Begin again.

Once I started a blog and an email list and had ambitious ideas about how it would all fall into place running parallel to my business. Happy thoughts, me in the woods, working, making, writing. Somewhere, at the same time, a Venn diagram circle of other events crossed over into my circle. The other circles contained personal family issues, health issues (mine and others) and then the ginormous circles of geopolitical angst and climate angst. These days I find myself at the intersection of all of them. Most of the time. A rabbit hole of events and environments. I sometimes wish I was better at juggling the emotions and navigating the minefield of tangled thoughts, memories and worries. A veritable Gordian knot of baggage. But I’m not better at juggling. It’s just the way it is for me right now. 

I guess the good thing is still, I persist. I have not made as much work as I anticipated. I have not explored the ideas I had hoped to. I have not fired as much in the wood kiln as I had expected. I have not kept up with the internet side of things, the marketing side, the email list side, as much as I had hoped. Time seems to have become distorted for me these days, much of that is due, I believe, to the bizarre nature of time in the political landscape in the last two years. I did not take into account how much of a foundation of my daily life was connected to the stability of the political and government landscape and that is the privilege of being a citizen of the United States until recently. Republican or Democrat, up until 2016, I never existentially worried that the potential for harm to myself and to those I love would creep out of every moment, every pore of awareness. Stability takes on a new meaning. But I have hope mostly because change is really the only constant. Nothing is completely stable or permanent so whatever is present today will decay and be replaced by another moment. Therein lies hope.

And so I’m letting go of my anxiety and the pressure to perform on the work side right now. I’m looking forward to the studio being heated over the winter so maybe, just maybe, I’ll be working and exploring instead of planning and strategizing just because it’s too cold to work. I hope to reconnect to my jewelry work as much as possible. I hope to explore my sculptural work as well. I have a whole body of work from last year that hasn’t even seen the light of day.