All Fingers and Thumbs

This week has been the shadow of the light of last week. Squashed by a stomach bug less than 24 hours after I typed the last post. I might have been relishing all the colour of my life but then you find another perspective and it's been a black and white fortnight. In the grey I have found self care and compassion that validated all I wrote. I said thank you for the opportunity to reinforce my progress. I laughed. Also I cried and felt flat and sorry for myself. Yet always out of the harder bits of life come the biggest lessons and I tried to welcome that. I saw how afraid I am of doing nothing. I think I have cultivated time for stillness. Another perspective could be that I have created safe little pockets to dip into. I write this to help me remember when I am in the swirl of busy and exciting bemoaning the lack of peace and quiet: I create the swirl to avoid the quiet. That the quiet scares me because of what I might hear. I promise to try and listen.

Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life. Care of the Soul - Thomas Moore A regular week and an irregularly momentous one. Play and work. Work and play. Plenty of rest. Full in the flow of the remarkable and unremarkable. My basic routine has space for quiet ritual, for time in nature, for movement and stillness and space to do what my heart calls for in the most playful of ways. The simple everyday is so very good for me now, care fully curated, and I reap the rewards of that in health and energy even in this fallow time. More particularly there have been delicious moments of note. The weekend brought time with friends, talking about the things that really matter and just being together - that amazing gift of time with people who really see you. This Tuesday I had one of my fortnightly coaching calls with Jen , we're just sprinkling magic on the mundane, recognising the sacred or as the oh-so-eloquent Mr Moore would put it applyi...

Winter and candlelight. Tea and biscuits. Sarah and her slippers. Things that are delicious together. Just like Brene and Oprah and art journalling and The Gifts of Imperfection. I signed up for the on demand course last October and I was starting to wonder if it wasn't a little like my exploration of The Artist's Way . Bought in 2010 after it was recommended on a course the book has been in a drawer ever since, just waiting for the day.  I tried to find my deeper way of engaging with TGIF in the spring  but that didn't stick so this sounded like a perfect way to really play with the concepts that were so helpful to me last year.  I gathered my supplies and then just couldn't find that overlap of time, inclination and a dash of bravery to begin. Despite Julia Cameron lurking in the drawer I just trusted that the conditions would be right, soon, however long that took. And hey presto the window of opportunity opened last weekend. I'm so enjoying playing with t...

This embroidery is growing like weeds! I have found so much inspiration from the wonderful Embroidery Workshops book . Along with the book my Ma had gifted me this flowery fat quarter, three exquisite skeins of thread and notions. When I opened it on Christmas Day I had everything to hand but I wasn't quite sure what to start as I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. So when I read the advice from the final chapter to "..please remember: Along the road of making things, it can be freeing not to worry too much about the end result." it was exactly the permission I needed. It freed my simple brain from the old trap of trying to get to the end before I've even started.  I'm still not sure how I'll use or display this work but it has given me such enormous pleasure this month to just doodle on these flowers, simply stitching what I feel like stitching. With the gentle pull of the thread, I can get in to that peacefully present place, beyond ...

These holidays with their sparkle and bustle are quite the distraction. In years past I used to associate this time with the pinnacle of winter, as if  I were saying "shortest day done, mince pies eaten, new year rung in, righty ho lets have at this spring business then". January and February dragging on drearily with the dark and cold were quite the anticlimax and time for restless blues. Then we had a proper snowfall one January and I had to actually slow down to something like the right pace for me, it was a revelation, January and I could actually be friends. Now these approaching quiet months seem like so much more the point to me and my traditional mid-December funk at being caught up in doing too much makes perfect sense. This is my big rest time, a natural lull in the cycle of the year. I think I must have been a hedgehog in a former life. The idea of lining my house with leaves in autumn, battening down the hatches,  emerging blinking somewhere towards the end o...