Creating again

My broken arm sidelined me for a while, but really allowed ideas to germinate and my passion to build only to spill over once I was able again.  In between a huge variety of summer visitors and activities, I have begun a series of "Collage Cards".  Pictured here is a collage of the Retirement card series I did for a colleague as I considered how she might spend her week in retirement.  This has led to a multitude of collage card ideas and an explosion of possibilities with this latest medium.  From sets in the fan folders to individual cards with coordinating envelopes, this latest expression allows me to dabble freely and frequently with simple thank you cards, to more involved individualized birthday sets.  These sets will be available through Etsy soon as I build an inventory and expand and explore various methods and materials.

Passion Interrupted

I had every intention of posting at least monthly, following my progression into more artful expression, but life is as ever filled with detours and the unexpected.  April was yet another month filled with artistic interpretation including a multi media book I wrote and created for my daughter using the metaphor of the life of a tree to explain my own life journey.  I dabbled with assemblage and worked on memory stones for my yard in Taos.  Then April 27th simply walking from one room to another in my socks on the wood floors (bad idea) I slipped and fell hard thoroughly breaking both bones of my right wrist.  Ouch!!! - but worse than the pain and inconvenience of a cast was the immediate halt to my artistic expression - it was like hitting a wall.  After the initial series of casts and manipulations of my damaged wrist (double Ouch!!!) I was able to at least decorate the cast with the help of a friend.  As I settled into a very quiet four week stretch, punctuated by two long planned trips, I came to see this as an opportunity to develop other parts of myself as my left hand grew a bit more adept and my right fingers tried to work in ways they had not before.  I am still in a cast, this one I decorated completely by myself - pictured here.  I found ways to work with the pain and started moving my twisted right hand in ways that allowed me to once again hold scissors, paint, write and work.  It is slow going and I am counting the seconds until the cast is off.  I have physical therapy ahead and a long time before I can do full yoga again, but I am curious to see how the development of new parts of me might express itself once I am more functional.  The physcial experience of having one part shut down is a great metaphor for how our lives continually shift and how we must navigate our way through losses and changes. Somehow, we just keep going as we constantly challenge ourselves to find more within and to tap undeveloped potential.  If we are open to it we may find the development of our less used parts leads to a more fully lived life.

Inspired Passion

My creative wildfire is once again fully stoked. I was enraptured for several weeks, creating constantly then had a brief lull in the activity. I kind of enjoyed the break, though I still worked on creative outlets every day I was able to read, and rest a bit more easily with the creative flame dimmed slightly. Once again, however, the flame grew and I am spending more time than ever with my creative pursuits.  I have posted on the blog several of the latest works, which I call Passion Pages.  I am loving the muli-media work as it allows me to meld words with other forms of artful expression.  Each of the Passion Pages pieces has a substrate of the actual pages from that chapter. The piece evolves to depict the theme of the particular chapter, finding ways to incorporate the number of that chapter into the piece has been fun.  Now to expand my connection to the larger art community !

Passionate Art

Well, my inward journey has taken me down an unforeseen path.  I have always been a craft person, and I am also a writer.  I constantly shift my attentions from one thing to another, as I am sure many of us do. Fortunately, for me and my household I am not one to leave projects undone or my home would be in chaos. I actually like things to be in order and love to see things to completion.  This new creative pathway exploded within me over the last month or so as I had embarked on an inward time of reflection, meditation, reading and soul-searching.  Out of the quiet came a blinding flash of creative energies unlike anything I had ever know.  I began to explore the very exiciting and limitless world of multi-media art.  What a perfect fit for me - I quilt and sew, I make jewelry, I write, I photograph, in short -I create, and I have been able to incorporate everything into this new medium for expression.  I hope to blog more regularly when the muse allows me away from creation and would love to post the ongoing exploration of this new form of expression.  For now I will share a couple of pictures.  Thanks for watching this part of my journey unfold!- I would usually say, "Onward!", but more apropos to the source of this creative explosion the expression is, "Inward!"

Living in Autumn

For a while now I have been straining against the classic sociological, mythology based female triumvirate of maiden/mother/crone. Now that I am not actively mothering, and really haven’t been for ten years or so am I really a crone?  Surely not, I am more fit, active and healthy than I was during much of my mothering years having finally found balance with diet, exercise, meditation, and the grace that can come with a life well lived.  As I considered what other paradigm might better explain this time of life I was struck with the metaphor of the seasons. If spring is childhood and summer is the rich, full, expanding world of younger adulthood and active parenting, then this is my autumn. 

With reflection and the search for meaning amidst metaphor, I am flooded with images of autumn and thrilled to consider that it is, for me, a time of the greatest beauty. Driving recently from our home in Taos through the canyon to the south, I was thunderstruck by the magnificence of the trees at their fullest yellow against the backdrop of the northern New Mexico landscape of scraggly pinon and sage. These trees are at their most beautiful and glowing with an energy that is undeniable.  I like this metaphor so much more than crone. This is the richest time of life, this is when I am my most beautiful, vibrating an energy of presence and power. This is when I can harvest what I have been sowing these many years, the fruits of a richly lived life.  This is a time of action, yet yielding, a time of potent beauty and great vitality and abundance. 

Autumn is a time of transition, as is every stage of nature and of life – one to be embraced, treasured, enjoyed, and at times simply endured, for in no time is there a period without sorrow and challenge. These times can still, however, make us grateful for the times of joy, for the simplest of pleasures, those rays of light that lead us through those moments of darkness.  In gratitude, I can weather times of sadness with the great understanding that an open and loving heart leaves itself open to pain, but for me there is no other way. Living fully, with loving intention toward all my actions is the only way to fully enjoy each season of my life.  Let us take every day as it is offered, each season as it is awarded – as there is beauty in each one to be cherished and celebrated.