The Solace Project #32

Hi friends,<br/><br/>It's been awhile since I've posted, at least a few weeks. One thing I&#8217;ve learned from Substack the platform on which I write and record this blog is to be consistent with my posts so that you open the emails and come back week after week. Apologies that I've been inconsistent of late and I have an excuse.&#160; A lame excuse, no pun intended: I broke my right arm and it's taken me a couple of weeks to work through the pain, to figure out how to type with my voice because yes of course it's my right arm and I'm right dominant.&#160; It&#8217;s been no fun at all but here we go again because a few of you have reached out to ask if I had deleted people from my list or if I had stopped posting or what had happened to me and I am so touched by the messages that you actually missed these posts.<br/><br/>I think back to February, March when I began this newsletter, the amount of research that I would do during the week and the hours that I would spend on a Sunday to write about a favorite painting, to think about close looking, to have gone on a really long hike that I could tell you about.&#160; The whole gist of The Solace Project is close looking at works of art for healing and taking walks for resilience and clearing the mind, and I almost feel now that I had to break my arm to really understand what it's like to not be able to look at art or go for walks because that's literally the situation in which I found myself over the past few weeks. I lost my privilege, the privilege of being able bodied, which I had taken for granted. Busted.<br/><br/>Because this post feels a little more personal than others I'll tell you what happened. I was driving home from South Bend, Indiana, where a lot of you know I spent most of the summer working at the South Bend Museum of Art, a glorious project that I was more than a little sorry had to end.&#160; I loaded up my car for the great ride home, a 775 mile drive that I've done countless times and was 9 hours into the 11 hour trip when I stopped at the fam