A little window into my year

Transition.  That is definitely the word for the year.  My husband, son, and I have been in a fluctuating state of transition, settling, change, transition, settling,...you get the picture, for almost a full year.  I am a person that CRAVES change but HATES transition.  What's the difference you wonder?  To me, change means adventure, newness, excitement, while transition is all the gritty annoying, tiresome details that get you from where you are now to where you want to change to - it's utterly exhausting!

  (us-in a Madison, WI park, pic by rejoyphotography)

Last August, my husband, son, and I left our home town of Gainesville, FL, rented out our home, put our dogs into foster care (they stayed with friends and family), packed up all our stuff into a tiny trailer, and drove 1200 miles to Madison, WI.  We did it because we had found ourselves without inspiration and falling into a rut at home.  Between work, school, church, raising our son, taking care of household things, and family and friend gatherings, we were too busy or too tired to push ourselves past the "wouldnt it be amazing if we did (blank)?!" or "I have always dreamed about doing (blank)!"  We were tired of talking about our dreams and wanted to start working towards them.  We quickly realized that we couldnt do this in our comfortable routined environment.  We needed to be UNCOMFORTABLE, unroutined, and pushed outside of our comfort zone and familiar spaces.  We would have no choice but to change then, to push ourselves, find our next adventure as a family.

Here are our sweet no longer foster-cared dogs.  Bella on the Left, catching bugs, Fish on the Right, doing what he does best (digging and sleeping).


To do this we hooked up with a sort of discipleship/leadership mentoring program with a group called 24/7 Prayer, and so moved to Madison, WI to live, work, and learn in an intentional Christian community house.  They call it a Boiler Room.  We called it the Winnie House (cuz it was on Winnebago St)/ Dream Incubator.  (please follow the links to understand more about what we did there and who the group is).  It was an intense journey from start to finish, but in the end we left stronger and with a larger circle of friends and family than we began with.

(pic of the back of our Winnie House, in Madison, where we shared a 3b/1ba/900sq foot flat with another family with a child, and had 8 other house mates on the other floors!)

So now, this week in fact, we are moving BACK IN to our old home in Gainesville, FL.  We are reclaiming familiar space as our own again, but with new motivation, new skills, new focus to put reason and logic in its place and let our dreams rule our present.  For me, that is reclaiming myself as an artist and getting my creative business going.  And so now, I find myself at the start of a very new and exciting venture, the ball has been started rolling, I have to hold on to my faith that my dream is a choice worth fighting for and investing in, and just make the leap and see where I land.

(pic of our florida home, in great need of some TLC - and hedge clippers!)

That being said, one very important step for me in this process of reclaiming old space as new is to turn the 3rd bedroom in our house, that a year ago was just office/school study space, into my own creative studio space.  I am so excited about all the possibilities and have found myself dreaming up all kinds of colorful, creative, and inspiring things to add to it, to make it my own, to make it pure creative energy in there.  Right now its horrifically cluttered with all the extra stuff that we havnt unpacked yet, but I have a vision for attacking that room in the NAME OF GREAT ART, and clearing out by the end of next week.

(Pic of my soon-to-be workspace. Can you feel the potential?!)

As I am gathering ideas for the room, (I even got lost for over an hour looking at studio space photo groups on flickr - HUGE time suck - but SO MUCH FUN!), I cant stop thinking about one of my most favorite studio spaces that I have ever seen.  Its the home workspace of Teesha Moore, Art Journaler extrodinaire.  You have to check out her photos from this renovated attic space in her Oregon home.  It makes me feel giddy and inspired and just want to create a million things with all the supplies, notions, bits, and colors she has in that room.  My space wont be like that, but if I can even have a little of that magic she created in there, I would be ecstatic!

One thing I do know for sure, is that I want to gather art (or at least prints - lets be honest here, money is short these days) from different artists that inspire me and make me push my limits.  I have made a great start on this, I think.  This amazing little girl now adorns the front wall of my soon to be workspace and is supervising the current chaos.  She was created by Mindy of Tims Sally (you will have to endure many endorsements from me of her work- as her art is currently a HUGE fav of mine).  I adore this wall child and was so excited that Mindy let me bring her my home.  Hopefully soon, she will be joined by many new, just-as-lovely, and just-as-inspiring, friends from many more artists that I admire.  

I would ADORE to hear about your creative spaces!  Artists, writers, scrapbookers, all creative people: what is the most inspiring environment for you to work in?  Tell me why it inspires you.  What is it, or what is in it, that makes it so connecting for your creative energy? -Feel free to add links to pics of your space if you have them online - :)

Starting over, again...will I ever get this right?

Hello world. If you are here through my previous blog, welcome and I apologize for my chaos. I am working out the kinks in my own system and hope that you can follow along as I get it right. I am tweaking both my intention and focus behind this blog and felt a new address was warranted to help me transition and let go. Its been a year of struggle for me to find my motivation and momentum to propel me into my dreams, but I have finally built enough disdain for my own waste of time dreaming and doing nothing. I am tired of dreams and ready for life. real life. the messy, put myself out there and allow myself to be seen fully even when it makes me very vulnerable. so here goes... sometimes its just best to start over again.

I have been struggling to find myself today. such a lame excuse for laziness, i know, but still... its like a have a sock in my brain, dulling my senses, clogging my neural pathways, making words come more slowly and ideas crumble apart when they are only halfway created. I have a creative-void in my heart. an inattention to detail, a lost of interest in interesting things. Adulthood does it to me, fills me with socks that is. Could I just get lost back in my childhood, when I knew nothing of expectation, responsibility, deadlines. or judgment of talent. I am 31, nowhere near childhood these days. Stuck smack into adulthood, feeling so small and ill-prepared, today I am a mother, a wife, a home owner, a pet owner, a daughter to aging parents, a sister, a friend, a mentor, a grad student, and where in all of that do I get the gall to try to be an artist? I have been waiting for transformation, but the adulthood keeps shoving more dirty laundry at me to clean. My husband, my partner, is supportive, loving, sweet, and totally doesnt get the Me that is the Artist. He loves to watch me create something new and artsy, but in the end if I try to talk to him about it, he listens, nods, smiles and says "thats great, hun", then moves on. I show him prints from the latest mixed media artist that I just discovered. It moves me, inspires me, makes me want to freak out making gloriously chaotic creations, but he apologizes and says he just doesnt like that kind of stuff = my kind of stuff = a section of my soul that he loves but will never completely understand. So here I am now, trying out the internet for size on my body, will it produce people from the unseen closets in webspace that "get me", share that head space for creating something beautiful from something unexpected and experience the same war with self that I feel, to keep the adulthood from smothering the artist within us. I am many things, and I am an artist. I have to be or something really important and beautiful will die inside of me. I felt it fading those years in between when newly married, swamped with grad studies, and then pregnancy swallowed me up. I am working to reclaim it now, but have a lot of cobwebs and lost socks blocking my process. I want to be creative in some manner every day, to bring my soul alive! To feed it and grow it back from the shriveled size that I have rendered it over the last 5 years. I started exploring art journaling, mostly because I felt less pressured to produce something incredible, but can still keep trying to. I make art journals to sell and fund my art supply needs, and hopefully to help someone else discover the smothered artist within them as well. I spent the last year seeking my own spiritual journey, along with my husband and young son, we traveled across the nation, seeking a mentor and community to guide us to our own awakening within our life journey as followers of Jesus Christ, but dont fit into the model of church that our nation promotes. What I found along the way was that it is my times of creating/making art that I feel closest to God, NOT in a church pew. It is in the times that I am surrounded by friends doing a collective art experience, and NOT in my singular prayer time. This is meaningful and must be paid attention to. Could it be that the ultimate Creator meant for us to be creating as well, both making art with our hands and bodies but also enjoying the art of others to inspire our own process!? This connects for me. This makes me believe in God and love Him even more. So I believe that if I keep trying, as clumsy and untalented as I feel, I will clear the dullness and find myself as my Creator intended me, in a beautiful mess of paints, paper, string, fabric, markers, and glue.