Adventures

I know I have mentioned that Emma and I were on an Artists' Retreat, but I have neglected to really say much about it. For the benefit of my newer friends and readers, let me 'splain.
My daughter is definitely a creative girl. And, well, so am I. I want to teach her how to be creative in a healthy way - to take care of herself, take time to look for inspiration, to seek adventure and find her place in this world that isn't always so friendly to our sort of girls. I also want her to have a community of creative women around her as she grows - people who understand and value the way she thinks and works. One activity I've devised that fits the bill is an Artists' Retreat. The past couple of years, we have gone to visit my friend Allison, who lives near the beach just a bit south of us. She is a writer and a poet and a Great Understander of People.
She's one of us.
So we go and stay with her for a few days. We eat interesting food that we find wherever we happen to be, we write and paint and draw and go to the beach a lot.
It's a few days of fun - connecting and creating.
We made a few really fun stops during our stay this year. An especially quirky one was the New University Pyramid Village. It's just a spot that Alli has always wanted to check out, so we did.
It's community with homes in pyramid-ish shapes and giant statues of composer heads.
I'm not even kidding.




We laughed and laughed, but we also felt super uncomfortable. I won't link to the website because it's pretty creepy, even if you could understand the poor English. It's some kind of new-age-ish European community. But still. Really funny stuff.
People crack me up.

On another day, we visited Koreshan State Park, which, now that I think of it, is pretty creepy in its origin too. But I love old buildings and crumbling structures and history, so I really enjoyed walking around.




But it was super-hot. We had just about given up and decided to seek out some air conditioning when we spied a pirate.
A real, honest-to-goodness Captain Jack Sparrow pirate.
Like any good free-spirited girl would do, we decided to follow him around a bit. I mean, the story is a bit more complicated than that, but Allison wrote a delicious poem about it that captures the whole event in far better and far more romantic terms than I could dare hope to write. Read it. You won't be sorry.



This pirate was so convincing that we spent the rest of the day giggling and wondering if he had been actually the real Captain Jack Sparrow. Upon close inspection of the photos, it has been determined that he was not. Sigh.

But that doesn't really matter, does it? We met a pirate. He told us we made his day. End of story.
The only reason there is no photo of me with the pirate is that I was pretty sure I couldn't PhotoShop out the lake of sweat that had welled up in my clavicle. I am a very vain girl, it seems.

(yawn) More tomorrow. I have spent this entire day playing with photos and I am ready to do something that doesn't involve a computer.