Creative Time vs. Day Job

So, it's 5pm and I am just now getting to go out to the studio for the day. Typical... but the trick is to not be bitter about CFCC soaking up all my weekday work time. I am jealous of people who get to go out to their studios at 9 in the morning with a fresh coffee, after a nice walk or something, and begin their creative time. My creative time begins after my day job. Someday it won't be that way (though I've been saying that for 30 years!). Anyway, we all carve out what we can, and all-in-all its a pretty creative life!
Thought I'd leave you with this photo of Theo Ellsworth's ghost goggles:


I think Theo is a young genius! Check out his blog I find his way of looking at things so inspiring!

November Weekend

So this weekend was another WAWAS open studio night. I was blessed with a visit from Bill and Lacey Ann Struve the couple behind Copperclay and Bronzeclay. They are a powerhouse team, a truly amazing couple of individuals. It made my month to have an electric, energized chat with them for hours. I hope to see lots more of them.

Then on Saturday we went to a fundraiser for ASAPCares. It was at a lovely plantation with large old trees, complete with shrimp burgers, bluegrass bands and ponyrides. I'd spearheaded a collaborative charm bracelet to be made by our metals club Cape Fear Metalsmiths. The bracelet caused a stir and raised some bucks for ASAPCares' Rainbow house. We intend to do another next year. Auction organizer Kim Beller snapped these pics.

Pain and Paying Attention

This is for a friend of mine out there somewhere today in pain. Thought I'd share this excerpt from Julia Cameron's "The Artists Way":
"In writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention."
How amazing is THAT! It was a bolt of lightening, reading that. I mean we know these things but do we KNOW them? My midlife cyclone (as I like to call it) and its ensuing rubble, did just that for me, taught me to pay attention, to live in each tiny precious minute. Some of that sensation has faded for me in my comfortable post chaos life. Some days I have regrets and I have consoled myself with thoughts like- well,I wouldn't be where I am now, or with Robert, etc. When really the journey I went through had a far greater, and simultaneously simpler lesson for me. EXPERIENCE! Pain was transmuted into wisdom and experience! But these lesson fade so quickly for us slow humans. We need more konks on the head!
Maybe pain and crisis has this lesson to teach all of us. From the moment we are born through pain, we continuously are reborn through it, over and over.
Julia goes on,
"In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to the right now. The precise moment I was in was the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right. Yesterday teh marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that's all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty."
Just beautiful.....
This is one of the truths of life that must be discovered by each person on their own. I think this is the core of so many journeys books, lectures.... how to find the soft tender center in the present moment. And so, my friend's pain and crisis and my watching her go through it, reiterate for me the fragility and beauty of life's processes. She will be hammered out smooth, shiny and new when it is over.
(picture borrowed from here)

Boo Ya'll!

So thought I'd report in about one of my family's favoritest of holidays, HALLOWEEN!
We had a good time. Meredith was with us for the festivities and we did a fine job. I had wanted to have a blow out party but getting life rolling after Portland, and applying to Portland for next year with new projects, and teaching, it was just too much. Next year! I did find out that my daughter is a whiz at pumpkin carving and wields a mean exacto blade. She did the Jack Skellington pumpkin and many of our luminaries including this fierce cat. Meredith and her friend rampaged neighborhoods trick or treating as zombie school girls replete with pleated plaid skirts and battle with a bottle of fake blood. I was thrilled to have LOTS of trick or treaters in our new neighborhood THANK HEAVEN! I mis the halcyon days of my childhood in the suburbs of the 70's. Days spent on costumes parents lurking and scaring each other. Those were the pre-razorbladed apple days. You couldn't wait until the Halloween cartoon special came on preferably Charlie Brown! Ah, the good ole days! Well, in my neighborhood it seems they're alive and strong!