Time and Light Switches

I’ve yet to return to my easel in earnest. I’ve sat and stared at it for much too long, but haven’t picked up a brush. Today, this week, painting doesn’t feel as high stakes as it did a week ago, and still I haven’t come back to it. In all honesty a big normal part of it is simply I do not know what to paint. The other part of it is, the place where the paintings used to come from looks a lot like a dried up lake, muddy and empty. So maybe I’ll paint that. Paint about how it feels wrong like a shirt that’s a little out of date and doesn’t quite fit the way it used to.   But I’ve been making myself a scrapbook, with photos taken from my summer and adventures. It feels like a calm life to do this. I don’t have to think too hard and it requires nothing from me but my own opinion on what looks good. It’s peaceful. In a way art hasn’t ever really felt. I’m an intense person, and as such my art has become so emotionally intensive. Has to be profound and fabulous and be well done. When ...

I don’t have much to say about this week or the creative process. I’ve been resting. After finishing my first draft and now waiting for my beta readers feedback I’m just hanging around. Life carries on even when I sit down, so I’ve been cleaning and running around catching up on some life stuff. But under all that I’m starting to feel itchy and twitchy, I want to paint.   I’ve started to have ideas churring around in the back of my mind, sharp brushstrokes and bold colours. Makes me excited to get back into it but also I’m not quite sure where to start. It feels like I’ve been around this bend a time or ten.  I’ve been living in revolt and desperate longing when it comes to painting. Living in it for years now. And lately I’ve been pondering, wondering, if it might be time to give it up. If I could, give it all away, would it bring me peace? To leave it in the past, would I be able to sleep? Would the revolt of truly leaving it to wither and die, would it give me peace?...

In my journaling this morning I wrote out this thought, that the times were weird and how it feels both like a time for mourning and a time for rejoicing. It feels as though life has given me both great reason to dance in the rain, and ample opportunity to wallow in the woods. The feeling is odd, its the kind of mishmash of light and dark that creates a feeling of disconnection. I have seen the valley low, and it has brought me low. I have seen the mountaintop high, and oh what a beautiful sight it’s been.   In my left hand I hold grief and in my right I hold untold joy. It makes holding a cup of tea difficult. So I find myself sitting in the meadow, somewhere in the middle feeling a bit odd. A little light and a little heavy. A little too close to the ground and yet not quite close enough. I’m left feeling completely in love with the life I’m living. But remain unable to shake the haunting feeling that something is missing, like I’ve forgotten something small and important....

It was a doozie of a day before the clock struck 12 o’clock but we carry on. If you’d seen my instagram story on Monday you can probably take a good guess as to what I’m about to say but here we go, I officially finished the first draft of my book! I have actually written a full length novel. Now don’t go getting to excited I still have to edit it a few hundred times, and its got more typos than I can count, but it exists!   The process of writing this book has been absolutely incredible. Radically different from any other writing project I’ve done. To start with, I finished it in record time, that I’m sure I’ll never accomplish again. For five days a week starting in March I’ve written for close to six hours a day. The goal was always to hit 1000 words a day. Sometimes I’d hit it and then go another mile, and others days I wouldn’t even hit triple digits. But having a goal in mind, paired with oodles of self compassion, made for an amazing enjoyable time writing.  I canno...

  I’ve got two scenes left, maybe 4 hours of writing will do it, then I’ll have written an entire novel. If you told 18 year old me I would have laughed in your face and not believed you. But if you told 6 year old me, well that me would begin jumping around with excitement and wonderment. 18 year old me would have asked you questions and demanded proof, but 6 year old me would just want to know how we did it and be so very proud. If you told me a year ago what I would accomplish in a years times I’m not sure even that me would truly believe it could be done.   Even if only my family reads this book, if only one person enjoys it, if I can just see it in print, it will be enough. Because I will have physical proof that I can do big things, that I can complete impossible tasks.  I think I have been writing for weeks about how concluding the story feels a lot like grief. When I’m reading, and I read an awful lot, and I get to the last 50 pages I tend to leave them. Doesn...