Freedom Flying

(sculpture detail: "Landscape of Enough")  

As soon as I get the OK that my documentation is fine, I will pack this baby up and ship it out of here!  It's my last frontier in Japan.  Woohoo!  Happy Wednesday.  Time to eat lunch with the 9th graders, take the early bus and get to some packing.  

Despite all the amazing things that seem to happen in my life I can't keep from dreaming of more.  It's not that I feel like I don't have enough, it's like the good things now fuel my dreams and make me feel like they can totally come true.  For example, I have been daydreaming of making tons of small paintings on paper while on our cross country bike trip and seeing how the changing landscape is translated in my daily paintings.  What a life it could be (will be)!  I feel like I'm flying off a cliff (flying, NOT jumping).  Freedom!

Speaking of freedom, Mikel and I have been listening to Studio 360 podcasts.  It's an NPR show all about the arts and creativity.  In February Kurt Anderson came to Japan and did a Studio 360 in Japan.  Check it out!  It's especially interesting for us to hear because most of the exotic things about Japan are totally within our experience now.  It also confirms my initial intuition that Japan has a really spooky side underneath the beauty, the cute and the technologically advanced.  The reason I started this paragraph with "speaking of freedom" there is an interview in the Japan podcast with a woman who owns her own business in Tokyo.  She talks about how women and people in general in Japan don't have much freedom.  Not only is Japan small and community based (therefore hard to re-locate and make a new life for yourself) the culture has not had a women's movement and therefore women and men have very strictly prescribed roles and expectations in society.  Listen to the podcast if you want to learn more!  (or have coffee with me in Vermont in a few weeks and I'll explain ;-)

Happy Wednesday!