2012/2013

I love the feeling of a bright shiny day with no mistakes in it yet, so a new year ought to feel the same. I think it doesn’t, and not in a good way 😉 because I make exactly the mistake I hate most! Dragging the past into it! A-ha!

So instead of doing a new year evaluation, I’m going to try doing it on new year’s eve…

What worked:

moving house to a flat, which I have arranged as a bedsit, so on the worst pain/fatigue days, I am able to manage to get the ten steps to the kettle and toaster, and even another five to the microwave…

moving to a place with a garden which I can play in, but don’t have to be responsible for, which Nonie-puss  and I both enjoy immensely, me for art and fresh air and quiet centering, her for climbing trees, hiding in laurel, sitting on bins and looking abandoned when I’m out…(thanks for photo, Keith!)

labelling the SABLE (stash acquired beyond life expectancy!) so I can find things, most of the time, anyway, the gold foil fabric still eludes me…hmmm…

accepting I need a variety of projects on hand, because the different fibro-effects make it hard to do the same thing two days running, or for longer than half an hour, without acquiring aches and pains that will make life much harder, sigh…

 

 

the blog 😉 thanks y’all! acquiring followers in spite of posting challenging stuff in with the art, craft, garden and cat  has boosted my morale!

the art class! definitely a good impulse, very tiring, but definitely lifted me over the fear of broken hands after the awful fall

filmmaking! a tad grandiose for the shorts I have made, but  if my eyes are ok, I can often still edit (love LOVE picasa editing suite and windows moviemaker) and being able to be creative helps me keep a positive attitude overall, and this slots into a hard place, when my hands hurt too much to make, and it’s hard to stand/move/talk. A few minutes editing is hard but manageable, painwise, but has a huge payoff, moodwise…

 

 

finishing the quilts for the chiropractor, I’m a bit worried they haven’t understood the cleaning instructions, but…once the gift is handed over, it’s gone 😉

There are things that didn’t work, energy spent the wrong way, risks that didn’t pay off, but as the wonderful Neil Gaiman said in a New Year’s message a couple of years ago, making mistakes is the only way to make sure you’re trying enough new or risky things, so….that’s ok…

Less ok is the doctor in Sneinton prescribing tablets I didn’t want, that I had a very bad allergic reaction to, to the point I thought I was going to die of a heart attack on moving day, because they sent my blood pressure all over the place, and then refusing to register the reaction, and then wanting to try a new medication with side affects of kidney and liver failure…omg,omg…I am now with a much better practice, who told me I didn’t need the meds in the first place…first do no harm, doctors!

Also in August, falling onto my hands and knees after banging my head off a wall…then rolling and hitting the back of my head on a brick…oh my! I’ve always been accident prone, but I surpassed myself that day…but the ambulance guys were great, and my friends really rallied round and although I still have pain and bruising from all the injuries, I didn’t break anything (or die, obviously, though as I fell I thought I would break my neck, horrible) so very lucky! Lying there thinking Nonie (the cause of it all!) was going to jump off the wall onto my hands was the worst bit overall, I could see her thinking, mmm, nice soft landing… 😉

I am finally getting clear of my overdraft, moving twice in 12 months is expensive, and to do this while  spending more on help – having an organic vegetable box (Abel and Cole are lovely!) and bargain goods from Approved Foods delivered (their organic sell offs are great, I got loads of sprouting seeds, alfalfa and radish are my favourite, for 50p a packet! Seaweed crisps anyone? And the cous cous and tinned fruit and juices are great for tired days and not having to carry them or catfood is brilliant) and a home help on a weekly basis, while maintaining therapy…I may be useless at juggling beanbags or people, but money and budgets, both my grandmothers would be really proud…once they’d finished scolding me for needing an overdraft!

I have  bought an external hard drive and backed up everything, so now I just need to add new projects to it. I bought a new hoover too, so self care has actually shot up this year 😉

I’ve started the Berceli trauma release exercises, the fibromyalgia means I can only do 2 of the sets, but hopefully this will improve and be effective. I’m struggling against a great deal of inertia, discussing it with my therapist, we think it’s because over the last 22 years I have tried so many techniques to help PTSD, and lots have helped, but some have been awful, and either way, the raising of hopes is hard to live with…

So, like everyone else with fatigue issues, I am hoping for more energy in 2013, being clearsighted and astute in my spending of energy spoons, with a good balance overall. I really hope the benefit changes are amended, the new assessments are even more like the Spanish Inquisition and knowing that my adrenalin levels going up will make my health worse adds a Machiavellian twist to it all…

Which brings me back to this blog, and why I started it, and how it helps me…

According to my WordPress annual report, in 10 months, I’ve written 77 posts, with 427 photos…and this is the only form of journal I’ve ever kept that I enjoy re-reading the text of, I do look back at my collage/artjournals, but gave up keeping personal growth diaries a long time ago. It has become a place to think through things and respond to world events, but mostly it is as I thought, a place to cherish creativity and a positive attitude:

Chinese proverb: keep a green tree in your heart, and maybe the singing bird will come

lighting candles

better to light a candle than to curse the darkness

I am so sad about the situation for women in India and the 2 deaths this week due to rape, 1 woman from her physical injuries, 1 from the impossibility of living with the crime being ignored, and worse yet, being told by the police to marry her rapist….that is murderous to your self esteem…not suicide, but murder by all those involved….

We are all losing when the world is so full of violence, when there is so little hope for justice that a victim kills themself in despair. It happens everywhere, a friend’s cousin killed herself a few years ago, a friend of mine killed herself 20 years ago, believing she could never recover from the damage of being incested in her childhood.

I was so angry….and so determined to never give in myself, to let ‘them’ win. I can understand not being able to white knuckle through another long, long night of flashbacks and intrusive thoughts and feelings, but it hurts every time I hear another victim has lost the battle.

When people ask me what has helped me survive, I am always clear, there are positive and negative qualities that have helped me get this far. One of the negatives is pride/obstinacy. I will not go under just because it would suit the perpetrators, the government and all the people who resent paying national insurance contributions to support people like me who are on the sick with post traumatic conditions like agoraphobia, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue conditions or physical injuries from being attacked. People forget that being attacked has both sides, most of my friends are very attuned to my agoraphobia, but very few realise the issues with my back stem from child abuse. How hard to tell people that, and yet, if  we the survivors do not share how hard it has and can be, how amazing the small daily joys after great sadness, fear and pain, how will the victims know it is survivable? That the darkest time passes, the longest winter thaws…One of the reasons I miss my husband so much is that the simple act of holding his hand and smiling reminded me how far I had come, to be able to trust again, to be loving without fear (by my standards…I really shocked him once being honest about how much I trusted him, ie the most of anyone, perhaps 80%? This is an enormous amount for someone with my history, but as a hopeless romantic, he assumed he could win 100% of my trust…perhaps with more time, he could have, but to me, that much was already a miracle.)

Is the cup half full or half empty?

For me, it’s always half full…I get very impatient round people who resist the positive, perhaps the fear that I will catch their negativity, and go under. I always want to remember the sunshine, the sea, the sky, making jokes, making gardens, being in love and the simplest tiny pleasures, clean sheets and wool socks and fresh coffee and another day with no mistakes or mis- steps yet, all fresh and shiny and clean, ready to make art in 😉

The pain has to be felt, the therapy has to be worked, but all the way through, with the understanding that life will be worth living again, because humans are capable of great healing, for ourselves and others, and terrible as these latest crimes are, for the first time, laws to protect women are being discussed in India. We must light the candles, even with tears streaming down, because the first message to share is that we value ourselves, we are all worth a world with respect for all, with joy and laughter and safety as a baseline.

There are hundreds and thousands of tiny reasons to stay alive, and each one needs to be another strand in the blanket keeping you warm on the coldest night, one dancer in a huge crowd, moving for joy, one tiny light in a host, like the Chalice Well Garden all lit up at night with positive love and wishes and good energy…

halcyon days

Halcyon days are peaceful and golden, but not summery, as most people think, they are around the winter solstice, when the halcyon bird made her nest on the Aegean Sea, and the waves calmed…

I had a lovely restful couple of days, and then woke up in such a sunny mood today, a real bonus (I’ll spare you the photo of heavy rain from pearl grey skies!) with a feast of satisfying brusho, roller/ pressprint and chinese script pages prepared for some journals.

I got as far as tearing the last photographic pages from some broken books so the remnants could go to recycling and then I cut interesting shapes for my collage stash and making more pages… so my collage prep shelves have new toyboxes, very pleasing…

the middle stack are all new, candles, buddhas, gardening and organic ( that’s things like woodgrain and garlic bulbs)

yes the stack on the left does include nuns! i got a book in a charity shop of old photos of ‘nuns having fun’ and have used lots of the images making birthday cards, nuns hula-hooping, on rollercoasters, sneaking a cig…

and the proverbs from different countries are also amusing – this one is Greek :

no one can make a crab walk straight

-very true!

then there are upcycled chunks of quilt leftovers and machine embroidery samples from cards that didn’t sell, all manner of oddments can help make a page look interesting…

the next batch of eye candy should include some buttons and felt embellishments, depending on whether I keep working on this or switch back to the cones or the mixed media piece 😉

Wishing you all a happy, peaceful and CREATIVE 2013!

happy winter solstice!

To help lighten the darkest week, on Monday I had a yarntagging adventure 😉

Walking back from voting a few weeks ago, I noticed a derelict /neglected space with cast iron railings in front of it…perfect for receiving some return of the light decorations…

So, lots of freeform crochet and fingerknitting swags later, some fiddling with  little foil pie holders, and some lucky finds in the under-used box, and I had some components that were easy to hang, secure, remove and no hazard to children or wildlife.

Most of my motivation was to make some street art that invites peeps to non-consumerism, a random act of senseless beauty, and to hopefully give some easy ideas for decoration to the carers who wait nearby to pick up their children from infant and primary school, some of whom live in St Anns, a very deprived area of Nottingham…which sits right next to Mapperley, which has some of the largest/most expensive single family occupancy housing in the area…with big electric gates and scary alarm systems…

I had to make it easy and low energy, as it was, even with help I managed to put my collarbone out, sigh…a bit of me would have liked to be more perfectionist about the placing and silhouettes, maybe even make a message with the swags, but…. it was far more important to get the pretties up before I got too chilled and stiff to function!

Some passers-by were very encouraging, a Sikh cabby gave us a cheering thumbs up! A guy from equatorial Africa was a bit out of his depth, being new to the temperate zone and winters, but loved the colours, so much goodwill on both sides there…I went back next day to take photos in the sunshine and it’s nearly all still there, I will collect what remains on Saturday…

I wish you all a happy and creative festive period, celebrated or not as suits you!

As a happy daoist I will be making art and chilling out with some treats and offering support to peeps having a hard time fitting in the boxes other people want to put them in at this time of year…so I remind you all how perfectly you do the job of being you, and that that is all the world asks of you…breathe, relax, smile, be creative…and I will do the same!

warm winter day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three days before solstice is not when I expect to see funghi…

These were growing in the bark mulch keeping weeds down in a brick box planter next to a bus stop on Carlton Road…

But given how much more everything hurts when it is cold, I will stop looking this gift horse in the mouth and do a gentle shimmy to celebrate 😉

I had an extra visit to the chiropractor today, yelp I yelped, some mighty crunching in my neck after annoying my collarbone yesterday by tieing knots above my head…

but it was worth it!

Sneak preview of Friday’s post:

excuses, excuses

Would you move this cat to finish your mixed media tutorial?

yarntagging

I am playing with string at the centre of a great net…

enmeshed?

I hope not!

One of the lessons life has taught me about myself, and why I follow daoism and can’t manage buddhism, is that detachment is one of the hardest life skills for me.

Releasing the past is a great challenge for me, and I wanted to share a recent breakthrough on that with the person concerned…it had occurred to me that it might be helpful for him to know that I had got over my anger about what happened over twenty five years ago. (why yes, I am a slow learner, progress not perfection peeps!) Anyway, no good deed goes unpunished, some cynic somewhere said, and I got a guarded reply, which didn’t allow me to share my insight on how young we were, and how that affected the situation…sigh…as a buddhist, out would come the non-attachment sutras and meditations. As a daoist, I took my attention elsewhere…and had such a surprise!

I googled yarntagging, and started scrolling through the images…only to find 18 photos from my blog!

And the universe is soooooooo laughing at me!

Cos NOT ONE of them was of yarntagging!

NO!

I’m guessing here, but I think cos I have yarntagging in my tagcloud, even though the posts are not about that, the image would be enmeshed that way… 😉

I was feeling my way towards being more confident about an..ahem..adventure with yarn scheduled for next week, and this has given me a such an incentive to do well! I want to be on that page for yarntagging! Forget perfection, forget non-attachment, I want to have some relevance/significance/recognition! Oh, I am so laughing! Who knew I had a little glory hound wanting out of her kennel?

So, some disentangling to do here 😉 but at least it is me working on me, and unlike to upset anyone else…

Meanwhile, yarntagging:

uplifting upcycling: yarn swags

These are balls of yarn wound from the skip cones, and some have been wound into solstice/xmas colours for fingerknitting/crochet chaining non-plastic tinsel swags.

If you are interested, Knit Nottingham are very kindly going to sell them to fundraise for Action Village India, my favourite charity. One of their Gandhi Memorial projects supports young girls learning spinning and textile skills. Women and girls can suffer terribly in India, and this is one of the ways to ensure a girl is treated with respect, by teaching her skills/a trade so that she can support herself, which means she is treated with far greater respect by her husband and in-laws, and within her own family.

For more on the horrendous injustices to women in India, please read:

http://genderbytes.wordpress.com/

Rita Banerji is amazing in her tireless efforts to have gendercide recognised by the United Nations, if you are on Facebook, please sign their petition.

If you are interested in the wonderful work Action Village India do, please go to their website:

Home

I first heard about them through a leaflet in Organic Gardening magazine, and sent them £20, which funded a place for a year on a self-sufficiency through organic gardening project in Trivandrum, Kerala. Details like the project worker visiting villages by bicycle appealed to me so much that I ended up raising £2,000 over the next few years, and only the fibromyalgia stopped me having stalls of baked goods and crafts for them…The ‘nothing is ever wasted’ exhibition in 2008 raised nearly £350 for them… these are not huge amounts, but because of how the charity works with its Indian partners, there is very little waste, and costs are kept very low, so that money went a long way 😉

If you are interested in the upcycled yarns, Knit Nottingham have some green, red, gold or white mixes to make xmas/yule swags, or ice blue and purple for solstice. And some other colourways for scarves, slipper socks etc., I’ve also slipped some xmas and frost fairy crafting and cardmaking packs in too, they’re £3/£5/£7 for over 45 items, including a packet of beads, xmas embossed fabrics, machine cords, some card blanks…the yarns are 2pence per gram, so 125g = £2.50 and will make a pair of bedsocks/slippersocks (but sew on your own soles)

http://www.knitnottingham.co.uk/

What is a swag? A long chained piece of yarn, fabric or greenery used to decorate staircases, trees, doors etc. Basically, anywhere you would put tinsel, you can put these.

If you have crafty children to amuse, this fingerknitting is really simple:

Make a large loop (big enough to get thumb and finger through) and secure it with a simple knot.

Put thumb and finger through the loop and pull another loop of yarn through.

Pull a loop through that loop….basically make a chain, and then chain the chain, by repeating what you did, with the first loop tied from the now chained yarn. Tie your ends firmly and leave enough yarn to tie the swag to a banister/branch etc.,

If you use eyelash yarn, it will look very like tinsel, if you use multi-strand yarn, it will look both pretty and very unusual. It is washable, re-usable, and non plastic based, if you want natural decorations that avoid petro-chemicals. Add holly, ivy and pine cones for a traditional swag, crochet granny squares as decorations or knit balls with stripes or spots, use that stash up!

picasa posterize

Ooh, the nice peeps at picasa have made me very happy!

Picasa is free, btw, just google it …

I cannot sing the praises of picasa enough, I am able to use their editing options so easily to reclaim the thing I saw from the photo I took! 😉 So many thanks to Jazz for downloading it and opening a door into possibility for me…anyway, in addition to the excellent  ‘repair’ options, there are many ‘playtime’ possibilities, and today I got round to playing with the posterize option, oh such fun!

So the first three are from full to hardly on fade; the next two are with HDR added, mmm, and another effect whose name I forget, but near the HDR, and then finally, my favourite image…

I have always loved wood cut and lino, but not been very good at them, and now haven’t the wrist strength (and am probably too accident prone anyway!) so being able to get an effect like this is extremely pleasing  to me, though I do wonder how the super skilled block cutters feel…

These are balls of yarn wound from the skip cones, more have been sorted out to give to a refugee friend and some have been wound into solstice/xmas colours for fingerknitting/crochet chaining non-plastic tinsel swags.

out of the blue

Sometimes I need artmaking to feel  positive and I am so lucky that I can immerse myself in making. When I checked in on one of my favourite photography blogs yesterday, at first I was really upset in a deep place, but later I NEEDED to make, like needing to drink water on a hot day.

I really love Steve McCurry’s work, he has taken some of the most sensitive, inspiring portraits and images I have ever seen. So it was very upsetting to find he feels “honoured” to have the Pirelli calendar assignment this year. He has taken photographs of some leading women politicians and activists for the calendar, which is historically a glamour shoot, and along with page 3, the most widely seen pornography…he has photographed a Brazilian ambassador for a sister organisation to Save the Children in a setting like a red light district, dressed in a cut away dress and corset (child prostitution anyone?) and Summer Rain Oakes, eco optimist in traditional glamour, parted lips, hands to breast pose, Adriana Lima from Bill Clinton’s Haiti support programme in a beautiful shot showing her pregnant belly, but, leaning on a wall, again, is she on the street, homeless/a prostitute?…and lots of people are going to say, well they agreed to do it to raise awareness of their cause, what’s the problem?

No one asks Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Al Gore, any male politician they respect to pose like a hooker to promote a good cause.

Why is it appropriate to ask a woman?

The use of glamour models to sell cars should surely be on its way out, and my feeling is, that Pirelli has been very clever with this, they have muddied the waters beautifully. How petty to object, when it is for a good cause, and Calendar Girls did the same thing. Except they didn’t?  Those poses were chosen by the women and had a lot of humour in them, and all the spinoffs since remain humorous. This is still a glamour shoot, but using women who are powerful and efficacious in the world in images of women as helpless and disempowered, objects of the male gaze. Cherise asked me for some links for the female gaze on Saturday, to do with her art course, and I obliged 😉 and this got us into a discussion of male/female gaze and the power levels behind each, the support each has within consumerist society. Any image that objectifies, has support from global consumerism, because it fits the pattern of creating an emotion that is uncomfortable and can be assuaged by buying comfort in an unsatisfying and therefore endless series of transactions. The idea that emotions should be dealt with appropriately by taking action that genuinely addresses them, and creating emotional self-sufficiency and wellbeing, and a positive ripple of empowerment out into the world…now that closes sweatshops and saves resources and empties landfill and is positively dangerous! So no agreement from consumerism for positive images of genuine loving intimacy (remember the HIVpositive love series?) or natural beauty and serenity…

So I guess that made the shock greater on Sunday seeing the Pirelli images on Steve McCurry’s blog. He is an empowering photographer, who normally grants subjecthood to the people in his images. Sonia Braga is the only activist who has been granted a positive, empowered and empowering image, and I can’t help wondering if this is because she is older and has more confidence in her ability to negotiate, or if she is more media savvy and sees that as a children’s rights activist, a salacious image would be totally inappropriate.

I use the word shock, and it was, but I really felt wounded, betrayed in my trust. I wanted to phone a friend, but realised I felt anxious, because the confidence with which McCurry expects this to be seen as a positive thing had hurt my sense of how that would be received, and that’s how insidious this stuff is…I felt isolated and unwilling to expose how vulnerable it had made me feel. Having done a lot of campaigning for Off the Shelf, a feminists against pornography campaign in the 80s, I know this stuff can lead into freedom of speech issues in seconds and end up causing a load of hassle.  Instead, I muddled through some craft tasks and thought out some more details of the act of senseless beauty I want to commit 😉 and then worked on covering cones with brusho treated paper, creating components for whispering wall, an installation about the stories of the silenced. And then I woke up feeling ready to share what I feel, because, making has given me my backbone, my place to stand in the world again, not necessarily the confidence that people will agree with me, but the feeling that I don’t need them to agree with me.

I left a comment and if you feel like seeing for yourself, here is the place, the link won’t work, not sure if they have blocked me :

http://stevemccurry.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/2013-pirelli-calendar-the-cal/

my comment querying the mixed messages implicit in using the women activists has not been allowed – I promise it was very polite, the most negative word I used was “confusing” as I really wanted it published.

On a positive note, writing this has helped lighten my mood, but mostly what helped was working on the scrolls for whispering wall. Until I had played with glue and papers, I felt too angry and hurt, wounded inside, to risk writing a post.