Flotsam and Jetsam

I don't know about you, but I find that the creative energy can be sucked right out of you when life goes sideways. Like there's only room in the head for some flotsam and jetsam - no choice, take it or leave it - and it pushes everything else right out the ear. So you're left with maybe a book that you can climb into or various games of solitaire, the kind that you can get over involved with. I imagine if I had a teevee that I would be glued to it, anything to completely numb out and NOT THINK. Noise, distraction, meaningless repetitiveness.

The bench you see above is at Daughter's Place. I designed and knitted the cover for it back in August as the existing cover that was on it (a marvellous flea market find) was falling apart. The colours match her living room furniture.

I stayed with Daughter over the weekend and I kept staring at it. And then I took a picture of it. And then I thought: I have that old bench in my house, cover falling apart too. Maybe? And I took designing pen to paper and now I've started on another cover and the flotsam and jetsam can hardly breathe, I do believe they're choking.

Through the Doorway

I had all the symptoms of serious malaise. Exhausted (though I prefer the word enervated)coupled with a mild depression(I say mild because I've had a serious relationship with severe) with the "what's it all about Alfie"-ness of the situation just about doing my head in and feeling I was wearing a cloak of invisibility. I want to snap "who cares" at anyone who dares ask me how I am, but I'm better brought up than that so I resort to "i vant to be left alone" a la Garbo but without her money or her gorgeousness and with far more manners. I couldn't force myself out of it and I refuse to medicate.

I just hated leaving Toronto this time and all my good family/friends and lovely clients there. I spent some marvellous five hour lunches/dinners with some where we got caught up on all the doings.

I wouldn't trade living here for anything but I'd like to package up the dear ones and move them in here. So funk happened. A blue funk of loneliness and a lot of work and deadlines and the why-mes waiting around for me to convert them into why-not-mes.

And today is a biting sun-drenched indigo day on the bay and I awoke and got up at dawn. My dreams had been astonishing. Albeit about someone else (other facets of myself as I've learned). I was telling this other someone to "Suck and chew the marrow out of life."

A message obviously for me.

Early this morning, I walked through the shadowed doorway into sunlight and an astonishing lifting of spirits. I feel renewed, refreshed and ready to start some serious sucking and chewing.

Bring it on!

Purpose & Meaning

Picture taken a few minutes ago from my front deck of some of the many walkers on the beach today in this glorious weather.

It is nearing the end of the year as I write this. I am struck by how many friends out there are looking or searching for a purpose as the new year approaches.

Now, I am of the belief that the purpose will find us, often unexpectedly and it will always be a surprise.

Years ago, I was told by an old shaman to always look for the surprise, the gift, in every day. It will always be there. And how true her advice was.

Yesterday, there were a few. One was the movie "The King's Speech", a brilliant film, I highly recommend it. I had the thought when it was all over and I was left wanting more, that a defect in one's life, like a speech impediment, can be transformed into such a powerful metaphor: overcoming whatever obstacle - whether real of imagined - there is to one's maximizing one's life.

Over dinner, I was challenged, in the nicest possible way, by my two dear friends as to why I haven't moved on to another publisher with my inedita - my unpublished work. And I had to admit it was fear. Fear of another editor slashing and trashing. Fear of myself, really. I need to open that window wide and trust. Not so much that everything will be rosy with a new publisher, but that I am living my life to the fullest extent possible, come what may.

In other words, we will never know until we put it out there, will we?