New Year - goodbye to 2011, hello 2012

"Once I was beset by anxiety. I couldn't tell right from left or orient myself. I could have cried out with terror at being lost. But I pushed the fear away - by studying the sky, determining where the moon would come out, where the sun would appear in the morning. I saw myself in relationship to the stars. I began weeping, and I knew that I was all right.

"That is the way I make use of geometry today. The miracle is that I am able to do it, by geometry."

-Louise Bourgeois
New York, 1977
(her work)

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May we all find our geometry, our moon, our sun, and each other, and know we're all right in 2012.


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Not so fast...

Over on the bg site I frequent, they are already shouting "HNY!" Happy new year, in case you can't figure it out :)

But... It's December 27th. There are 4 days left. Inside my head, I am screaming, "Nooooooo, waaaaiiiitttttt! It's going too fast!"

2011 was a hard year. It was hard, financially. I'm just not very good with money, and the recession hasn't helped.

It was hard, personally, emotionally. I took some risks and they have paid off, my life is richer for them. But there were also some losses and disappointments, which I took very hard. I keep looking at my heart charm and seeing that little heart, ripped open (see Shambhala) and trying to remember that's how it is supposed to be.

It was hard, healthwise - but not really. I'm fine! A little anxiety as frosting on top of the already-overstuffed anxiety layer cake - but I'm fine! Except for the bills... Too low levels of thyroid medication, as it turns out, didn't help much either. But I'm fine now! Almost.

And it was hard, creatively. Or rather... it was very rich creatively, almost too rich. I have way more ideas than I have time, and this year it wasn't just my own natural procrastination that got in my way.

When I did make time for it, it was very fruitful. The Radical Jewelry Makeover was RAD, a tremendous blessing, a very healthy kick in the pants. I need to write my thoughts about it, for it changed my creativity and thinking profoundly, and I want to complete that writing before the year is out... 2011, SLOW DOWN!!!

Overall, my creativity was fruitful and fitful, lots of stops and starts.

2011 was just so full of clutter.

Here's hoping that 2012 is more fruit than fits!

But please, please - can we wait until Saturday before we begin?! I'd like to get through this year in one piece first...


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I'm back...

and being creative again! woo hoo!

I had a bit of a cancer scare. I went for an annual physical, and my doctor found that my thyroid was enlarged, and all the test results kept coming back indeterminate. Given that my mother died of cancer when she was five years older than I am now, there was a lot of anxiety, and a lot of emotion, and not much room for creativity. I realize now, I should have made room for it.

Along the way we also discovered I have an abnormal EKG, so that was a concern. More anxiety. It turns out that it is "abnormal" the way a head of red hair is "abnormal" - meaning just rare, not dangerous. My heart is good to go.

After six weeks of testing, I finally had the thyroid out. The surgery itself was quite easy, and I am now fully recovered. Well, almost fully, there are still some calcium issues, but we are hoping they will resolve on their own.

And the final word is - no cancer. There never was cancer! It was just lumpy and large, and the surgeon took it out simply because it was so lumpy, it would be difficult to track in the future.

No cancer, and significantly in debt due to medical expenses.

In the midst of all this, I also moved my studio, taking the smaller guest bedroom to sleep in, and moving all my creative stuff into the larger bedroom to work in. I had been thinking about moving for a while, but it seemed overwhelming and I wasn't sure I would like it. Someone came to help me, so the overwhelming part was diminished (thank you!), and I like this new art studio very much! There is so much space, and light. I now have different work surfaces available so I am not constantly moving one project aside and putting one set of tools away, in order to work on something else while waiting for the first thing to dry or cure or pickle.

However, I have spent several weeks not able to find anything! My methodology, I'm afraid, is a little bit cluttered. I think it requires clutter, to a certain extent. I'm a bit of a sifter when I am working. I need to see things, rearrange them - bead colors lined up next to each other for example. So I take out 30 tubes of beads and move them around. Then there are 27 tubes of beads lying around, after I have picked the 3 I need and start to work. At least now, I have the space to let them lie around for a while, I don't have to immediately put them away.

Because all the things were moved, I would be looking for one certain thing, and it was in a new place in a new room. It has taken several weeks for me to adjust my thought process about where that one tool that I KNOW IS AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE might be.

I work mostly in the center of the room, and have all my creative inspiration and tools and intriguing STUFF I have collected orbiting around me. I am the sun, and they are my satellites, and sometimes I finish something and it shoots out like a comet into the universe! The air conditioner is in, the cats come in and sit in this one area of sunshine, which luckily is out of my way when I'm working, so I'm not rolling over tails with the chair anymore. I should take a picture of the room, it's wonderful.

I finished my school project, a version of a prayer wheel based on the Tibetan tradition. I am very pleased with it, as a prototype. It will serve as inspiration for something else, eventually. But now I am back working on seeds. The prayer wheel incorporated seeds. Then with sterling silver becoming so ridiculously expensive, I started working in polymer clay. I had signed up to take an enameling class, and was looking forward to working with color this summer, but the teacher bailed and the class was cancelled. I am getting my color fix from the clay instead. Inspired by the watermelons of summer and their seeds, I have made a set of beads, and am working on ways to mount them for earrings. That is today's project, I hope to have them on etsy by this weekend. I need to start creating and selling, to help with these bills.

I want to get back to the wax carving again soon. I need to make a butterfly to commemorate the thyroid experience, and I have a feather idea....

It is SOOOOOOOOOOOO good to be creating again!

why Shambhala is related to creativity

I remembered to ask my teacher yesterday.

Courage.

Shambhala is about courage.

Making art is about courage.

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wrestling with roller coasters

Listening to the radio has become a joy!  Where I used to flick the television on to see if there are any disasters, now I flick the radio on when I go downstairs in the morning.  I hear music instead of commercials and chatter (mostly), and it's oriented around my town, instead of New York, or Los Angeles.

Yesterday, listening to the local public radio station, I heard part of an interview with Natalie Goldberg.  I was busy doing other things, but I caught a section where she talked about making her creativity part of her practice.  Very interesting... I already have her "Writing Down the Bones" ...  OH!  I just checked.  I have "Wild Mind" in my creativity library as well...  Yay!  Hmmm, I suspect the next few evenings will be quite busy re-reading these.

Anyway, I decided to go to the library to see if any of the available books of hers were directly about creativity as practice, and if I could maybe translate her writing instruction to my wax carving of silver charms.  I found two books.  One called "Thunder and Lightning", which seems more directly related to questions of writing, and a book called "The Great Failure".

That title grabbed me.  I have had some major failings in personal relationships recently, and I was hoping, hoping, hoping that her failure (was this about her failure?) could help me with my own.  It did.  I read the whole thing in one evening.  It also helped open up my perception about the Pema Chodron and Shambhala reading I've been doing.

"We spend our life on a roller coaster with rusty tracks, stuck to highs and lows, riding from one, trying to grab the other."

Yes.  I need to buy this book now.  I think I'll get some Beyonce too... "to the left, to the left"...

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The rowboat is almost complete.  I need to refine the shape a little more, carve the oars, and texture it, and then it's off to casting!
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messages, thoughts, and beliefs

I am ruminating about Shambhala, tumbling the words over and over in my head, which seems to resemble a rock tumbler...  complete with rocks.

There is a section in Chapter Nine: Celebrating the Journey, the part about the bow and arrow, and messages.  When I read it the first time, I had great trouble with this section, but it seemed very rich and full even though I didn't understand it, or know how to incorporate it in a practice.

I was thinking about messages, and thoughts and beliefs today.  I verbalized for myself the idea that it is not the thoughts that are troublesome.  According to this book, you just label them "thoughts", and allow them to float away.  To this end, I like to visualize my thoughts being written on little scraps of some sort of melty paperlike substance, and I catch them and pin them on the inside of my skull and let them dissolve, rather than let them float around.  It gets clogged in there if I don't pin them down.

But I have the habit of letting thoughts solidify.  They become rock hard, then immoveable.  Or sometimes they become brittle and then they break and become shards and stab me with their little sharp edges.  It's not the thoughts that are troublesome.  It's my habit of making them solid. They become beliefs.  Big, beefy, heavy, sharp, brittle, rocklike beliefs.  Even if they aren't true. Then I eventually do something neurotic because of them.

So, thinking these things, I went back.  I looked up "messages" in the index of the book, and found that section again, and there were these words that leapt out at me:

"You want to look at every situation and examine it, so that you won't be fooling yourself by relying on belief alone..."

Maybe I am absorbing some of this book after all!  That whole section now makes a kind of sense to me.  And it's great.  I love these kinds of books - so rich, and so deep, and you can go back to them year after year and discover something new.

In case anyone is wondering, this book does have something to do with creativity.  I'm not sure exactly what yet...  but I was originally introduced to it by one of my art teachers.  She assigned it as the text for a previous jewelry-making class, two or three years ago.  If I remember, I'll ask her when I see her next week (I am currently in another of her classes.)

If nothing else, I am hopeful that it will prevent me from making neurotic art.

To that end, work progresses; here is the lil boat today:

lil boat

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seeds

Whew!!  Finally got the other website done (at my other job) and so now I'm over the hump!  Woot!  Now there's just the marketing and the SEO and the updating........... ... .. .  oh.

Well, I should have more time for wax carving and artwork though!  I've already added a layer of color to the blue pear; I'm waiting for that to dry and then I'll add another layer.  I should count the layers.  I'm on... five?  six?  I'm not sure at the moment.  Next painting!  I'll be anal retentive and count!!

Hmmmm, I just realized, I'm doing what the kids do!  I volunteer at an art program in our local schools, and when we do paintings, the kids never want to fill in the background.  The teachers show them Matisse and tell them, "Fill in the background!"  The kids make these tiny little figures and leave all the white space and then scream out, "I'm finished!!"  Lazy monkeys...

I never fill in the backgrounds on my pears either.  Oh wait, that's not true.  There's a big painting of a pear in my living room, and the background is filled in.  But.... that's because it was done on an old canvas I got from a flea market or something, and it was under my bed for a loooooooooonggggg time... and it was covered in dust.  It was filthy.  I had to paint over it, and I just used the line that the dust formed as a separator.  It looks like the pear is sitting on a windowsill or something.

That's the only background I've done though.

Thinking about what I should be carving - I need a Christmas project to go with the star... maybe a camel?  Then I'm also thinking of putting the heart aside for a bit - save it for Valentine's Day - and working on some earrings inspired by seeds instead.  Which is odd, since it's harvest time...  oooooh, farmers market tomorrow!!

But I have a thing about seeds and beans... so seeds it is!  I think...

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actual artwork

As this blog is supposed to be about creativity, I thought I might post some actual creative work...



this is a finished watercolor painting, the first pair of pears I ever did. not yet framed. for sale! feel free to inquire.



this is a single pear, work in progress. sometimes it's a shame to continue, they have such life in the early stages. it was meant to be blue, maybe it will end up blue when I'm finished... but i'm rather fond of this turquoise green color i found.

thinking of someone who is having surgery today... get well soon!!


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