The forgotten time: Between Christmas and the New Year

This is the time of year where we accumulate things and in this gathering of things amongst the making of memories my thoughts returned to where we put these things:

• small soaps;
• sparkling earrings;
• a new silver charm for a bracelet:
• a delicate necklace;
• a stray flower of pot pourri....

Of course it is in places..... in bowls.

We also keep our thoughts in places, tucked away like a soft pashmina against our skin on a night where snow threatens yet again.

And somewhere inside of me I feel that I have somehow let my profession down by not bringing myself to write in this joint blog where two in three posts are written by the person that is not the writer. There is something in this, too, I think. Something about the relationships that form during processes of collaboration whereby we define ourselves by the roles the joint creativeness assigns to us.

I will do more thinking about that, now, in this in-between-time but first, I return to the idea of things which inspired me to take this picture (above) in Tennessee, USA in April 2010. It was the idea that we define ourselves by both our possessions and how we are seen to possess ourselves....

Out of curiosity this is something which Carol Shields captured aptly in the wonderful short story "A Scarf" (in the superb collection Dressing up for the carnival).

And so: the task now is to explore those thoughts of place and time, those trinkets of things and what constitutes their beauty.