August Break Day Four: Orange

August Break Day Three: Window

The bedroom windows as they were today. Closed with curtains drawn, no sound filtering through from the busy street outside. There were also books, cups of peppermint tea, some dark chocolate and a well earned rest. Even nine weeks after surgery my body is still surprising me with new pinches and pains as it tries to mend itself.
I've never really been a tea drinker until this year and though I still don't like your average cup of English tea, I love a nice, fragrant herbal mix. The ritual of boiling the kettle, letting the bag steep for a few minutes, waiting for it to cool enough so that the mug can be cupped and drawn close, it calms a fretful mind like nothing else.

August Break Day Two: Pattern

I am a woman of many kimonos.

August Break Day One: Lunch

So i'm participating in this as a way of getting me back into blogging. A prompt, one photo a day and somewhere along the way perhaps the story of the last twelve months will emerge. It's a story that includes new freindships, breakdowns, eight months of therapy, two major rounds of surgery and lots and lots of healing. Roughly in that order. That's the short version.
For now, let's just think about lunch. Which I forgot to do. One pesto salad scoffed whilst prepping for the new term, mind elsewhere until all that was left was an empty tupperware container. But this is lunch number two, a treat after a morning of paperwork. Not lunch exactly but the perfect way to end forty minutes browsing in the Oxfam bookshop; a haven of muted classical music, bookiness and fairtrade chocolate punctuated only by the smell of wet pavement wafting through the door. Ah, the humble Marks and Spencer's caramel tart. Truly the nicest sweet treat you can buy yourself in a market town with no artisan bakery.

Confessions of a straight lace

This is my 2013 vision board.
Owing to various circumstances I didn't finish it until last week.
I've had the images stashed away for ages, the words rolling around my head. I know how I want this year to feel.
The thing is this: I'm worried about that word Wild. I don't think I am capable of being Wild. Not really.
That woman up there, on that board, she is so intimidating to me right now.
I was teaching my watercolour class yesterday. We were painting images of rambling gardens. Lovely English cottage gardens. Lupins, poppies, alliums. Little stone benches. Willow trees bowing in a light June breeze and little gateways hidden behind over grown foliage. I had one of those rare moments where you actually recognise your own contentment at the time you are feeling it. I had found a little patch of sunlight to sit in. There was the sound of paintbrushes in water and I think I might have heard a cookoo in the distance.
On Monday I will pop over to Hornton, the village my mum comes from. A lot of my family still live there and there will be proper Mayday celebrations. There will be a Maypole. Homemade cake and cider in the pub garden.
I don't know how to be that woman; wild, unapologetic, natural and brave, in these quaint settings. That little word. It just popped into my head without me giving it a huge amount of thought as to what it meant to me. And, of course, in my woefully naive way, I have become worried that it might mean going out when I don't want to, drinking when I don't want to, talking to people when I don't want to, talking to men when I don't want to. I'm worried it might mean accidentally becoming something I'm not. Which I have accidentally done before.

___

Ok. It's three hours later. I very often write blog posts that I don't publish, mainly because they are a bit open ended.
I have decided to define what this word means to me.
Wild.
It means being slightly more audacious.
It means apologising less.
It means tending to my own needs before everyone else's.
It means listening to my body more.
It means calling people out on their bullshit. Quietly and politely. And then probably running away and hiding.
It means, actually, just doing what I bloody well want to do. Without reference to any of the dozens of people I nod at and say hello to as I walk from one end of this small town to the other.

Is the sun shining yet?

Today I am blogging from my sick bed. I seem to have spent a large part of this year feeling distinctly under the weather until last week when I well and truly hit the wall and under the weather became 'flu. Like proper grown up 'flu. If I wasn't feeling so ill I would be quite impressed at my body's ability to completely floor me in this unexpected way. I started January in such high spirits but the last few months have seen me forced to slow down a bit. Like everyone else, I am blaming the weather. Has there been a winter quite like this in recent memory?

 

I am feeling a bit better today and just wanted to post some images of the work students did on my Handmade Art Journals workshop a few weekends ago. The weather was freezing but everyone made it in and we had such a fun weekend playing with paints, inks, fabric scraps and found imagery.

One of the very best things about teaching these workshops is how inspiring I find them. For me teaching isn't about me imparting information and students copying what I do; it's more like an exchange of ideas. They take the techniques I show them in whole new directions, they filter them through their own unique skill set and come up with things I would never have thought of. I always leave these workshops completely amazed at the beauty of the work that's produced as well as buzzing with new ideas of my own. It highlights one of the things I have always believed: that creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum, it needs feeding and watering regularly and teaching does that for me.

 

Small, brave things

I started writing a post the other day only to realise I was beginning to write about a recent dentist appointment. I paused and thought to myself what's going on here? What am I not talking about?
I have a habit of disappearing from this space when life gets a bit crazy and I don't know how to process it. I don't like to come here and complain.

The thing is half of the people I work with are being made redundant. This is the direct result of a massive funding cut and the process behind it has been rumbling on for about two years now. To say it has begun to take its toll is an understatement. The people leaving have been my mentors and friends for the last seven years of my life. The resulting atmosphere in my place of employment is shocking. It's bad. There are arguments. Tears. We are all tired. The staff that are left are facing a massive restructure.

And all this means that i'm circling my life, questioning things, wondering what i'm doing. It is not comfortable. It is hard. Things have been the same for a long time. In July I will have been in my flat for three years. The flowers I planted in my garden are spreading, the delphiniums and poppies growing taller with each passing year. In happy moments I would say that it's been three years of healing and creating and unearthing myself from beneath layers and layers of crap. In these happy moments I would say I've been building a life. A real life. One where I don't need to make myself small. One where I can be myself. In bleaker moments I would say I have built a fortress. With armoured guards and a high city wall. I would say I have been hiding. Hiding from people. Hiding from the world. Hiding from my potential. I know this voice in my head is not to be trusted, it's the small, scared part of me trying to keep me safe.

These thoughts have been rolling around my head since before Christmas and my first response was a typically dramatic one: I need to quit my job! I need to move somewhere new! I need to get out of this small town!

But of course the problem isn't where I live or what I do. It's how I approach my life. I'm sick of being someone that things happen to. I want to feel like i'm creating the life I want. I want to be awake.

So, being someone naturally inclined to making plans and taking practical measures to fix things, I have drawn up a list. It is called Rachel's Awesome List Of Small, Brave Things To Do In 2013 None Of Which Involve Massive Lifestyle Changes Or The Dramatic Quitting Of Ones Job. I wrote it down three weeks ago and here it is, unedited, exactly as my brain spewed it out.

1) Get the tattoo. Seriously woman, stop procrastinating and just do it.
2) Go to a retreat, specifically this one in October.
3) Travel somewhere by myself, even if it's just to Birmingham shopping.
4) Take an e-course. One for me. So, not Manual Handling, Safe Use of Display Screen Equipment or Health and Safety in the Office. I have taken all of those e-courses this year and they don't count.
5) Blog more often. Once a week. Don't censor yourself.
6) Find the most amazing vintage leather jacket.
7) Read more. Which ironically means I have to give up the book club.
8) Eat fruit and veg that's in season.
9) Flirt Goddammit.
10) Paint the living room white.
11) During the summer, when it's hot, take blankets outside in the evening. Eat outside. Light candles.
12) Invite people over for dinner more often.
13) Stop freaking out about friending people on Facebook. It's no biggie.
14) Start plotting out the novel. Do it my own way. This can include images, maps, poems. The linear way clearly isn't working.
15) Dream and write it down.
16) Buy some really cool jewellery from Etsy.

So there we have. My manifesto for this year. I've started researching number one. Number two is booked. I will do number three on Thursday. I have a week off work and plans to buy a tin of paint and I am beginning to lower the drawbridge.