Doing my thing...

A new adventure starts next week. I have signed up for a class in portraiture. In my life I have drawn two portraits, quickly, off the cuff, and garnered congratulations and praise; better yet any observer seeing the sketch and seeing the original would know that one of these things looks just like the other.And yet I cannot draw faces...or people. Draw the heck out of boats and plants and landscapes, paint sweeping vistas in water colour with the same ease that I burn sausages to charcoal instead of dinner. Apart from those two flukes where aliens took over my hand(there is no other explanation)I cannot make a simulacrum of a face. And so the class. Piano and guitar lessons left me tuneless without an instrument to play and this maybe the same but I have learned to do so many things throughout the days that make up my years that this too may be possible. I learned to make pots and and grew clay to smooth round cylinders spinning on the wheel, pinched and coiled and slabbed designs that sit jumbled in a box, all fired and shiny, just five feet from me. So perhaps I can learn to capture curves and angles of a gleaming eye, a jaw, a lip, even a whole mouth. The knowledge is within. I shall do my best to let it emerge without resisting, holding back. Why can I play no instrument? Because I let casual words said too close to too young ears close my understanding. "oh her, she always has to do everything" and it sounded to me as though that made me what I tried so hard not to be...bad. For a year I walked a tightly circumscribed path, not reaching out to grasp but touching very gently just those things pressed against my mind by others. Now, older, I am proudly capable of many things and say what you will, if it catches my fancy, I will learn to do it. I will succeed and do it well. All I have to do is listen.