Creativity Explosion

I feel like I am in the middle of a creativity explosion these days. Quilting is big part of my creative output and I have become more and more interested in making art quilts. Bed quilts and lap quilts are large and take more time than I want to give sometimes. If I am not driven by a deadline - like a birthday or Christmas - I get lazy about working on projects that I have started. Moonglow is a good example. It is a beautiful quilt that I made in a block of the month class; it was paper pieced and I couldn’t have done that on my own without the class. But it is huge and I am hand-quilting it; I feel overwhelmed by it and haven’t done a lot of work on it. I told Alix she could have it, but I don’t have a deadline to give it to her, so no pressure. Plus, I kind of don’t want to give it away, at least not yet.

I have made several small projects in the last year that I like very much. A thread-painted small quilt with a rural scene on it that I lavishly hand-quilted while Michael had chemotherapy is one. Another is a miniature quilt I made for a Guild challenge and just finished. Simple, but lovely colors. I have a quilt in process for baby Gabriel and a UFO quilt of Felix’s footprints during her first year of life. Admittedly, there are a few more UFOs in my sewing stuff, mostly from classes. I want to get them finished, but I don’t know when that will happen.

This year I added another creative outlet: ceramics. Michael and I have wanted to do ceramics for several years but never got around to it until 2017. Last March we took a four-week class at The Potter’s Wheel and both made several pretty bowls. I even made a pitcher to add to my collection! This fall, we decided to enrol at Lone Star College for a semester-long ceramics class. It is very intense, lots of class time plus needed studio time after classes. The teacher, Kelley Eggert, is great and has really taught us a lot in a short time. I have made things I would never have expected to make. When they are all finished, at the end of the semester, I’ll take pictures of them and post the pix here for review.

I retain my interest in photography, although I’m not too active right now. I did put a photograph in a show at the JCC this summer and sold it. Last year year I sold an art quilt out of a WiVLA exhibition. Selling things is nice. We have a slush fund/windfall account and extra money like that, refunds, Christmas money, etc go into it. We paid our tuition for the ceramics class out of the slush fund.

I plan to take the ceramics 2 course in the spring. I really like ceramics and I am better at it than I knew I would be. It adds to my repertoire of creative outlets. I like it.

(And lest I forget, I found a new writers group and I am getting back into my book. I am developing some ambitions about finishing it this winter. We’ll see.)

Insomnia Night Three

Another night and I am wide awake at 2:06 a.m. For the last three nights, I haven't been able to go to sleep and I've ended up awake until dawn. Yesterday, I finally fell asleep around 6:00 a.m. Or should I say, TODAY I finally fell asleep around 6:00 a.m. This is such a problem for me. I am not getting enough sleep and I am sleeping too much in the daytime, throwing off my schedule. Going to yoga at 9:00 a.m. was too much for me today and I skipped it. How am I going to feel tomorrow morning (this morning?) when I have to be at water aerobics at 9 a.m.? 

Today is going to be really tough if I don't fall asleep soon. I have the water aerobics, then a program on colon cancer at Glazier I want to go to at 11, and an appointment with Dr. M. at 2 p.m. I am going to be whipped after all that. Hell, I'm going to be whipped duriiong all that.

Most evenings, I start falling asleep in the living room when we are watching tv and/or I am fiddling with my iPad. I try to stay awake, but it is hard and sometimes I miss hallf the program. That doesn't translate into going to bed and going to sleep though. Before I can go to bed, there are chores to be done. Feed the cats and clean that up, finish the dishwasher and run it, brush and floss my teeth, take medication, give the cats their nighttime treat. By the time I have done all that, I am wide awake AND it is late. Like 12 or 1 a.m. late. And I get into bed and I can't sleep.

I am getting phobic about it. I start worrying that I won't falll asleep and that keeps me awake. Or I start falling asleep and I become self-aware of the progress, which wakes me up. I try tricks, counting, breathing, pretending I am in my chair falling asleep watching tv. It doesn't seem to help. I have some sleeping pills aand I always think I'll take one of them and get a good night's sleep and get back on track, but it is always too late to take the pills by the time I realize that I can't sleep.

I can see what I need to do. Get everythiing finished early in the evening so that when I get tired, I can go to bed and fall asleep. Get on a better schedule, stop staying up until 1 or 2 in the morning on a regular basis. While we were traveling on the West Coast, we got up every morning and got on the road around 8:30 or 9. We traveled and did things all day and went to bed 11-ish. We didn't nap. I didn't have insomnia. We had purposeful days.

I feel that I am adrift. I have lots of things to do but little motivation to do them. I doesn't seem to matter whether I accomplish anything or not. There are rarely any deadlines in my life. But, of course, it does matter. The house is in terrible disarray, still disheveled from the flood last February. FEBRUARY. What is it that makes me not care enough to put my house back together? I don't know. And in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep, that is part of what I am thinking about. Everything I am not doing and everything I need to do and should be doing. 

When morning comes, that is all forgotten. I am adrift again. You know, at 65 I really should have this shit worked out. For all the years after I left the workforce in 1992, my family's schedule defined my life and provided the structure that I lost when I retired from work. The kids are all gone now and since Michael retired, he doesn't have a schedule either. Self-discipline seems to have eluded me. External requirements still get me moving most of the time. But I hate living this way. I hate seeing myself as a failure on this very personal level. I need to change up my life. I wonder how I'm going to do that?

My AROHO Reading

In August 2013, I attended at women writers' retreat at Ghost Ranch sponsored by the A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO). During my week there, a videographer named Rebecca Scheckmann taped me reading the opening of my memoir-in-progress, "The Requirements of Love." Today, Rebecca posted the video on YouTube, making it public for the first time. 

Thank you, Rebecca!!

You can see the video at http://youtu.be/XjA-ir2-ecE.

Let me know what you think!

Ciao,

~Lanie