I am inspired.
I am am eager and exited to take on my work week ahead.
I am feeling bold.
I have been a working machine lately. I owe my sanity to my coworkers, and my friends for letting me post up in their homes so I didn't have to commute, providing me with never ending candy jars at the office, going out to sushi lunch dates, and simply just letting me vent and go on rants as needed. I have worked straight through the last two and a half weeks with only taking one furlough "day off" for the Oregon home game against UCLA last Thursday. So with the help of my coworkers, I decided that this past Friday I would take that much needed day off, giving myself a three day weekend to play.
Friday was a day of errands, Saturday became a day of recovery and football, and Sunday, today, I dedicated to myself.
I started my day slow this morning while laying in bed texting and reading stats from the last nights Oregon game against USC, finally rolling out of bed around 10-ish. The morning was already off to a good start. I jumped out of bed with a level of confidence and energy that had laid dormant inside me for months. There was only one place for me to go with that energy--the Blue Room of Powells on Burnside. There is something so rejuvenating about not only literature, but books themselves. It is something in the way that you can run your fingers over the printed words and have a story unfold in your mind. And how you can hold the book in your hands, cradling its binding, creating a bond while you are mentally promising the book that you will take care of it, if it in turn promises to take care of your imagination.
Upon my arrival to Portland I parked my car especially far away from Powells forcing myself to absorb Portland in the fall. As I walked along the blocks I found myself in awe of the crisp yellow leaves barely hanging onto their respective trees, eager to join their friends below whom had already shed from the tree creating a beautiful mosaic of Autumn on the sidewalk below. Though the sky was blue, the puddles from the prior nights rain created a gloss over the cold, dark one-way roads of the city. It felt right. Everything felt right.
I shopped at Powells for well over an hour, and with 10 books in hand, decided it was time to leave before I did too much more damage; But I felt it in my gut--I wasn't ready to leave the city. "Onward to the museum!" [I must tell you, that my Portland Art Museum membership was one of the greatest investments....ever] There were things I noticed about the museum today, that I paid extra special attention to that I haven't taken the time to appreciate before. Never had I noticed the tri-color infusion of brick on the building; and how well it meshed with the granite/marble stone that laid the steps as well as trimmed the doors and windows of the museum. Never had I appreciated the large stone benches, deep charcoal in color, placed outside in the courtyard until my friend called right before I walked to the membership desk to check in, forcing me to step outside and sit on one while finishing up the conversation.
How had I never noticed these things before? Why did the Lee Kelly exhibit speak to me the way that it did today when this was my second time seeing the exhibit? The way the bronze sculptures formed such fluid, circular patterns, and were balanced-poised-and engraved. I know that I broke every single law of museum-hood by taking the picture seen below-But I couldn't walk away without one. My justification of course was "Well, if I can take a picture of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre without a flash, I can take a picture of a bronze sculpture without a flash."
I feel like post graduation, I have shed all ideas about who I was supposed to be as a girlfriend, and as a daughter, and really just allowed myself to breathe, and take joy in the simplest things that make me sit back and smile and say "damn, this is incredible".
I've allowed myself to relax.
Travel.
Read....
...a lot.
Laugh.
Trust.
Get lost.
Share.
"Good rare feelings come at the oddest times"
I am ready.
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