quiet

This week I've had so many ideas for blog posts which never made it out of my head. All my thoughts seem to be floating off like untethered balloons at the moment, and I can't seem to round them all up and tie them down again. I keep starting things and finding that they take far longer than I thought, nothing seems to work out as I intended, and getting disheartened and losing interest.

The new blog header, for instance. I thought it would be a matter of minutes to take a new snap, process it, add some type, and away we'd go. Ha. Everything but everything took ages and felt like reinventing the wheel, and all the while I got more and more fed up with the old one and more desperate to change it. So we're making do with a plainer version for a while.

To be honest, I feel squirmy even sharing all this. I didn't want this blog to dwell on the tedious humdrum of my life. After all, I'm meant to be 'making, thinking, drawing, painting, sewing, reading'. Well, I am doing a lot of reading, but otherwise my creativity seems to have wandered off. All I feel like doing is ordinary, domestic things like crochet and gardening.

A lot of this is due, of course, to the massive emotional expenditure of becoming a grandmother to my teenage son's little baby: a wonderful, colourful, incredible experience but charged with a lot of anxiety and responsibility I don't always feel up to. (A huge, huge thank you to all of you, by the way, for your sweet and lovely words of support and congratulations this week. It's meant a lot.) Other things are in play, too, as always. But the result is, I don't have a lot of originality to share with you just now.

So, I thought I'd tell you about some of the things that have been keeping me going and engaging my interest over the last few days. I've been inspired to get back into a pattern of good, healthy eating and cooking, something I've been very lazy about recently, and Lucy's blog Nourish Me has been a major source of inspiration and ideas. Even the name is soothing and nurturing, and helps me to believe in the power of the senses to heal and energise. I've been listening to music again (especially these two favourites), getting out in the fresh air in the beautiful Peak District National Park, and adding some colour to my life by painting my toenails turquoise.

Although I don't watch a lot of tv, the other night I stumbled across a programme so absorbing I almost turned inside out with interest: the BBC documentary Six Degrees of Separation, which looked at the science of network theory and some of the amazing discoveries and connections which have recently been made in this field.

I've also been thinking a lot about some of the ideas shared by Mal in her brilliant blog Turning*Turning, and in particular this post and its comments, about Julia Cameron's concept of 'shadow artists'. Really, really thought-provoking. She's also written insightfully about creative block, and along the same lines, Pikaland's 'Good to Know' project and Etsy talks have filled me with ideas to help get creativity flowing again. Perhaps I need to read some of it again...

Above all, I've been enjoying the green flourishing of spring in the garden. The leaves are almost full on the trees, and flowers are appearing everywhere in beautiful whites, greens, blues and mauves. This is my 'everyday' view, the one I see when I sit for a few minutes on our wooden bench outside the back door, drinking a cup of tea, just soaking up the silence and the trees, looking, listening and thinking.