Each person has something to teach us

Red Oak Leaves
October 2008

"People do not arrive in our lives by mistake, even when we did not choose them to be in our lives. It is best to learn the lessons about ourselves and life that we can learn from this person. That we do not like this kind of person is not the lesson. This person is in our life as a teacher...to illuminate an area where we struggle and where we can grow."
-Lynn Fitz-Hugl, Tip#10 from 21 Tips on Personal Peacemaking

A link to the article 21 Tips on Personal Peacemaking arrived in my e-mailbox this morning from a friend who has struggled through a very difficult divorce over the past year. As I read through the article, the tip which I have quoted here really seemed to speak to me. It underlines the human connection that exists in all our relationships, including the troublesome ones, and affirms that growth and healing are possible outcomes even when we find ourselves at odds with another person. I also felt happy that a sense of resolve was returning to the life of someone I care about and who has had a long, rough year.

Some day we'll all have perfect wings

"you can use pain to self-destruct or reconstruct."
-Ellen Goodman, journalist [paraphrased]

Things stood still for several weeks, after my younger brother died unexpectedly, on July 21, of unexplained heart failure, he was thirty-eight years old. His home was a short walk from ours, my daughters adored him, and my husband and he were friends. Over the past month we've taken time to grieve, to think about my brother's life, to remember the person that he was, and to say good-bye. Some moments, and some days are better than others as life slowly returns to some kind of 'normal'. Part of me is 'dealing with it' because I have to go around and get things done. Another part is still struggling and to some extent, remains in denial about what happened. I think a part of our brain keeps the person alive in our mind, stubbornly refusing to let go. Eventually I suppose it sinks in.

At the same time, something seems to have shifted for me in my thinking about how I want to go forward with my life. It's something subtle, because I can't really put my finger on what it is, and I often feel I'm in a state of suspended animation waiting for some additional insight to get me moving in a forward direction again. A close friend whose brother is dying of lung cancer, wrote to me and said, "when you lose a part of yourself, you can simply never be whole again. That is what we have to live with." Sometimes, life seems so meaningless, other times so beautiful, a gift. Basically, cognitive dissonance reigns.

For now, I have decided to slow the pace of my activities way down and leave lots of open, still space in my life, I cannot really do otherwise. I have decided to stop blogging except that I will continue to post photos of work in progress, and finished pieces. I'll also post quotes that are meaningful to me, related to creativity and personal growth. This is the most useful way that I know of to keep track of what I am doing, and document my creative journey.

The title of this blog post is a line from a song called 'Don't laugh at me' written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin. Country singer Mark Wills recorded it, as did folk singers Peter Paul and Mary. Peter Yarrow has made it the foundation song for the Don't Laugh at Me Program whose mission it is to stop bullying in schools. The song reminds me of my brother, who was a childhood survivor of cancer and was often teased in school because he was very sick for many years and developed a disability due to the aggressive nature of his cancer treatment. You can listen to the song here. Thank you to Christine Kane for introducing it to me.

Quilting as a metaphor

"[In] my 'Secret Garden' series [link]...I take as a starting point, old memories of gardens of my childhood with their combination of water paths and foliage. This also becomes a metaphor for deeply embedded old memories that rise unbidden in our consciousness; sometimes clear and structured, sometimes vague and formless. Quilt-making with its multiple layers seems an ideal medium for exploring these ideas." - Rosalie Dace

I have an opportunity to take a one week class with Rosalie Dace who is teaching at Quilting by the Lake this year. I have looked at her work on line [link][link] and read about her on a handful of websites and blogs. Her quilts are absolutely sumptuous and appeal to me directly. As well, she appears to be a process person; no patterns or kits provided. On her website she states that her interest is in helping students to bring out what is personal to them in their work, and to encourage them to stretch beyond what they think is possible for them. Great! I am hesitating to proceed though, because I attended a class at the same conference last year and had a very mixed experience, largely because the class I took was poorly organized and, I thought, did not deliver what had been advertised. I would hate to set aside this kind of time and financial resource again for a repeat experience. However, all things in life present certain risk, along with the concomitant possibility of benefit or great gain. So, I'll ponder on it for a few more days and think about the benefits that this experience has to offer. It has long been personal challenge for me to let go of preconceived expectations about how things should or shouldn't be, a challenge which requires a heightened trust in life and in people, and a willingness to allow things to unfold as they may.

Ways to simplify your life with kids: Tip #25

25 Ways to simplify your life with kids was published yesterday by Leo Babauta over at zenhabits. It's a great list and not just for parents. I thought Tip #25 should be way closer to the top of the list:

Focus on doing, not on spending...Spend quality time together, doing stuff that doesn’t cost money.

Good idea.

The creative habit

"It's vital to establish some rituals -- automatic but decisive patterns of behavior -- at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way...Thinking of it as a ritual has a transforming effect on the activity. Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this?"

"In the end, there is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they impel you to get started." -Twyla Tharp, The creative habit, Learn it and use it for life

This book has got me thinking about the physical part of creating a body of work. By this I don't mean doing the work. I mean placing yourself in time and space, on a regular basis, in a way that will optimize the probability of getting something done. In a recent post I wrote about setting some goals for my quilt making over the next two years. One of my goals is to set aside a certain amount of time each week to work. My big push for the next year will be to develop a creative habit. Since I am a morning person this would logically mean working in the morning. I think it would look something like this:

• 5-7 AM: Get up and do one hour of back strengthening exercises and Pilates on the ball.
• Eat breakfast
• Work. This means creative work e.g., designing, dyeing, piecing, or quilting, nothing else. Can probably work for up to four hours depending on what time I get started. Break for lunch.
  

I could afford to do this three weekdays a week, and one weekend day. It would mean paying someone to play with my kids between 8:00 AM (when my husband leaves for work) and lunchtime, three weekday mornings a week. Then, getting my husband to commit to giving me one weekend morning each week.

In The creative habit, Tharp includes exercises throughout the book. In one exercise she gives a list of questions which are to be answered, quickly and instinctively in order to provide a kind of self-appraisal to the reader of her creative identity, that is, what kind of creative work is the reader most compelled to make, what point of reference is she most inclined to take, from what distance, and so forth. One of the questions was: "What is your ideal creative activity?" For me, two answers came to mind simultaneously: -- creating an image and -- creating a functional object. It occurred to me that here is one of the core reasons that I love to make quilts: because they encompass both of these creative activities. Wish me luck instilling a creative habit.