I thought I’d pop out my head, like the groundhog, so busy underground, so absent-seeming on the drifts of snow. There was a blizzard yesterday, and then, just like that it stopped and the sun came through and filled the sky with a gentle yellow.

I filled up a sketchbook. It’s not really anything I want to show, even though I caught this quote by David Hockney who said: “… of course, art is about sharing”. I’m sure he’s right, and I’ll feel that way eventually. For now, I hold on to a thought from Paul Heaston on the Sneaky Art podcast: “…you become so results oriented that you would rather see no result than a poor one, and that goes back to everybody no longer being creative. It’s like, because the idea of being a failure is much more horrifying than doing something at all, that you don’t even do it.” It’s about patience. Jared Muralt in an Instagram post wrote: “Drawing mountains is like mediation for me. I constantly got confronted with my own impatience. But to succeed I have to focus on what I do and only that.”

I will pop in again to add books read to the reading list, to share pictures of the dog and a handful of quotes. For most of January, the kids were home from school. I sat at my desk for only the most urgent work. I joked in our family newsletter that my studies had been pushed so far to the back-burner as to have fallen off the stove. But in the quiet of the house right now, I can see myself picking up the contents and bringing them back to a warm simmer. It is what groundhogs do below four feet of snow.