When my friend moved to San Franciso in 2007 I visited her for a few weeks and those weeks melded together into some of my favorite vacation days of my life. Of course I think they were the only real vacation days of my life. We sewed, shopped, laughed, cried, held her boy-baby, invented recipes and sat outside in her secret garden every perfect morning for coffee and conversation. It was bliss. It never rained, was always cloudless, and a balmy 70 degrees in the middle of August.

It's been strange how my life seems a bit reminiscent of that season now, like a constant vacation in constant perfect weather with creativity and coffee every morning. Only now, well, now it's my life. At least for this season. And somehow I have to start making a living doing so.

The thought is daunting and I get choked up several times a day thinking about it. I have amazing cheerleaders and advice-giving friends who prod me along and encourage the art to keep flowing. I've found myself a business partner (ie. someone who can program my flat colors into a useful website), I'm going to be churning out my own website and business cards sometime in the next week, I'm finally setting up some screenprinting hoopla in our garage, and I take two hours of every day and force myself to create something new. And there are no clouds in the sky. No sir.

But clouds in my heart there are. See, I tell a friend the other day, it is so easy to dream and hard to make those dreams happen, and then once you begin to make those dreams happen, it is hard to hold your breath and see if they'll fail or not, and if they don't fail, well, it's hard to keep doing what you love without growing weary. There's always something that needs tweaking, changing, and challenging.

I'm up for that challenge, I think. I think I'm up for it. I think I was made for it. I think deep in me there's a gift of boredom that keeps these melding days from falling into the abyss of Every Day. I say it's a gift because I can't see it being useful for anything but forcing me to try new things and challenging me to stretch and grow.

When I was preparing to leave Potsdam, the fellow staff of my amazing church laid hands on me and prayed blessings for me. One of my pastors prayed Proverbs 18:16 over me "A man's gift makes room for him and brings him before leaders." And I think about that. I think about that a lot.

I'm not too interested in being brought before leaders, but I like the idea of the things inside of us being there by design, on purpose, because there's a new and different sort of day ahead.