Musings from a Sleepless Mind

It is funny where your mind can wander when you awake at 5 am and can never fall back to sleep. And though I often wish I could just flip a switch and shut it off, my mind continues to swirl way past the point of sleep. Perhaps it is where the details in my doodles come from, my crazy minutia focused mind.

On the bunny trail of sleeplessness last night, I remembered an old high school aquaintance (we'll call her Sally) who may be perhaps be the only person to draw tinier more detailed little works than me. Hers was a world of minature. I remember most distinctly her notebooks, which were incredible in every way. For most of us the choice is between wide rule or college rule when it comes to the size of our desired text, but for Sally it was beyond that, she actually wrote TWO lines of text for each line on the page (in other words DOUBLE the line amount actually given)... and it was NEAT, (I think she even used white out to fix mistakes). It left me a little speechless. My notebooks by contrast were a mess. Scribbles out everywhere, big spaces between thoughts and always filled with little doodles. And while that worked just fine for me, there was a small part of me that longed for a book like Sally's, perhaps with a little larger text, but SO NEAT. But no matter how determined my will may be, there would invariably come a part in a lecture that left my mind time to wander, and there I was, doodling again.

I bring up Sally not to just remember her notebook, but rather to celebrate it. For Sally was not only a detailed note taker but also a talented artist, and some of the art I remember of hers most was the detailed pieces she did. (I have no idea where Sally is today, but I am sure she is somewhere doing something very creative very successfully). What I loved about those books was the detail.

I'd like to think that maybe I don't sleep much these days, but at least I have the fingers and the mind to scribble out some pretty detailed little pretties. To all the tiny drawers out there, BRAVO! In this world of bigger is better, it is nice to celebrate the small.