Lost in Time

Life is full of changes.  Changes that often sends you into a tail spin that is difficult to recover from. However, as I am an experienced survivor and learning to thrive, I have begun to revitalize my creative spirit and take baby steps back on a fluid journey of artistry.

Since January of 2015 I have had to help place my beloved father in a Memory Care unit. His dementia made it impossible for us to keep him at home amongst us.  I had to help my mother deal with the fact that she could no longer take care of my Dad and is now living alone after 63 years of marriage.  Unfortunately, we experiences other disturbing events but we managed to meet the challenges they presented head on and survive.  We are blessed to live in a community of friends and family who have given us support which we sorely needed.

In the meantime, I took the plunge and joined Liz Lamoreux's Inner Excavation Course online this summer to help heal and rediscover my own passions and needs.  http://www.lizlamoreux.com  She has a fabulous book, you may have seen on the shelves of your local bookstore or on Amazon:

If you interested in creatively finding yourself again, buy and work through the lessons yourself.  I totally enjoyed working with her online and other passionate people who took the course. Hopefully, she will offer it again, I recommend it.  Here are a few of my collages from this summer:

If you are not a collage artist, Liz Mamoreux's book taps into the photographer and the writer in us as well.

Through my inner excavation I rekindled my thoughts on what I want to do with my life over the next phase.  Lordy!  I will be 60 years old in January and though time is fleeting and so much of what I am is in my rear view mirror, I still ask what do I want to be doing with my creativity?  The answer usually ping-pongs back and forth between textile arts and crafting, then zips betwixt drawing and painting only to buzz eager bees about mix media collage.  Where do I land?  What do I focus on? Do I have to focus on one thing?  What if I focus on many things will that spread me too thin?  These questions lead me to another question:  What will I regret not doing?  A very hard question to answer since I am not a soothsayer, right?  Nevertheless, I finally came to the conclusion that the best thing to do is just 'play'.  To let my inner child express itself without limitation or editing in the hopes I will find a direction...or not, yet enjoy the process along the way.

I hope to rekindle this blog with my journey's processes and outcomes.  So, stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

A new year has begun and when I look back at 2013, I see that I was able to accomplish many things, one of which was to start this blog.  My goals this year are simple:  To continue to live and breath a creative life.  I keep reflecting on whether I have actually achieved that.  When you work a full time job it is often hard to see past all the anxiety of the weeks work and commuting to note:  Hey!, I am doing something creative everyday or at least most days!  Feeling frustrated that I haven't been able to keep up with my new blog.  Losing sight of my vision for this blog in the craziness and excitement getting ready for the holidays has been slowly undermining my focus and motivation to keep trying.  That being said, I can but try.  My main focus or the foundation of my New Year's Resolutions is to maintain my four agreements (by Don Miguel Ruiz):

Keeping these simple guidelines in mind, I hope to figure out how to prioritize and organize my time so that its is manageable - doable.   Fitting creativity around a weekly job that is not 9-5 in many cases - I am a teacher by profession - is always a challenge.  Working with teens is rewarding and I do not regret my 29 years of teaching at all.  However, it is exhausting physically and emotionally.  I need my creative time to help me refocus my attention on what is also important to me - art, crafts, sewing and writing.

I hope that 2014 will be my year to continue on my life's journey one step higher up on the spiral of possibility.  I have begun my quest to live a creative life and there is no time like the present to re-energize my motivation.  Thank you for stopping by. I hope to share my journey more frequently than I have.

May 2014 bring great joy, love and hope to your dreams, your family and all that you hold dear.

Cheers!

Happy Christmas!

Happy Holidays to all.  Thank you for your patience with the long lag times between postings! I hope that you will return often as I hope to recalibrate my blog to provide the latest on my creative endeavors and inspire you to continue to build your creative lifestyle.

I wish that your holidays have begun with joy and love and will end with a sense of renewal for the coming new year.

Best Wishes!  

Sunday Musings: 1st day of Advent...and counting

Though, today is the first day of December, Autumn still reigns until her elder sister Winter takes over December 21st.  Here in northern California, the days are warm and the nights chilly. Sunrises are foggy and the sunsets flame-on!  The deciduous trees in the area are lemon, mustard and a riot of reds, rust, tangerines and corals.

Inspired by this colorful season and with a desire to improve my creative practice in embroidery and textile painting, I whipped out some muslin and stenciled, using fabric paints, oak leaves and acorns. Out of practice, I used a bit too much water and the paints bled a bit beyond the stencils. I was not waylaid by this and I am working with 'this mistake' (always a learning experience rather than a problem) and using embroidery to outline the leaves and acorns to define them as well as bound the eye within the shapes.

I am not sure what I am doing next with this piece - ah, the joys of experimentation! - but I wish to use various stitches - running, kantha-like or shashiko-like to build the background which is pretty boring...to say the least.  It has been my habit to spring into a project out of fear that I won't do anything.  So during those moments, I plunge in with only the details in mind and not the broader picture. The result is I get stuck with nice image(s) but might not be sure what to do with them to make the composition cohesive and finished.  I tell myself that I need to do is slow down, and think the process through.  And, yet I don't want to lose the spontaneity of the process. Mistakes can become happy resolutions. A shift in ideas is a welcome re-energizer when the project loses its sweetness.  I envy those who can use sketch books to build ideas and go from there as it seems to keep them on track and focused on the outcome they want.  For me, past experience with over planning a project results in my work feeling stiff, and staged and a dull imitation of the original idea.

In any case, with this project I was not actually looking for a specific outcome.  I wanted to play with paints and threads and learn from the experience.   So, we shall see how this evolves over the next few weeks.

"Analysis kills spontaneity.  The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more."
 - Henri Frederic Amiel

“Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”  - Jane Austen, Emma