Oh it feels so good right now to be throwing pots!! My groove get a bit derailed last week and it took quite a while to get back to my centered space...and I watched it get me down--really down! I felt so out of whack, and couldn't do anything about it. Finally home alone yesterday--guests gone, the boys out at the bar for football and I got some uninterrupted studio time--*sigh* heaven! I'm realizing just how much my inner compass is always where I need to pay attention. The last week was challenging, at best, to stay focused. (which is never easy for me...) several different things got me out of my normal groove and I felt a bit lost all week, which culminated into some serious anxiety on Saturday. Working at home and balancing it all is generally a pretty enjoyable dance most of the time. I tend to flow thru my workdays from morning to evening, sitting at the computer, moving over to the wheel, the kitchen, the garden, back to the wheel, the kiln, packing boxes, the computer, the post office...etc I wonder how other work at home creative folks handle lifes interruptions... I wish I was better at it, and didn't get so disturbed by the monkey wrenches...I guess it's because, as my good friend P said, my home is my sacred creative space and I'm the queen here...hmmm.
Those of you familiar with this blog know that I don't get too personal in here, so brace yourselves...I wrote most of this post a few days ago and have been hesitant to post it, maybe it's a bit too revealing of my inner workings, maybe it's self centered silliness, maybe someone will find it of interest and of value. I normally reserve this sort of material for my private journal, but it is such a good example of what I call my spiritual life and what guides me, weaving my inner and outer worlds together...so my hesitance to post it just now again this morning got another synchronistic jolt that has pushed me to publish it...
Monday: I dreamt I birthed a baby last night. I've often dreamt of being pregnant, but never of the actual birth. This was a quite a vivid dream, in which I was the young wife of a weathy Arab man who was the youngest son of three in his family. His two older brothers had long been married and their wives had birthed several children and now I was the laboring to bring the next child into an already large family. My two sisters-in-law wanted nothing to do with me as I was a new young wife competing for territory and power, so I was content to keep to myself and my beloved husband. In the dream I was aware that my husband and I posessed a pleasant and sweetly comforting relationship that made me very happy despite petty jealousies that surrounded us in the large family home. As my time drew near, I seemed to have been abandoned by the other women in the household and I found a quiet room in the house and decided to simply squat down to birth my child. I waited and waited thru the contractions until the midwife declared I was already dilated 12 cm--(ha! more than ready!) and I (being somewhat lucid in this dream) remembered somewhere learning that the baby can birth himself and I should just follow my body's natural direction. Since there were no other women telling me what to do I did not feel the need to push, instead, I allowed the gentle, firm force of the contractions to push the baby. It was rather intense, but with very little discomfort, and fairly quickly he emerged from me sliding smoothly out of my body and into my hands and I just held him there staring down at his slippery warm body. He slowly opened his eyes, locked onto me with his gaze and smiled at me. Now my memory of this dream is still very clear, and I can so clearly see and feel this tiny baby boy I held in my hands, his face beaming up at me. The image is burned in my consciousness. I love it when I have a captivating dream like this that is rich in all sorts of ways, and I spend a lot of time in the subsequent days recapping the dream in my head and ruminating on the symbolism in my life, etc. This is one of those dreams, of course, and it will certainly leave a mark.
And the synchronicity thing today...which is somehow connected to everything else... I'm often noticing synchronicities in my life, and today it is the song 'Blackbird' from the Beatles. I was reading Sharilyn's blog to see what's new and she had made a lovely little compilation of bird related songs for her young daughter. She posted the playlist and I was reading thru the titles and one of them was 'Blackbird' from the Beatles, which among all the other lovely songs, didn't really make much of an impression. But then, not 10 minutes later, I was reading Kim's blog scrolling down thru the posts and just last week she had posted a video from Youtube of Crosby Stills and Nash performing their version of the song, 'Blackbird'. Funny huh? and I watched the video and kinda had a moment at the line, "All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arrive." So I've been thinking about this post for a couple of days, and wondering if this sort of thing happens to other people...and what they make of it, and maybe I'm a bit silly for finding these synchronicities so fascinating and letting myself get all excited when they happen. I do generally feel like the web of life is a deep and magical thing, completely non linear and when I get these syncronistic messages that usually serves as a reminder of that interconnectedness.
Now it is Wednesday, and, like I said, I've been wondering if maybe these episodes are meaninful only to me, and would be rather self indulgent to post them here... and then this morning while I was working on some bird vases, and listening to KCRW radio, and a snippet from this show with Paul Mc Cartney came on and Paul started to talk about writing the song 'Blackbird' and proceeded to play a little acoustic version of the piece. I was just floored. I decided I had to to share the story.
When these things happen I do get a sort of thrill and feel like there is some meaning here for me to decipher... but right now I'm just going to let that idea rest, and just enjoy feeling connected to the bigger picture.
Carl Andre's 'Eight Blocks and Stones' Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
“You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.” ~ richard bach
Somehow this quote calms me. It's like, 'oh really?! now I can relax and be my quirky self and stop worrying that I'm doing it all wrong and start enjoying life more.' Or maybe that was what happened when I turned 40. I wonder what it's gonna be like at 50....
yeah, I know. I've been working pretty hard the last coupla months...and I kinda hit a wall. Last week I didn't throw too many pots, and it was all I could do to keep up with my business correspondence and shipping. I kept wandering aimlessly around the house fretting about all I wasn't getting done, and finally, I sat down to work on a wholesale order for one of my local shops. I was throwing pots and Sedona got hit with an incredible storm...I just stayed at the wheel for a bit and the storm ramped it up a notch, so curiosity got the better of me and I went to go check it out. It was a raging and a hailing down something fierce....this picture does not convey the drama very well, but you can see the hailstones a bit. Well, it turns out that this was one of 'those' storms. And somehow our little neighborhood didn't really get hit too bad. Some parts of town flooded pretty bad, and two of the three shops that carry my work were filled with several inches of mud and had a lot of damage. Nobody got hurt, but cars were floating around in parking lots down by the creek at Tlaquepaque shops, causing some added mayhem and extra damage. This one was quite the doozy. Bruce and C and I went down Thursday night to help with some cleanup and then I spent some time down at the other shop cleaning up on Friday, so the owner could open up for the big weekend festival at Tlaquepaque. It all came off pretty well considering two feet of water, mud, debris and a Mini Cooper were floating thru there less than 48 hours earlier...
So I spent one entire day last week unloading the kiln and packing up the rest of my orders from the prior week. Something like 28 packages....Lots of little birdies..vases, mugs all flying off to various parts of the planet. I requested a pickup from our mail carrier and set the boxes out to be picked up. Normally mail comes around 9:30 am, so I made sure these were out there by 9. I had a Dr. appointment at 10:45, so I was sure that the packages would have been picked up long before I had to leave...they seemed so vulnerable just sitting there...awaiting their destiny: The carrier was late. At 9:45 I get a knock on my door. Thinking it's the carrier, I run to the door and open it. It's a salesman for a carpet cleaning company with a special offer. Now, we don't get too many door-to-door salespeople around here, and I'm always a little leery, but I figured, our carpets do need to be cleaned, so I wanted to hear about the offer... as we were talking, he said " well let's have a look" and just walked right on in the door. What was I gonna do? yell, "stay outside!" (actually, yes, I should have) So he's looking at the traffic patterns in my living room, I start to get squicked about the whole thing, and I wrap it up by telling him we couldn't possibly do this today, and he says they are only in our area today, and he took off. I watched him walk past our neighbor's house and meet up with his partner and they both walked on down the street. Now, I was raised in the city, and I do consider myself to be more cautious than most people here in my small town, and always tend to question myself and my suspicious nature as being a little over the top. We live in a place where most people don't lock their doors and folks do look out for one another. But I'm still a city girl at heart. And something about the whole thing seemed weird. (especially just barging right past me and coming into my living room) I know, I know.... So now my adrenaline is up and it's getting later. I need to leave to make it to my appointment, and the carrier hasn't shown up. I start to wonder if it's a bad idea to leave a great big pretty pile of my work sitting out on the front porch with potential criminals roaming my neighborhood. I walk out the front door and stand there in front of my pile of packages, and while I'm standing there a bashed up van drives by reeeeeeeallllly slowly and I notice it's the carpet cleaning guy and his partner. They just stare at me and my pile o' boxes as they cruise by... That's it, I'm freaked, I decide to move it all into the house and write a note to the carrier and head off to my appointment, figuring I'll have to take everything to the post office later. There was just no way I was going to be able to leave nearly $1000 worth of ware just sitting there with strange guys cruising around possibly casing the joint. I get it all back into the house and write a note to the carrier and then he shows up, just as I'm getting into my car. So I explain to him why the boxes aren't out there waiting, and he says, "Oh you could have just left them out here for me! don't worry, I would have just picked them up." And I want to punch him. I do realize that I had an inordinate amount of stress last week, and I logged in waaaaay too many hours working than I should have, so I guess my nerves were a bit more fried than normal. I do get very insecure about my worrying. I was raised by cautious people, who taught me to be on guard for danger at all times, then I moved to Sedona and spent several years surrounded by "it's all good!" "just relax, you'll make something bad happen by worrying" hippy types of folks who always seemed to belittle my cautiousness as uptight and not fun and freewheeling. So now I don't really know how to trust myself. Yes, I am cautious, that is who I am. I'm not a freewheeling girl who just goes with the flow...I tend to prefer structure and I do worry more than most and rarely is it justified. But this situation was with regard to my work, and actually it was no longer mine: buyers had already paid for it. I'm glad I didn't just drive off, I'm the one who needs to take care of things around here. Yes, the carrier was right, I probably could have left one or two packages out there on a normal day. But this wasn't a normal day.
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