All At Once

caltrain, originally uploaded by Diana Kimball.

When the urge to write started tugging and whispering, I knew something was up. It took several days to remember why, just in time:

Today, http://dianakimball.com is two years old! (August 18, 2007; August 19, 2008.)

The second year of writing here has been very different from the first.

The first year, I was enchanted by everything. This year, I was thrilled even more by impulsive tools.

Because: ideas are worth so much in the moment they happen. Our imaginations are consumed by these floating, glistening-thin slabs of colored plexiglass, translucent; ideas overlapping. But keeping that space—the uncompressed field of hovering abstracts—only, adding to it the dimension of time, in effortless catalogs of jewel-toned detritus? Those open stashes of unthought impulses have retrieved for me: cyclicity, spontaneity, intimacy.

Since moving to San Francisco, I’ve partly started over. But every day, I find myself recovering more than I invent. I spend time thinking about: lighting, wind, information; standards and validation. I take pictures with my telephone out the train window, and it’s: the past! The future! All at once.