Where was I?

I haven't written for a bit. I sort of went away to do the difficult part of my work. It's not that I haven't thought of you. I've thought of you often in the past week. It's become a habit of mine, to think of you, my fellow explorers, whenever I find something interesting. After so many years, you've become part of my inner voice, so that in moments of discovery, the words flow with ease and clarity. But not so much now, sitting here in the real world of my desk, my coffee and the tactile comfort of these familiar keys. My poppet stands like a sentinel by the monitor, always keeping me connected to that other place. Is it possible to love a tiny inanimate object? I love this little poppet most of all my poppets. I have a lot of poppets. This one, the-poppet-who-lives-on-my-desk, is the Scarecrow to my Dorothy.
True enough, I realize that what I love is the idea of the poppet. I love what poppet represents just by being a poppet, in the way I love all poppets. I love this one more because we've been 'there and back again.' If you've ever found yourself smiling at a poppet through real sadness, you likely love a poppet as I do. If not, you likely think the rest of us are a bit whacked. No worries. We are.

Anyway, I didn't even mean to go off on a poppet tangent. It's just that I see it there, looking at me as I try to cobble together a couple of sentences that make sense.
It's difficult to write about a thing when you're in the thing. Or---it's difficult to write it well. The thing I'm in is a creative transition. No, it's not climbing a mountain. But yes, it is. Just a mountain of a different sort.

Sigh. All of this sounds overly dramatic to the point of stupid As I said, it's difficult to write well about the moment one is in. Still, this is the stuff I'm supposed to be telling you about. Let me reel in the poet and let the geek speak for a minute. I seem to be in a major transition. I don't know this yet, for sure, but, yes I do. My vision is shifting. Again, not a big interest to anyone except others who explore inner spaces. But it is a big thing for me, because a vision shift is like the tide rising---it lifts every boat. I don't know yet how the art will be affected. But I know that in twenty years I've had only one other experience like this. And my work changed a great deal then.

So that's where I've been. It's not the sort of change that can be worked into the schedule, like finding a new technique or medium, or starting a new project. It's the sort of thing that takes over, so that you have to stop for awhile, and breathe and rest and think. It's not the sort of thing that you decide to do. It's something that happens when you don't expect it, like yesterday's earthquake.
---We're okay. We have a lot of crooked art on the walls but nothing actually fell. We huddled in the doorway for a minute that was bigger inside than out. Slow motion is real.
A 5.4 doesn't seem like much until it's close. Then, wake up.

So that's where I've been. Traveling fast and far through unfamiliar inner spaces, contained in a body walking on shaky ground, in a little pellicle of desert, on a world at the edge of a galaxy, hurtling through an ever- changing universe.

What've you been up to?