Category: Thoughts
Solstice
The shortest day yet
King Frost declines invitation
Green holidays ahead
A scent of Christmas
decorated forest floor
green tufts underfoot
Den korteste dag
Kong Frost takker nej til fest
Grøn jul i sigte
My interest in haiku a few weeks ago lasted exactly 2 days. Not that I don’t like them anymore, I just haven’t bothered. I think my brain simply thrives on new challenges? The thrill of firing untried combinations of neurons, no reason to go bungee jumping, you can get your kicks inside your own skull!
“Change all begins with thinking: we can immediately form new neurological connections and circuits that reflect our new thoughts. And nothing gets the brain more excited than when it’s learning – assimilating knowledge and experiences.” (“Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” by Joe Dispenza)
It would seem, to stay alert and on your toes, learning new things is indeed the way to go. So I guess I’ll just carry on like I’ve always done, LOL. Multicraftual, multilingual, diving into all sorts of weird subjects just because. I read somewhere that bilingual people are less affected by Alzheimers and other forms of dementia because they have more word combinations to choose from. Well, I’ll have to get back to you on that one in 25-30 years, that is, if I remember to.
There will be more on this topic later as I hinted on Monday.
On a holiday note, well, I can eat good food and take a wee bit of time off (ok, the latter is untrue), but I don’t do holy days or anything ceremonial. I’m guessing most of you out there will be busy with your families the coming week, so I’m wishing you all the best and I hope to see everyone on the other side of xmas or in the new year! I’ll probably keep posting if I feel like it, regardless of a drop in readers, or I may not get enough uninterrupted time to do anything useful whatsoever.
I’m really looking forward to the afternoons getting longer, as my outside time is suffering, I go about my things in here and before I know it the sun is down. But outside things also wear me out physically, so it’s no use doing them in the morning, as I’ll then be napping most of the day.
Date night, a movie.
Off to see the bad dragon,
but not in 3D.
Like a child
I thought I was going to write about and show postcards and doodles today, but things got in the way of making them, not me, things! I swear! So instead here’s a little something to give you at least a chuckle.
In some earlier posts we’ve discussed the topic of having a vocation and several readers agreed that perhaps you don’t need one. When you read advice on these things around the web, one suggestion is to ask: “What did you enjoy as a child and is that what you should be doing as an adult?”
So I thought it would be fun to dump the same question here, hoping that you’ll all play along with me. Do you agree with this theory or not, are you doing what you loved as a kid or at least something that makes you feel the same way, do you wish you had the guts to, and if, why don’t you?
I’ll start: As a kid I loved drawing, books, building things and making up stories, and, well horses. I had my debut as a photographer when I was 4! (unfortunately not a regular occurrence, film was expensive I guess). There was even a certain fascination with yarn winders and knitting machines… I also enjoyed doing these things on my own, I wasn’t desperate to have friends around all the time or even my family. Geesh, what do you mean “no surprise”?!
So why didn’t I end up working with the things I liked? Well, I used to have a million bad excuses. How I didn’t enjoy math, didn’t want to move, blablabla.
- There have been several related carreer choices on the table in my teens and 20’s, such as veterinarian, archaeologist, architect, psychologist, photographer, but I could never commit enough to just one when thinking of the huge debt I’d have on the other side of uni. You know, in case I picked the wrong one? At that age you think everything you choose is forever….
- I had bought into the theory that you can’t make a living from art. And for some reason, during high school all my stories disappeared. I was too timid to find an apprenticeship in photography because everybody kept telling me how hard it was.
- Nobody had mentioned to me you need to work hard to accomplish things. (actually perhaps somebody did and I didn’t believe them?) Homework was something I did with a flick of my
magic wandpencil and things I couldn’t do I just didn’t out of embarrassment to be seen failing. Again, the ignorance of youth! Life is wasted on the young. - Even then my batteries weren’t good enough to be able to work and study at the same time, for instance I battled a chronic headache from 18-25 years of age. Hence the commitment issue and fear of choosing. But really, I think I was just lazy. I could have insisted somebody investigated the headaches for instance, but I don’t think that ever occurred to me. (eventually I did find the cause, rather by coincidence)
So I’ve been away from all of these interests for longer periods as an adult, doing various odd jobs, but they keep circling round. By now I’ve given up trying to adapt to society and just be me, which is great. I’m not rich but I do have a roof over my head and I’m definitely not undernourished either. 😉
Let’s see a bit of interaction!
It’s funny how you begin to remember more things when you turn to them like this. Some of my “dream jobs” elude me right now, although I know there were more, but I suddenly remember how sometimes I went along to pick up my mum from the office (Normally I was the last one to be picked up after the day).
And if I begged real hard I was allowed to use the typewriter! It was long before I could write but I loved operating it and seeing all the letters appear. Later we had a small typewriter at home and I used it to write little stories and paste them into notebooks with drawings.
Winter schedule update
I thought I’d mention how well I’m actually doing with my intentions to be more efficient and procrastinate less. It may not be apparent on the blog, since I skip from topic to topic as usual!
I have a loose regime of studying/writing/doing computer work before noon and paints/fibers in the afternoon, and I stick to that pretty well. I choose a topic for study, get a book on it and work through that one or two chapters a day. Or I search for website tutorials, open up a selection of tabs, and work my way through them one by one. In the evenings I read whatever or knit.
There is some going to and fro, which is perhaps also some procrastination thing, but it seems I get ideas for one subject while I’m doing another and if I ignore it the idea goes away. So I indulge, take notes or go do the thing I’m inspired to, then come back to what I was doing before. As long as it’s not an evasive behaviour I find that it works alright. So I’m a person who writes silly poetry while spinning yarn, blog posts in the shower and beget paintings in bed. Fine. I’ll most likely always have a tonne of different ideas and not enough time to work on them. My mind keeps telling me to work on something else on the list no matter which one I choose, but I don’t think it’s so much a short attention span as a wide one. Making lists and going over them regularly does help, so that I’m sure nothing is forgotten, no need to keep repeating it in my head until it gets done.
When I do my “chapters” I do try to contain myself. I’ve also managed to stay true to the goal of getting updated on the Adobe suite, saving most other bookish subjects for later. Still working on it, it’s not like I’m making a full-time job of it for now.
Sometimes I do have to discipline myself to stop clicking the interwebs or ignore the urge to clip my toenails, but other than that I feel like I fill up my days to the extent that I’m able as well as resting when I need to and not when I want to (which is hardly ever – you can always do just one more thing, right?). Thank goodness I don’t have a social life. <G>
All in all I think a pretty good improvement. I have some plant dye experiments on hold and I plan to do them all inside a week or so, doing that and just that, not on the side while doing everything else too. Reprogramming your brain and undoing more than 40 years’ worth of habits is not something you do in a month or two, but I’m beginning to trust that it is in fact possible. Perhaps by 50? 😉
So what about slow and simple living you ask? Yes – it is in fact something I ponder from time to time, and I do implement it to a certain extent. But I also think that one of the keys is how you think and feel about the things you do and not just cutting them down. The guilt. The hurry. The duties. The performance. Those are the things I want to cut out, not just my number of activities. Efficiency is not about doing more, it’s about doing it well and as easily as possible. Can you do more cleaning in a shorter time simply by changing your attitude and your method? Voila, that leaves more time and headroom for important stuff without feeling rushed. Or a nap.
Last week the lovely Raquel popped by with a link which accurately describes the kind of person I’ve always been. So now I’ve been diagnosed 😉 Not that I plan to let anyone cure me, I rather see it as a handy excuse as well as an incentive to work harder – my way. “Follow your heart and trust that the dots will connect”. Which is pretty much what I’ve been trying to tell myself the last couple of years. Maybe I wasn’t all that wrong.
Forced painting
I’m slowly getting back to hands on tasks, and I’m determined to break a barrier or two before the year is over.
It’s funny how I can happily mess about with painting abstract backgrounds / washes forever, and then I get stuck. Or any idea I might have doesn’t work out – probably because I’m so scared to ruin it that I overthink, and then paint over the failure with a new background. It’s quite clear I have a performance anxiety here that I don’t experience with photography, probably because I can’t trust my hands to be able to do what’s in my head, the craftsman part of it. And we all know how that part is achieved!
 
It mostly happens when I paint without a plan, which is what I’ve been trying out for a while. Just picking a set of colours and see what happens. Of course, it could be that I’m simply not suited for the so called intuitive approach. I do have several complete illustrations in my head, but they don’t even get started apart from some very preliminary sketches or even just descriptions. And I have a feeling they’re kinda blocking the doorway for any new ones…
So I’ve decided to just make them, force myself to begin – and if they’re no good, I can make them again. Totally new experience to me, I never did the same image twice. Or rehearsed them.
As for the backgrounds sitting in a pile, I’ll try to put anything on there now, even if it’s not what I think is my usual topic matter. For instance, even though I love gardens and take copious photos of flowers, I never considered myself a floral painter. But I quit resisting when all this canvas wanted was some poppies – now I just have to work on them a lot, as you can see they’re going through multiple stages before being even close to a sketch. (I was interrupted the other day, as usual. By the same person who interrupted me with the same painting a month ago, when I was doing the background! I just hope it won’t be another month before I get back to it – last time I completely forgot my actual plan with it. And well, the famous thumb and all…)
I don’t really wish to paint from life – that’s a camera thing for me. Painting is for the world inside my head.
I actually have a third hurdle, as if the first two weren’t enough. I never painted or drew people. I never take photos with people if I can help it, even as a tourist I wait until everybody is out of the frame before I click. But it appears that some of my “illustrations” have people in them. Which means I have to learn from scratch and develop a “style” if I want these images to live. It’s not going to be easy, I’m no good at people in any aspect. I even avoid mirrors.
I’m still not certain whether this new thing is really coming from me though, or if I’m simply influenced by all the mixed-media art journaling I’ve been seeing around. So the figures may or may not happen.
And that’s what I’ll be dedicating December to. No more touchy feely I’ll bloody well do what I feel like-a-day. I’ve got a job. Not like pretending to make art, no, this will be deliberate and planned destruction. Because I am in the mood and still nothing happens, as opposed to not really feeling like it but thinking you should.
I don’t know why I persist, but it seems I have to give it a go. And yarn. Silly, useless, colourful string. I always have my Adobe studies to fall back on if my hand acts up. And plugins..
All I know is, I spent many years doing just tedious jobs and nothing creative at all and I don’t like the person that turns me into – I don’t think anybody else does either. So I need to keep giving this as much space as possible, because even if it sounds like I struggle, it really is the only thing that keeps me alive. It doesn’t have to end with painting – after all it’s been on the shelf for 20 years while other crafts are more recent and perhaps more likely to yield “products” I’m happy to call finished. But just as I always considered myself a horse rider even when I didn’t ride for a decade, I still have this image of myself as someone who paints. Weird, huh?
