In the Interim

Hello, my friend.

It has been a very long time. I used to share a lot about what I was learning and experiencing. It was compulsive. And I loved sharing my life with you like that.

But then things changed very quickly. I welcomed my son to the world, and discovered that I was woefully unprepared in every sense to be a parent. It took me a long time to get my feet back under me. There was a deep depression. There was therapy. There were friends. And there was, equally instrumental, a growing creative practice.

It started with stamps…if you can believe it. Cardmaking kits. Then watercolors. And that's where I got in deep. Although a lifelong art enthusiast, I discovered for the first time what it meant to enjoy process, and play for play's sake. I was watching a lot of YouTube videos, and so I had a lot of influences, but it's the early videos of Peter Draws (exhibit A) that were so astoundingly strange, and honest, and oddly philosophical that really encouraged me to keep going.

And now I sit here surrounded quite literally by watercolor paints, snips of embroidery thread that I haven't put away from my latest project, scissors and recycled paper I used as a template for a little bit of wool felting I'm doing (in preparation for more embroidery), dirty water cups, thousands of seed beads, other artist's works, to-do lists, and crystals I've been meaning to turn into jewelry. Honestly, I couldn't be happier in this little chaotic corner.

So that's a stretch. I've been turning over and over in my brain the idea of selling off some art supplies, or perhaps giving them away - the ones that belong to personal dead ends.

Papermaking. Linoprinting / Stamp carving. Those two avenues I've discovered are not for me.

Not in the way that painting and embroidery are. The supplies are taking up space. I'm ready to pull the things I love into even stronger, squeezier embraces, and gently let go of the things that hang around like lonely ghosts.

Speaking of ghosts, my mother passed away in the infamous year of 2020. So did my grandfather. My mother died just 12 days before my grandfather - that he had to attend his daughter’s virtual wake just days before he too would pass on is proof of something. I'm not sure quite what.

And it's now February of 2021, and I am often ok. Last year was an absolute reckoning as my brother and I dealt with our mother's sudden illness, brief recovery, fragile hope, long decline, and death, and then (and now) with the reconciling of two estates that in a kinder world would have been passed consolidated instead of falling simultaneously into our laps. I don't bring this up for want of sympathy. Maybe I bring it up as a little bit of a warning.

I want to talk about her. It's how I'm choosing to heal. And I'd be a liar if I said it hasn't, and isn't still, making a huge impact on the art I want to create and the choices I make every day.

I hope the forewarning doesn't scare you off. And if it doesn't, I'll send another letter soon.