I have been pondering my time in my studio. Wondering when inspiration will make a come back. Wondering why I can't seem to focus: wandering from computer to painting table to the piles of beads on my shelf, looking at my notebooks full of sketches and ideas. Starting something and then putting it down and picking something else up, and wandering back out into the kitchen, the living room, or out to the garden.
Yesterday I took out a book I bought as a present to myself around christmas time. It is called Foolsgold by Susan Woolridge .:. she also wrote an old favourite that many of you may know Poem Crazy. Instead of doing the studio/house wander, I took myself outside into a sunny day, and sat beneath a tree and began reading. She grabbed me immediately. In the third essay, or chapter, called Moving the Dishes, she brought me where I didn't know I needed to go.
I have so much Stuff. I have art supplies and paper, and canvas and boxes of found objects - man made and organic - I have books, bought for projects that didn't end up happening the way I had planned them, and books to learn a new skill. I have tools, and photos, and little odds and ends: stamps, letters, stones, shells, broken jewelery, picture frames, yarn, journals, magazines and sketch pads, and on and on and on. But where do I start something new when all around me, crowding my studio are bits and pieces from old projects, some that were used, some that I got because they charmed me, or because they made me feel something that perhaps one day I would translate into an art piece, or some writing, some "thing" might be born from this other thing.
Start new. Start clean.
"Moving the dishes, clean and empty, helped me sense that nourishment would come. Tea, wine, soups, a new way of being. The dishes, hidden in cupboards, were an invitation. For a time I needed emptiness to make room for a new start. How can the mysterious, redemptive creative force enter (and where does it come from anyhow?) when our houses or ourselves are crammed, busy, overfull? We need to let go of everything that gets in the way of what needs to enter." -Susan Woolridge
She asks me to notice what is "overfull in my world right now. Bookshelves? Your head?" Check. Yup. Okay. Some cleaning out needs to happen. So I spent my Sunday weeding out what I have not even looked at in a year or more. What things I moved with us when we moved into this house. Things that I have been given by friends because they thought I could use it in one of my shadow boxes, and I kept these things only because they were gifts from people I love. Paper. I have so much paper. Blank paper .:. by the ream, in boxes, in notebooks and journals. Articles torn out because they sparked an idea. Images from a magazine that I loved and wanted to remember.
Now the work remains to sort what I can really use, recycle the rest, and start the picture journals that I used to keep when I was in art school. Wire bound sketch pads filled with torn out pictures and words, accompanied my my own sketches and my own words. I used to call them My Books of Gems, and I named each one for a different stone .:. Amethyst .:. Peridot .:. Saphhire .:. kind of as I went, whichever stone moved me as I started to fill a new book. This will be good work, it will be work that will center me, work that will help me to remember who I am and what I do in my studio, work that will relieve the clutter and give me space to think and dream and breathe.
Making room for something new. That's all I really needed to do. Such a simple idea, and the last idea I would have thought of. This year has started all dark and cloudy, not only outside, but inside my heart and my mind. And so I begin the cleaning, making room for all that wants to make it's way in. I have boxes on the floor labeled "NO" "MAYBE" and definitely "YES"; I am filling them and will be carting things away .:. books donated to the library, art supplies and paper to the local elementary school art dept., many items to goodwill, and probably a few to the dump. Making room for all the things I don't know yet, all the things that have yet to enter.
For more Sacred Life Sunday, go here.
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