I had hoped to post next about the delight of having Sandra Rude visit San Diego and give our guild a marvelous program called The Magic of Interleaved Threadings. It was absolutely fascinating, and augmented with a table full of gorgeous scarves. She topped it off with handouts including colored images of drafts! I was especially taken with her description of the inspiration for some of her work - a teacher had told her to find an element of nature that inspired her, and find a way to weave it. Now, this tickled me in particular because the very first weaving class I took, when it was time to plan our first project, I was asked by the teacher what I wanted to weave. "I want to weave water!" I replied. She gave me a funny look and suggested I think about it a while longer and let her know when I had picked my yarns and draft. :-)
The bad news is that apparently the batteries for my camera have reached the limits of their age, and they don't recharge properly anymore. So.... I wasn't able to get any pictures. Sandra let me take a picture with her camera, which she is going to email to me. With her permission, I'll post that here when I get it.
In the meantime, I want to talk about all this new year's stuff. I'm not making resolutions this year - not even the "in action" kind that I made last year (which apparently didn't take.) It's no secret that I've been stalled again, and for quite a while. Of course, not weaving doesn't mean I'm not doing a lot of other things, but it still bothers me greatly that I'm not getting any weaving done.
So... I've been thinking about my situation, and something occurred to me. I have some built-in limitations that I have not challenged in the past. Perhaps I could win some newly inspired activity just by challenging those unquestioned assumptions about my own limitations. Here are the two main ones that come to mind.
- I am a person who does not enjoy wet-messy processes.
Okay, in the past, this has been true. I'm not much for painting, or for dyeing, or for cooking, for that matter. These are what I categorize as "wet-messy processes", and so I've tended to avoid them - justifying it by saying to myself that it is just the way I am. But why is that? And why can't that change? I don't know if I'll do anything about this, but I've put myself on notice that there may be some wet-messy adventures ahead of me!
- I need large blocks of time to do anything creative - no 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there for me!
I have friends who will do all kinds of things in tiny bits of available time. I even have one friend who keeps her knitting handy and knits at red lights and in traffic jams! Me - I've always thought in the past that it was too hard to switch gears to do bits of things - that I need at least an hour of available time before I'll jump into something. But is that really true? And doesn't it reflect more a lack of preparation rather than a proclivity? What if I were to have some projects (a variety of them, because ironically, I *am* a magpie) already setup, with everything already at hand to begin work, maybe even with a post-it note telling me the exact next step to take. That would avoid the mental context switch that seems so cumbersome that I avoid having to make it.
I'm not promising anything, but I wonder what could happen if I became a person who can change focus at will and is oblivious to drippy messes? It's actually sounding rather fun and intriguing to discover the answer to that question!
And on a good note - at the Unity Center I attend, we start every year with a White Stone meditation. In ancient times, prisoners were given a white stone with their "new name", signifying that they had paid their dues and were now free to begin a new life. During the meditation, we're guided to find our own personal white stone word for the coming year - a quality, an aspect - something we want to manifest more in our lives. Each year, I go to that service with an idea already in mind for what I think my white stone word will be. This year, I thought it was going to be "acceptance" (a positive way to say non-judgment.) But, nope, something else came through in the meditation, and my white stone word for 2010 is HeartSong. And I love it. So although I'm making no specific resolutions - my goal for this year is to find and follow what makes my heart sing. I like that.
This is looking through the French doors next to my desk. Thankfully - we didn't have any trees fall. (Thought the green belt that runs by our house on the other side of the wall is littered with branches, as is the eucalyptus aroma.) No major leaks, either, although the rug under my desk was damp near the door, so some moisture blew in. We'll have to fix that. Much of the water has finally drained away, though we do still have a standing pool. It's probably time to have roots cleared out of the drain pipes, I suppose.
