Day nine: Snow.

I flew today, a long flight. I've never had a window seat during a cross country flight in the winter before. Snow. It makes the country look like a drawing. Some very subtle and quiet, pale grey crop-mark circles and intersecting lines. Others majestic, mountain ranges from the sky that make you catch your breath, trees leave dark stippling on mountains, pale cross hatching lines of snow blur into red rock.

It makes everything feel silent, and lonely. Snow is foreign to me, but travel is not. It's hard to explain travel for work to anyone that hasn't done it. It sounds very glamorous, free trips to fun cities, seeing friends and museums, but it is also hard to shift gears and to be away from the life and world you know. Time feels longer. The people and world you left barely notice you're gone, but your sense of time stretches in a way that leaves an imprint on everything. It magnifies moments, and makes every gesture, good or bad, feel very important. It is exhausting. 

When we make work, it is always partly of us. Self-portrait or no, any art we make contains who we are. I've always thought that portrait painters always make paintings that look somewhat like themselves. I think that part of the reason people buy art is that they want some piece of what they feel the artist holds - not the song but the singer. 

As I travel I feel both more and less myself. Being surrounded by the unfamiliar magnifies every critique I have of myself, my work, and my life.  Being alone in a new place reminds me of how rare and precious my life is and how much I've done with it. I feel boring. I am exalted. I'm constantly trying to think of ways to use it, this feeling of urgency that comes when I travel.