Swept away.

So far it's one of those springs when the weather got hot early and the snow has melted quickly. The local creeks are full and rushing and the combination of this and fine weather seems to draw young men (typically) to fast water. Two were lost at the height of the heatwave in Gold Creek near here, in a swimming hole we have swum in but that was late in the summer and by then the water was tired from rushing and the only danger was the icy temperature. Even my dad leaped into the granite pool carved there by centuries of falling water. Young men have also been lost in capsized canoes in deep interior lakes that bear pioneer women's names. Bodies are washing up on the banks of the Fraser, remains have been found up north in Prince George. Yesterday a boulder crushed two campers, a man and his daughter. Harsh spring, but a beautiful one.

The sun has been shining and so I have had no time to be reflective beyond noticing how tremendously hopeful and happy I feel. On Monday while I hung out the laundry on the clothesline I could hear bees buzzing loudly and naturally thought it sounded like trucks and cars whizzing by on the Trans-Canada highway 5 miles to the north. It turned out it was a bee swarm in a tree above my office. Mark was panicked as he has an irrational fear of bees and he was in the office when they appeared. I was over-the-moon. Let's face it the last few months have been rather hellish in the work department so the appearance of nature's busiest creature felt more symbolic than plagueish to me. The bees have stayed and so have the indications that I will probably be okay after all. I launched my new website, and reinstated my land line after a year and a channel of communication as wide as the Ganges has opened. We borrowed a box for the bees from our neighbor on Tuesday and thanks to the internet we set it in what seems like a good location. We rubbed the box with lemon rind and Mark put a bit of honey near the entrance. He relaxed around the bees and let his natural obsessive tendency kick in checking on the swarm and box every 45 seconds.

It's 8 days later now, it's been raining and I have returned from Canada to discover the swarm still up in the tree but the bee box is quiet and I fear barren. I have been busy with work and in between things today I took the opportunity to prune a few limbs along the driveway. I found myself under this red twig dogwood and the blossoms were alive with bees. I felt so pleased to discover they were here on the property. I am hoping that there is so much pollen to be had that the bees are lingering around and are enjoying being up that tree. Who can blame them, they have a view of the whole yard. I really want to open the box to see what went on in there. Did they just come in and raid the cupboards, so-to-speak, rob the hive of its honey and move along? It's a possibility but they are still up there so I am still hopeful that they will let me make them a home here.

Work this Week

I had an epiphany recently about how I work, or rather how I want to work. I had been feeling like I was waiting for something to happen in order for me to move my own creative process forward. I had made a list earlier this year in my notebook "be the thing you want to be" and "enjoy what you are doing" were two directives I had written down.  The thing I want to be is boundlessly creative and to follow it where it takes me. Make and do without worry. "Enjoy what you are doing", had a question mark after it. I was asking myself the question. I used to separate my activities and my time, everything was either work or not-work. Not-work played second fiddle to work and I wasted days feeling pissed off instead of inspired. Well I feel done with that notion.
 
So if work looks like painting type on a wooden cabinet in my carport all week I have decided that is valid. If it means sewing a suit of clothes to attend an event, then it is valid. If it means designing elaborate promotional pieces teaching a curious public how to deal with graphic designers, then it is valid. If it means feeling joyful all day, then it is valid.

So in the interest of total authenticity and integration between my multiple creative selves and wanting to work the way I enjoy working every day, I embarked on an unusual project for the Bellingham Farmers Market. I volunteered to freshen up the market's information booth and signage. The first phase was to reinforce, scrape, and paint the base cabinet. With a fresh smooth surface to work on I transferred the projected type onto the cabinet, and tomorrow I will fill in the all the letters. When that is all done I am sewing some bunting flags to hang above the piece and below the overhead sign. The flags will be up-cycled from tea towels made for our 20th Season last year.

It's been glorious in the afternoons for working outdoors and we keep getting little glimpses of the enlightenment that comes with summer and personal evolution.

P.S. I could not have done this project without my partner in crime, he took the pictures too.

Mood swings.

Holy cow, almost a month since my last post. Time flies and not in a good way always. In some ways I am just hanging on by a thread but in most ways I am a hardy Fir tree, sturdy and deeply rooted in my routine which feeds all my needs, creatively anyway. Spring is arriving like baby teeth, coming up and receding, sometimes all in the same day. I am rebuilding things, re-making myself, coming back out of the shell I put myself in now and then only to realize that while I love shell life I love the bigger world too. What I want to know is if all this positivity is due to the weather or if I am generating it myself. I haven't felt this good in years, maybe ever but I was a bit surprised when I noticed other people were feeling super good too and it was sunny and we all got outside. Am I responding to mass hysteria brought on by the pollen rich air? I prefer to think I am the master of my moods and that the sunshine just makes it all more pleasant rather than the other way around. I want to think I can control how I feel about things. I think I can, I think I can, I feel like I am.

Diagram of Me

Swirling.
There is a black dot at the middle of an empty page.
It is labeled, Me. It is not me but a representation of me.
Above it I imagined the heading WORK and a long pencil line connecting the two.
Me and work. I am imagining a diagram. A central mark with radiating lines.
Words on post-it notes. Nourishment and enrichment, two different things to Me.
Nourishment I imagine is painting, knitting, sewing. Not food. It sits below Me.
Food is represented by the word FOOD. It is to the right of Me.
Enrichment sits below work but above me. Learning and reading. Worthwhile.
I have another list that could dot the pencil line between Me and Enrichment on the way to WORK.
E-book technology sounds enriching but it stands to the left of Enrichment and lower down,
at the same height as Secret Signage Project to the right of Enrichment but higher than me. I could pull the trigger on that one any day now. HIKING sits to the left of me. It is a dreamy goal waiting for the snow to melt. MAKE SHOES sits next to Nourishment under FOOD. I have tried to hold all these things in my mind, putting them on paper releases the grip of my brain and frees it up to think creatively about the small steps that dot all the connecting lines. Impulses along thin pencil lines
on blank pages in endless notebooks. Journal entries dated and begun and stopped after one written
letter M—R—S. The page abandoned in favor of what? Items from the list that jump out and pull me away before I have a chance to record them or put them into the diagram where they might make sense. Does it count as a list if it never made its way from brain to hand into letter shaped pencil lines. I am thinking differently about the diagram. Rather than the long laundry list of things one must do. The diagram is a celebration of all that it is possible, radiating like a sun, and at it's center is Me, making it all happen. I have resisted lists as they make for messy pages in Sketchbooks but a diagram. A diagram is a thing to behold. As the diagram evolves I develop a deepening understanding for all of the activities I am engaged in and I can see where my practice lies. Working which is the key to my survival can be exactly what I want it to be. Nourishing, enriching, satiating and it's important to keep moving about, vigorously if possible. This is me.

Print Project Complete

The last item on my list of "33 Ways to Stay Creative" is finish something  and yesterday that is what I did. Having scanned the elements of this piece into my computer I was able to layer them together and see what was working and what wasn't. The background was too strong and the portrait was too dark. It's all pretty subtle but there has to be balance. The theme of the piece is "The Drive Home". At first all I could think about was the road I walk up and down everyday for exercise and meditation but then I went a bit deeper.

I am going home and I don't mean physically at least not right now.  I am slowly returning to the country of my birth, reclaiming my Canadian-ness, examining who I am as an ex-patriot. I have been in America for 30 years now and so I am thinking a lot about what the next phase of my life will look like. The circles represent many things, the north, my career as a designer, a feminine form, individual closed units, perhaps of time. I used to think of my life in 5 year segments. Major changes seemed to take about 5 years to hatch and see to fruition. 5 years from now my daughter will be out of school and one of my key daily roles will become redundant.

Beneath the circles is an image of a neon sign. It's a picture I took many years ago when I lived in Los Angeles, it's at the bottom of the page signifying that region of the southern US where my journey started. Layered over that are the words "Not there yet". The answer to that age-old question, "are we there yet". I ran it up my face pointing north to my destination and to my brain. I am not there yet. The larger message of the piece — a self portrait — is about that constant searching and process of evolution I am involved in.

I am looking forward to sending these 12 prints off and seeing what I get in return, I liked this idea of sending these little signals out into world that say I am here like you working away, living my life. I am alive.

Felting Project 1, The Gateway Activity

You heard it here first. I have made my first pair of shoes, albeit slippers. The die is cast. I will learn to make shoes. Here are a few pictures from the workshop I attended. It was taught by a very bright young woman, Sarah Breggin who really knows and loves her craft. Sarah sells her tutorials via Etsy, and works as a programmer when she is not teaching felting at Burkeland Bros Wool in Abbottsford.

We started with 8 little piles of fleece.

 Each pile is flattened over the template.

 

The templates, left and right now covered in 4 layers of fleece and ready to be decorated.

 

The design gets laid on top of the fleece block and then gets slowly worked in as the felting begins.

 

Serious felting begins, slowly binding the fibers together. 

Rolling the slippers up helps shrink the fibers, first length, then width.

I can't tell you enough how important this little outing was for me. I have had this frustration with shoes rolling around in my mind for as long as I've had feet. I seriously feel that this could prove to be the activity that leads me to my ultimate goal of owning a pair of shoes that not only fit my "larger foot type" but somehow compliments my particular sense of style, whatever that is. I honestly can't point to a woman's shoe and say, there, that is the shoe, the shoe that will make me whole, as I suspect other women can. I stopped thinking about women's shoes around size 10, at size 14 I have no hope of wearing women's shoes unless I want to look like a transvestite, a risk I am not willing to take. It can't be denied there is a gender sensitivity attached to shoes. At a certain age my brother and I wore the same shoes and he suffered for it via verbal suggestions that he was wearing girls shoes. What I knew was, I was wearing my brothers shoes, a decidedly non-feminine act. I would like to deny it's importance but I would be lying if I told you I didn't care. I want to feel feminine in my shoes. (I just threw up in my mouth a little re-reading that.) To hell with it, I am that person, woman, girl, longing to be girly, womanly, whatever, not just some facsimile in Kenneth Coles that pass as sensible shoes for a woman of a certain size and professional acumen. They're not flirty, unless you're Italian and a male homosexual. I want flirty. I don't need 4 inch heels, I want soft. I want unique. I want my own goddamn shoes. 

 

Hints

I dreamed I found a bunch of money I had meant to put in the bank but didn't.  The mortgage check didn't bounce, at least I hadn't heard it. From where I am sitting with my eyes closed and my ears covered I didn't see it fall, hit the ground and bounce up and away out of my reach. In the morning I put on my second string coat, the one I wear to the bus stop and lo and behold the pile of folded paper in the pocket contained a twenty dollar bill. Huh, I thought. And because this is my reality I decided that the twenty meant something even though a piece of green oily paper means nothing. I decided it meant that things are going to be okay and then I went on to have really good day.

Nothing to report.

Sagittarius

"Don't think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter," wrote the Persian mystic poet Rumi. "It's quiet, but the roots are down there riotous." I think you're like that winter garden right now, Sagittarius. Outwardly, there's not much heat and flash. Bright ideas and strong opinions are not pouring out of you at their usual rates. You're not even prone to talking too loud or accidentally knocking things over. This may in fact be as close as you can get to being a wallflower. And yet deep beneath the surface, out of sight from casual observers, you are charging up your psychic battery. The action down there is vibrant and vigorous.


This seems pretty accurate to me. Stay tuned.