the perseverance of bulbs

The force for change in a bulb is immense and unstoppable. Only two weeks ago I posted a photograph of this little pot of hyacinths in their stubby green-shooted infancy. Ten days later they were bursting into life and beauty, and today they look like this:

What you can't see is the scent, the pure white, heady and elegant perfume that wafts around the house when it is warm, and is held close and tight to itself when the rooms cool down for the night.

When I was an art student I filled a sketchbook with drawings of tulip and hyacinth bulbs from their tiny first shoots to their final blowsy browning overblown fullness. There is something powerfully optimistic about bulbs and their wilful desire to grow towards the light and then bloom, fully themselves, knowing that this is their moment.

a thousand and one days

It's three years since I started writing a list of five happy things every day, a sort of gratitude journal, a sort of diary, a sort of storytelling. It's become the thing I do every day, the thing I refer to if I'm unsure when something happened, the thing I laugh about to myself at how many times tea-drinking is mentioned, the thing that centres me and lets me know I'm alive. Today I've reached 1001 lists, all of them telling their own story and all of them part of the whole.

I also bought some white hyacinths and potted them up with hazel twigs, ivy leaves and moss. I also had dinner with my son and watched the jackdaws flying over to their roost and started to read my new Tessa Newcomb book. It was a good day.

You can read about how I started my Five Things lists here. If you like, you can have a look at them all here.

turning over an old leaf

An old leaf is just as inviting as a new leaf I can't help feeling, and an old leaf is what I feel like after the ravages of 2012, which was probably just about as bad as a year ever was.

But an old leaf is fine, and after a few weeks of lying on the ground, nestling into the soil, being blown about, and being frozen solid so that all its veins, edges and naked structure are revealed, an old leaf can become very beautiful and very much part of the cycle of things.

Lots of things changed last year, and lots of things will change this year. I'm planning to make sure that many more of this year's changes are positive ones, and I hope to begin by being present on these pages a little more.

the first cut

On Sunday I went to see Manchester Art Gallery's new exhibition 'The First Cut' which is all about paper, mostly paper cutting, but also other techniques including making huge leaves out of seaweed and hemp.

These delicate cutwork birds made from old maps by Claire Brewster were my favourite, perhaps because they symbolised a freedom and lightness of touch that I felt the rest of the exhibition lacked. Apart from the seaweed leaves and an enormous, gestural piece by someone I can't now remember, I must admit to an uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia while walking around. There is something very tight, controlled and almost slightly verging on madness about the process of cutting tiny work from paper, the sort of thing I have seen prisoners or mental health users produce. Very reminiscent of outsider art in its varying forms. Some artists such as the perennially popular Rob Ryan manage to capture a poetry and humour that lifts their work, but I'm afraid a lot of it seemed too intense and gave me a bit of a constriction in the throat - not really something I usually look for in an encounter with art! What a difference from the outdoor freedom and space of last weekend's trip to the YSP.

Do leave a comment if you have been to see the exhibition - I would be interested to hear other perspectives.

out for a walk

Here I am resting at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park after what seemed like a very steep climb but which was in fact a pathetically gentle incline... 

...unfortunately I fear my girth is not too far away from looking like this grey-green lady's, elegantly reclined though she is, which added to the puffing and panting as I laboured up the hill.

It's lovely at the YSP, and I'm so glad I went. A great combo of art, fresh air, sunshine, autumn colours, walking, coffee and cake. Not to mention the lovely scenery of the Pennine hills on the drive over.

I didn't quite manage to banish all my worries from my mind, but I certainly did a better job than if I'd stayed at home moping.

That's all for today, but I thought I'd try to report for duty a bit more often on here... I did a bit of painting on canvas last week before the old anxieties took over and spoilt the fun... hopefully I'll have something to show soon.

autumn is here...

...and so am I... at last!

I have wanted to write a post for ages but I've kept on stalling... I haven't known what to say... I've started a few lines in my notebook and then given up, and then suddenly a week's gone by and it all happens again.

The truth is, I haven't felt like I've anything terribly interesting to say. There's been more 'life' than 'creativity' going on here - and that's been the case for quite a while. I've decided to bite the bullet and write something anyway, just to mark the passing of time, because I want to be truthful with myself, and in the end this blog is for me, to read when I'm old, and what I'm feeling and experiencing at the moment is just as valid and as much a part of the story as the busy, successful times.

I haven't done any art for a while, nor any kind of expression other than the intense giving out that life seems to be demanding of me at the moment. So, I am 'inhaling'... taking in... absorbing... and trusting that the 'exhaling', the expression, the creation of something other than life and relationships, will come.

Maybe the new season will bring other newness with it. I hope so. Autumn is here now, I know this because as well as the rose hips and ivy berries and darker evenings and chilly air, there was a huge skein of geese in the sky this morning, very high up and distantly honking, making their way to Norfolk and the Wash to feed on the mudflats over the winter. We are right underneath one of their flight paths here in south Manchester and every autumn is marked by their passing from west to east. In springtime, back they go westwards, to Iceland or Greenland to breed over the summer months. I love hearing them and rush to the window when I hear the sound of them passing over to catch sight of their strung-out 'v' shapes making their way across the sky.

East to west, west to east... the miracle of time passing. My 'baby' granddaughter will soon be starting school, and neither of my children are teenagers anymore. This feels incredible, but there is something familiar and comforting about the journey of the geese that somehow makes it all ok. Good and wonderful things happen in amongst the terrible and frightening things, and there's a sort of rhythm and form to it all that I didn't notice when I was younger and saw it as a single, linear journey. It's not that at all, is it? Not a bit.

I'm doing a lot of reading. A lot of sleeping, a lot of thinking and praying and eating cake and back in August I did a lot of cleaning. Hopefully I'll be doing a bit more writing and taking photos and getting back into more of a conversation with life very soon.

reflected glory

I just thought I would show you this page from last month's Country Living magazine. It shows the studio of the lovely Emma, aka Silverpebble, who was featured in their 'Women and their Sheds' series.

What's that to do with me you might rightly wonder... well, that's my paper garland in the background! Emma kindly bought one from my Winter Shop a couple of years ago, and I think it looks lovely in its new home, don't you?

I wrote about how I made these garlands here.