It is now one week before the official launch date for my upcoming travels across America. I have been getting pretty anxious to push off, but realized this morning that I have already started by spending days (actually five months) in an unfamiliar house in my home town of Sonoma that I left more than fifty years ago. My plan is to travel to get to experience new places and meet new people, perhaps getting a better idea of how deep our shared humanity goes. Partly I am just trying to get some ground under my feet by shaking myself out of my habitual points of view, but there is also a big question about the “truth” of the media’s stories about the differences between our “blue” and “red” states. I don’t believe those stories – I think we share most of our humanity, but have different ideas about how to get to the same, or almost the same, goals. I hope to explore this idea.
I also intend to take the trip at a slow enough pace that I have time to get a bit of the “feel” of some off-the-beaten-track places America. Perhaps I will be able to take interesting photographs, or draw something that captures a feeling about the place. I realize that since that is my aim, perhaps I should start doing that now – in the new and unfamiliar Sonoma. I have a few stories that perhaps I can share in writing, and I drew a couple of sketches to see if that is even possible for me. Here are a couple of my attempts at sketching. The drawing with the arch is a view of my bedroom from my reading chair. The sketch of the building shows the Sonoma Hotel located on 1 St West and Spain Street. These amateur attempts are “art” are just little experiments, but I think they turned out well enough that I can continue to do these when the moment seems right and share some as I go along.
