing threads creating grasses in delicate colors against a hand dye.

The approx. 4 year old girl was playing inside the building and my inner 4 year old longed to take up a teacup and play grown-up with her. Of course, being adult is no day at the beach sometimes and loss that comes with being alive and loving takes some gloss off play. Still.... I could remember how magical this place would have felt to young me, because she is still in there, and responded.
That part of me who loves whimsy responded to the fish swimming through the air... the stacked flowers and birds in the yard

If I felt like quilt making, I might love to do a primitive, whimsical stack like this. Maybe one day soon I can face the studio. Like I mentioned before, I create from a place of joy, and right now my spirit feels like a skinned knee. I am happy to be responding to beauty again.

Sometimes it takes a bit to open your eyes, and your heart to beauty after a loss.
The muse in the form of beauty is there, waiting for us.
For now, I want to paint, and to write. I Felt something. I want to return to this place of calm and healing.

On this day, we tried to see as much of an overview of Cape Cod as possible, so we drove the length of it stopping at only a few places, vowing to return for a leisurely exploration. The area has small old (really old, like 1600 era) towns for me to look at architecture. It has natural vistas, stores, restaurants.

As an aside, we stopped in Barnstable for a quilt store, (a TERRIFIC Tumbleweeds by name)and lunch. While strolling to the outdoor cafe, I spied a sign that said Remote Sensing. Hmmm that's my husband's engineering specialty.... and he said, "hey...that's the business name of one of my UMass associates"

Sure enough, it was his friend's company here on Cape Cod instead of in Amherst! How exciting to run into Jim unexpectedly. When he worked alongside Jim, Drew was finishing his masters degree and we were about to wed so it's been at least 22+ years since they talked! Small world.

If we had not been ambling along, stopping where our fancy took us, we would have missed this moment.

I wrote a short fiction story about the young mother and the Bird Barn. The muse is still by me.