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...

So this run up to Christmas business is still hard even when I am feeling healthy. Is it almost more so because my in-built excuse for why I'm not participating at my imaginary shiny elf level is missing? Physically I'm tired, but no more so than is to be expected at this waning of the year, when it is more dark than not and cold rain wants to send me indoors whenever I try and venture out. This time of year is not conducive to running around and seeing all my friends, making a ton of gifts, finding the perfect artisan made options and decorating my nest to new levels of magical grotto-ness and yet I still tilt at that. Just avoiding grotty feels like a challenge enough. Is it a challenge set to torment anyone with an imagination? I can visualise the looks on my loved ones faces as they unwrap the (sparkly with seven bows on top) thoughtfully chosen, ethically sourced/personally hand crafted gift. I can see the glittery magic that I want to wrap around me as I float serene...

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue she stripped her mind, bound it and collected self-contempt by the heap.”  ―  Toni Morrison ,  The Bluest Eye Once upon a time there was a girl who was gifted two Buddhas. One came all the way from Laos, was cast in metal and was a slim, elegant, beautiful figure in a perfect lotus position with the serene smiling/not smiling expression and seemed a very authentic depiction of Zen calm. The other came all the way from a gift shop in Bristol, was cast in clay and was a sprawling, fat bellied, beaming guy who looked like he was too busy having a good time to worry too much about achieving enlightenment. The girl moved house many times in the years that followed and the authentic Buddha came with he...