Photo by Barbara Rick

Just coming back from a deep summer break.

We had been going full blast at Out of The Blue Films, Inc. since late last year on some spectacular documentary film projects, and are just now catching our breath.

Film festival invitations are starting to roll in for A BROADWAY LULLABY… and we are in the final stages this fall on our as yet untitled follow-up film with Deborah Santana … a return to the Daraja Academy in Kenya, and the exceptional girls that call that school home. Here’s a little taste.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. ~Henry James from the novel, Roderick Hudson

That quote appears in an article in the September issue of The Sun Magazine by Janna Malamud Smith. An essay adapted from her new book, An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery.

So excited about all of our ‘absorbing errands’ – making these films and my creative writing, too. Deep gratitude for it all. Smith writes: “We become the work to which we dedicate ourselves. I know that now but had only begun to grasp it then… We cannot both give ourselves over to a process and preserve ourselves from the way our choice alters us. Yet, if we agree to the exchange, what we get in return is a way of living in the world, and of seeing: a perspective, a point of view, and with it a way of bearing our lives.”

If you are a writer, a filmmaker, an artist of any stripe, her words on the poetry and despair of creativity and the lifelong effort to master a craft provide a balm, a deep satisfaction, a means to refresh and move forward once again.

And like a fourth-grader with her new shoes, backpack, and pencil case (wait, do they even have pencil cases any more?) I feel the excitement and expanse of the fresh calendar pages of the sweet and challenging days ahead.