“My flowers are charming – the watch and a train  –  a sharp dog back – train just pulling out – cattle sound great here at night sometimes – one now” …

…  I was very sick when I was eighteen, and I forgot a lot of things that happened a year or two before that and after – I really lost about four years – People sometimes won’t believe me when I say I forgot things they say happened after I was perfectly well.” – Georgia O’Keeffe,  Selected Letters To  Alfred Stieglitz.

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Georgia O’Keeffe said she could say things with color and shapes that she couldn’t say any other way—things she had no words for. To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage. She said she wished people were all trees and that she could enjoy them then.

Her words ring very true to me. She was much more of an artist than I will ever be, yet as I researched her life, I found she spoke my mind more than I might have guessed.

The colors and shapes in my flowers say things I can’t say in words and never really could. This opened me up in a new and meaningful way.

See you in the morning. Please tune in for Maria’s Monday Morning Video from Bedlam Farm on my blog and hers.

It takes courage to create one’s world, from a book to a blog, a quilt, a painting, or a genius at world-creating. O’Keeffe was telling the truth when she said talking to trees might be easier than talking to people.

I can’t say I find that true in my life—I like to talk to people, not trees. Maria, like O’Keeffe, loves to talk to trees, and they speak back to her. It’s beautiful to see; perhaps one day, I can do it.

But every day, I am asked to muster the courage to create my world and push aside the world of other people. I’m getting used to it, growing into it. It always wanted it to come out, and now it has.

I hope you enjoy the little world I created today; I worked on it for hours.