I'm a pretty big Joni Mitchell fan. A while back, I read one of her many biographies:

Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period.

I was struck by Mitchell's strict need for solitude. She maintains that to be a true artist, you must be alone. For her, this includes living alone as well as avoiding long-term romantic relationships. During her touring years, she would alternative travel with intense creative periods of solitude. Now, I don't claim to be the stoic and ascetic artist that Joni is, but I do get her point.

When you live in New York City, it's hard to find any alone time. I think I went a few years without ever being alone. With roommates, close-by neighbors, subway rides, pedestrians everywhere, it was a challenge to find any solitude, and thus, tap into my creative energy. I treated the subway as an office for my writing time -- I was equipped with earphones and a journal, so it's kind of like being alone, right? Hmmmm.

They say you don't know what you have until it's gone. Well, I think it works backwards as well. You don't know what you're missing until you get it. Last winter, after coming off a decade of non-stop sensory overload crazy energy-zapping NYC and then spending two months in a cabin in rural Northern California, I was finally able to tap into a level of creativity and concentration, that I just couldn't find in Brooklyn.

Well, now I'm in rural NorCal on more permanent basis. And there's solitude a-plenty. Even so, I'm taking what I learned, and I'm moving my little studio rig out from the guest room (where my spouse can hear me), and renovating the cabin into a dream room of recording wonder! Don't get me wrong, it's not that my husband eavesdrops on me or even cares what I'm doing in there or how much noise I'm making, but there is something about being truly alone in a space, that can free you. Or, at least, it certainly grants me some creative liberty.

So here are the before pictures: