that other force of nature

I (too) have been reading a lot of what feel like heavy sighs around blogatopia... especially coming from the artsy area.

I remember this same lull when we started bombing in Afghanistan, and then Iraq. And now with the Middle East shit on the rise here we are again. I think we take this very hard as artists, many of us anyway... as it is especially antithetical to who we are and what we are about.

An artist friend of mine has had as her email signature for years, "the opposite of war is not peace, it's creation" (from Jonathon Larson Rent). And so it goes that when the drums start going and the bombs start dropping, we feel as if we have been punched in the sternum, the wind knocked out, and we might have to sit on the curb for a second to regroup.

It's how i always imagined a spider to feel when i bumble through the immaculate web it spent all day weaving. (Except there's no mass murder and i always apologize.)

Deborah Fisher has a good analogy to rock climbing. I would add to it that sometimes we take a moment to pause for tumbling rocks to pass before we resume our ascent (or descent... some of us just want to get back down to sea level).