getting started again

This year I have been trying to make peace with the highs and lows of my creative cycle and to stop fighting it.  It is scary when I stall out.  I'm afraid I'll never get started again.  That I have no new ideas.  That I've lost the creative spark and will never get it back.  I've come to realize that I'm just resting.  It always comes back.  Sometimes it is a little time, and sometimes it is a longer time, but it always comes back.  After the big push to get ready for my show at the end of last month I stalled, but I've mostly been fine with it.  Except the last few days.  I think when I near the end of my creative lull, I start to figet.  It doesn't help that the last few days I've been drowning in estrogen (gotta love PMS), but I've felt this before.  I want to do something, make something.  But I can't figure out what.  The choices are overwhelming and I don't know where to start.  I don't have a lot of confidence at that point in the cycle.  This weekend I sat down to make a card - simple enough, you'd think.  But it just would not come together and it was really frustrating.  I messed around with that thing for hours.  It seriously took me 3-4 hours to make a card!  Usually I whip those things out.  So I didn't start anything else, because I was in a bad mood after that.  And then I spent the next day fighting off all of those feelings of doom and gloom and depression.

But this morning I was totally figeting again.  I wanted to create.  But I didn't know what to work on, where to start, and I was scared that I was going to get frustrated and mad again.  Finally, I decided to just paste some stuff in my journal.  I tore up a couple of catalogs that came in the mail yesterday - made a little dream shopping collage.  I drew some borders around some stuff that I'd stuck in my journal a few days ago.  Wrote about the concert we went to last week and glued down the wine label that we'd worked so hard to get off the bottle.  Pasted in the book reviews from the Bookshop newsletter that I tore up over the weekend.  And I realized at some point that I was smiling.  I was having fun.  Not fighting it, not making a masterpiece, just easing myself back into the water.  Back to the place that makes me happy.

Later in the morning, I was catching up on my friend M's blog (she has a locked LiveJournal blog, or I'd link it - she's very talented and fun to read), and came across a list of things that make her happy.  It is a long list - 64 things - and she says she's still adding to it.  There, right in the middle, was this:

31) Pasting stuff in my journal.

Yeah.  That makes me happy, too.

Comments

[Ruth]

Sorry I missed your show in Santa Cruz, did you make any sales out of it?

Wah and things that you folks didn't make it to our housewarming/open house thingie on the 21st.
SBAYahoo attempted to eat your birthday email to me with the wonderful sunflower; I think they've accepted that any mail from you is NOT spam and I should get it harrumph.

Thinking kindly of you this day.
hugs

[Mary Beth]

Yeah, I can relate (as usual, lol, I usually feel like you have plucked thoughts right out of my head). The biggest problem with my 6 week break was getting back to work afterwards, oh yeesh, took my forever to get in the groove again.