Being still...

It's an enforced stillness...somehow I managed to twist a muscle in my back (doing something as utterly inane as cleaning the bathroom basin), and have been doing not very much at all since Monday, apart from sitting propped up with cushions.  It's temporary I know, nothing seriously damaged, just painful and will take time to heal.  I'm certainly not the most go-getting, active, out there person, but enforced stillness is hard even for me.  It's made me aware of how little we ever allow ourselves to be still.  To listen.  To notice.  I like to think I am a fairly observant person, but there is something about not choosing the time or place to be still that seems to make you more acutely aware of...the squeaking of the tree branches on the roof of the courtyard, the sound of the wind in the tall palm in the backyard a few blocks down from mine, the sound of the wind chimes, a plane going over right now, the pattern of shadow falling across the couch I'm sitting on.  A bird chirping (not a dove this time, though there are plenty of them around now it's Spring).  On Monday I watched and listened, and wrote a short poem, not very good, but a true response.

This morning

I watched.

As the wind chimes turned slowly, silently

evidence of something I cannot see

nor hear. 

The leaves gently bowed and shadows

moved

to a breath of warm air, slow and

soft.

And I marvel as if at something 

I have not seen

or heard 

before.

For indeed, I think that I

have not.

The other thing I have done is to finally finish a book I started reading almost two years ago.  "The Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram.  It's a difficult book to summarise, but it is profound and thought provoking.  It offers an alternate way of seeing and experiencing the world.  Not as some kind of new age spirituality, rather more as an extremely old way of experiencing the world. Simply that, the world around us is not inanimate and silent, but rather that we humans have become deaf to the conversations going on all around us, because we have forgotten how to listen, how to hear, and how to speak to, the rest of creation.  And that this forgetting, this terrible loss, is what has led us to be able to treat not only the natural world and other species with contempt, but even other humans.  We no longer know intimately the changes of the seasons, we don't understand the birdsong we hear (if we hear it at all) so we have no idea what kind of birds might be making it, or why, so we don't know that the songs they are singing would tell us they are nesting and bringing up young so we go ahead and cut down the tree they are living in without a second thought, without understanding of the impact we are having.  And that this knowledge and understanding is something our ancestors took for granted.  It's not that we can speak the same language as a bird, it's that an intimate knowledge of our place, and all the creatures we share it with, teaches us what different birdsong means.  And we've lost this completely.  This is just one small example.  It is everywhere and permeates everything we do.  I've had conversations with people who do not know which direction the moon rises in.  People who are utterly unaware of the fact that the the position of the sun (well, the earth actually!) changes with the seasons.  How can we be so divorced from reality?  And yet, I think so many of us feel a deep, deep sense of yearning, of loss, for this knowledge.  Yet so cut off are we, that we don't even understand what it is we are grieving for.

Just after I started reading the book, I found myself watching "Narnia: Prince Caspian" with my girls one evening, and as often happens, the two collided and created a question, a thought.  I scribbled it on the inside cover so I wouldn't forget.  

"It's the 14 Jan 2011 and I'm on page 95.  But I wanted to write this down while I'm still thinking about it.  We all watched "Narnia: Prince Caspian" last night, and watching it after reading this was fascinating...I must go back and re-read the book to see how much of it is original.  The four Pevensie children come back to Narnia, but hundreds of years have passed.  Cair Paravel is in ruins, and Narnia has been invaded and taken over by a warlike race of humans who attempted to (and believed they had) 'eradicated' all the Narnian 'savages'.  The world of Narnia has changed dramatically.  Where previously all the animals spoke, the trees were inhabited by animate spirits, dryads, and could move and speak, the land itself was in many ways, SENTIENT; now the trees, according to DLF (the dwarf the children rescue), have retreated so far into the earth they no longer CAN move or speak, they are 'just trees', and many (if not most) animals have forgotten how to speak and 'gone wild'.  As DLF says, "get treated like a dumb animal long enough, and that's what you become.". The children are perplexed when a bear attacks Lucy, they don't understand why it wouldn't talk to her.  Lucy is saddened to find the trees silent and unresponsive.  Narnia has become like our world.  When Aslan comes, he reawakens the land, calling the trees up from their sleep, and summoning the river spirit to destroy the invading army.  Watching the movie after reading this, it's like a vision of how our world might once have been (well, slightly less 'Disney'!).  As if we have a memory of how things once were, how they SHOULD BE, and though we might think it's just imagination, the longing for that is there deep within us.  I can't remember how much, how obvious this might have been in C.S. Lewis' original vision, but it doesn't actually matter, that yearning is tangible in this modern re-telling, retold for OUR time.  When we envision Utopia, it is a SENTIENT Utopia, where we live in harmony with plants and animals, rivers and rocks, and can speak to them."

If we think a little further along these lines, we have the Ents in Lord of the Rings, we have Avatar.  We have Harry Potter showing us there is magic all around us, but we are too blind to see the mermaids in the lake.  There is much more I could write, but this is awfully long already.  I'll leave you with a couple of links to other blogs that have informed and influenced my thinking on this.

Terri Windling, of course.  So many of her posts are utterly inspiring.  She has lately written several posts that have made me stop and think more and more about this.  And over at the Earthlines blog, Sharon Blackie has written eloquently herself, and included the writings of others, about belonging to a place, learning it's language and coming to an understanding of it that can only come from being a PART of it, not APART from it.

Busy...but had to share this!

I've been working full-time the last few weeks, and though I have enjoyed it thoroughly, I'm looking forward to doing something creative in the next few, now I'm back to two days work a week.  I'm itching to write, actually, inspired by a post by Tom Hirons on his Coyopa blog.  It's so wonderful I had to write this post just to tell you about it!  If only I could write like this:
http://coyopa.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/nettle-eater/

And this one by Tom, too.  Utterly magical.
http://coyopa.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/sometimes-a-wild-god-2/

If music be the food of love...it is certainly soulfood!

Last weekend I spent time at one of those rare events that somehow takes you away from the mundane boring ordinary world, and drops you into a beautiful place that nurtures and inspires, and leaves you wishing you never had to leave.  It's called RhythmSong, and it only happens once a year.  I've been a few times in the past, but haven't managed to make the last three or so years, and how I have missed it!  The venue is nothing special, old chalets at a 'holiday camp' that has seen far better days.  But it doesn't matter.  It's what happens there that's important.  Four marvelous days of music, singing, songwriting, clowning, drumming, where if you've never sung in front of an audience before, you may suddenly find you have the courage because everyone is so supportive, where just finding that courage will get you a standing ovation, and you may even find yourself with a 'backing band' of professional musicians if you just ask for a hand.  Four days of workshops, classes, sharing, great food, and a community camaraderie that is as beautiful to experience as it is rare.  The calibre of artists invited to run workshops is wonderful, they come from all over the country, and they become part of this wonderful community, sharing, laughing, eating meals with all the participants like old mates.  There is a youth scholarship as well, so there was a bunch of marvelously talented teenagers in the mix, with no discernible age barrier at all.  Everyone loves music, and that's all that matters.  I sang, and played Cordelia for the first time in front of anyone other than my immediate family, and it does a shy ego marvelous good to receive applause and whistles at the end of a song.  More than that, though I was so nervous I couldn't hear, I was told afterwards that the entire group of young 'uns joined and sang with me, in harmony, as I attempted an Adele song (not my usual thing, but fun to have a shot, and as I said when I came up to the mic, it's about as 'pop diva' as I get!).  That's the other marvelous thing about this weekend, though all the participants are amateurs, everyone sings, and any excuse to break into song is acted upon, and the harmonies! Oh the harmonies.  People who sing in community choirs and just naturally break into harmony, who sing for the pure joy of it.  Oh how I wish I could bottle that feeling and hand it out on a street corner in the city to everyone who walked by.  It's how we SHOULD be, I'm sure of it, just singing because we feel like it.  I saw my mum shyly share a song she had written with the song sharing circle, and stand up at the mic with one of the young lads and sing in front of everyone, I saw my dad get up and sing a song he thought no-one would know or like because it was too old fashioned, only to have everyone join in and then applaud and whistle and hoot when he finished.  It's that kind of place, a magic place, maybe a bit like Avalon, (or actually, more like Brigadoon!).  It appears magically once a year, out of the mists, lasts a few short hours, then disappears again, leaving no trace but a warm happy feeling.

I didn't take my camera, I didn't want to be distracted by taking pictures, but here is some YouTube video of past RhythmSongs, that will give you an idea of what it's like.

New toys...and the tyranny of technology

I'm typing this using the new toy...which may seem rather odd once you read the rest of my post.  Yes, here I am, planted on the couch, by the windows letting in beautiful winter sunshine, my feet up on the edge of the coffee table...and Beloved has just handed me a coffee to top it all off...with the new iPad.

I resisted this for a while.  Because hubby (and I too, in a previous life) is a graphic designer who works from home, we have computers already...but it's always been a juggle for me to find a decent length of time on one during the week without getting in his way of work.  I don't like to spend much time on the weekends stuck in the studio (especially not on beautiful sunny winter days) because weekends should be family time.  And that leaves late evenings, which are not ideal, as I'm usually tired and can't think of anything to say and end up web surfing and then feeling guilty about the time wasted.  And I don't like sitting in the office chair in front of the screen in the chilly studio to read a long and interesting article online.  That's just wrong!  That requires a comfy chair and a fire and a cup of tea at the least (or perhaps a glass of red wine in the evening?!) So, we bought an iPad.  It also means that munchkins can use it (sparingly...I'm trying to limit all 'screen' time to no more than two hours a day), and play some educational games, and also look at the Internet under supervision.  Because like it or not, I know they'll have to learn how to use these damn things sometime!

So that's all fine and dandy.  But sometimes...oh how I wish for simpler times when the dreaded computer was nowhere to be seen.

This semester I'm working at a local school, helping out in the library while one of the permanent staff members is away.  I did work experience at a library, way back in the mists of time, when I was 17, before computers and smart boards and printers and remote control air conditioners and digital cameras and audio-visual equipment.  It was fun, I remember considering it as a career back then, being a fan of libraries in general.  And working in this one has been fun too, to a point.  Meeting the kids (even the monosyllabic teenagers!) is fun, talking about books, seeing which are favourites (the ones I'm constantly re-shelving), seeing old favourites of mine still finding an audience now, it's all wonderful...when I have time.  But it seems an enormous amount of time is taken up pfaffing about with technology.  I have to learn a whole lot of new stuff just to be able to issue and return books.  There's scanners and barcodes (for students as well as books), programs that have to be logged onto and long and complicated processes completed in order to do the simplest thing, and then logged out again before you can do anything else.  A website that I need but cannot access because I'm (at the moment anyway) only casual, so I have to use someone else's computer.  Not to mention the turning on and off of about twenty computers for students, answering (or trying to) student queries about why they can't print (who knows), why are they locked out of their login (who knows), can I give them a new password (only if I can access the site I'm not supposed to access), and so on and so forth.  Answering staff questions about how to use the smart board (who knows), are the laptops all charged and ready for the class to use (who knows).  And that's all when the technology is actually working.  When it isn't, everything stops while I wait for the poor beleaguered IT specialist (who is also a teacher, so isn't exactly hanging around just waiting to fix something) to find time to sort it out.  It's not a fear of the technology, I've been working with computers for 24 years and they are wonderful tools.  But I resent it.  I resent the time learning all this stuff is taking up, taking me away from being my (probably fantasy) idea of a helpful school librarian, when I know that all these new 'skills' will be forgotten and obsolete in a year or so.  I resent the fact that when it doesn't work, there is no manual alternative.  How much time is wasted worldwide because of 'sorry, the system is down at the moment'?  As a person who likes to do things with their hands (I love the new book covering work, and book repairing), I hate hate hate sitting in front of a frozen screen wasting time and knowing there's nothing I can do, I can't circumvent the system.

And so, I found myself day-dreaming the other day of an old fashioned library.  With old, dark wooden shelves (no melamine allowed) and card files.  Where the books have little pockets in the back with cards in them, and date stamps, where there are no computers or smart boards.  I have a vision.  It's called the Luddites Library Cafe.  A sign on the door tells you to turn off your mobile phone.  There is no WiFi.  Laptops, DS games, iPads (yes, I know, I just bought one), Mp3 players etc are not permitted.  There are squishy comfy chairs, and quiet study nooks, shelves and shelves of everyone's childhood favourites, and a little cafe section where you may buy a nice hot cuppa and a piece of cake and peruse your weekly selections in peace and quiet, or have quiet discussions with fellow library members (perhaps an alfresco section for sunny days and louder conversations?)  Wood floors so you have to walk quietly, and hand painted wooden signs over each section.

I explained this vision to my mum.  She told me I'd only ever get little old ladies visiting my library.  I don't know, I think there might be a lot more people out there who would relish visiting a place like that, a technology free zone where peace and quiet rule.  What do you think?

Inspiration or madness...Part one and a half

It continues to be a deep, deep subject to ponder, this one of inspiration and muses and where these colliding ideas and urges to make, to create, come from.  There are many new entries into the moveable feast, so I'll be mulling over it a while yet I suspect.  While sitting outside enjoying the winter sunshine yesterday, I re-read THIS article, by Niko Sylvester, from the Journal of Mythic Arts.  Terri recommended it in the comments section of her post on Inspiration.  It's a fascinating article to read at any time, I read it years ago and it was a joy to come back to it and discover new things.  One quote that leapt out at me was an idea from Leslie Ellen Jones' book, Druid, Shaman, Priest: Metaphors of Celtic Paganism.  Sylvester writes:

one of the primary functions of the shaman is to mediate between the mortal world and the Otherworld. Jones comments that "The Otherworld can perhaps be regarded as a psychological state related through language", making a poet a natural choice for shaman. This psychological state is another state of consciousness that alters the perception of reality. In normal life, we live in consensus reality, the purpose of which is "to provide a structure for filtering masses of potentially perceptible raw data into a manageable flow that offers enough information about the environment to enable us to function, but not so much information as to be overwhelming." A shaman is able to leave consensus reality and enter another state; "an altered state is merely a different filtering of the same mass of available data." 

Now this makes sense!  The idea of a 'consensus reality', essentially a version of reality that we all agree to adhere to (without really having much choice I suppose, society teaches us and we believe), in order for society to run smoothly.  But one that you can step out of, because it's really just one way of thinking out of infinite possibilities.  I'm not a psychologist, but I imagine it as some kind of highway we're all on, we're all travelling in the same direction, going approximately the same speed, seeing the same landmarks from the same point of view.  But you can get off it.  You can take a side exit, head down a disused track, step away and look at the highway streaming past from outside of it.  See those landmarks from a new vista.  Take the scenic route, so to speak.  Which might explain why it always seems to take me so much longer to do the normal, ordinary, everyday stuff (like housework!), because I'm on the slow road to somewhere else in my head!  The ideal situation would be that you can choose opportune moments to 'sidetrack' and then pop back into line and catch up with everyone else.  I suspect the problem is that sometimes you don't really choose.  The sidetrack appears and before you know it you're off on an adventure somewhere, and then sometimes it takes a real effort to find your way back onto the highway, at least in time to get dinner on, or pick the kids up from school.  Maybe that's the sliding scale between creativity and so-called 'madness'.  Healthy creative people can pick their moments and find their way back easily.  People suffering from mental health problems may not realise they've gone off on the track at all, or may find themselves hopelessly lost.  I've probably taken that metaphor as far as it can go, but it made me think.  Especially after reading about 'Translogical Thinking' yesterday.  It seems to fit nicely with that concept.

Today I went back to a book that I read a couple years ago, The Brain that Changes Itself by Dr. Norman Doidge.  Fascinating stuff, it discusses new discoveries in Neuro research that overturn older ideas that the adult brain was hardwired and incapable of change.  Instead, it talks about 'neuroplasticity', the flexible, malleable, changeable brain, that is capable of re-wiring itself, and more interestingly for this discussion, mentions some pretty weird and bizarre things that have been discovered.  That is is quite easy, for example, with the help of simple illusions, to trick a healthy person's brain into believing that a wooden table is part of their anatomy, even when that person is well aware that it cannot be.  That 'normal' people who are denied sight even for just a few days, can develop extremely acute hearing and tactile senses as the 'visual cortices' that aren't being used for sight take over some of those tasks, thus increasing the amount of 'brain power' (so to speak) that is given over to handling aural and tactile input.  And that many started to experience very vivid, strange hallucinations as they moved around, heard sounds, or were touched.  The fact that autistic people can often hear things that 'normal' people cannot, and find sounds that don't bother us utterly deafening, suggests (to me at least), that 'normal' people might not be getting the full dose of reality at all, but rather a filtered version.  Filtered through a brain that is shaped and altered by the experiences it has, and importantly, by the culture it develops in.  So while our brains may shape our culture, our culture also shapes our brains, and therefore must shape our perception of reality.  It seems to me that definitions of what is 'reality' and what is a 'normal' brain all start to look very...fuzzy.

What I also noticed in the book, was the number of times phrases like, "Dr Such-and-such was the first to see the link between...", "Professor Thingummy made the connection...", "Dr Whatsit saw the affect this had and wondered if it could be applied to..."  Which all sound to me like different ways of describing 'Translogical Thinking.'  And they're phrases we're very familiar with when it comes to speaking about scientific breakthroughs, new discoveries, exciting medical research and so on.  So while maybe creative people's brains have similarities to people suffering from various mental illnesses, it's pretty clear that these abilities are vital to the development of humanity and civilisation.  I guess, as in the case of so many other things, it comes down to a balancing act.  Too far one way and mental illness and psychosis might be the result.  But too far the other and we might still be living in trees.

So...where does that leave inspiration and the muse?  Perhaps the muse is just the whisper of synapses firing in unusual combinations in the brain.  Perhaps the muse actually exists as a real, physical entity who keeps you awake at night with shreds of ideas and characters and paintings that need to be created, an entity that 'normal' brains can't see/hear/feel because it's their brains that don't work properly, or at least, don't show them the whole of reality because they couldn't handle it...oh I'm just being cheeky now, as I've managed to include myself in both camps throughout the course of this argument!

Or maybe it's both...or neither...or something else entirely that we can't even begin to comprehend.  In any case, though perhaps I pay a price in more ups and downs, more dark fallow times, more times of doubt and fear that my talent amounts to nothing, than the 'average person' (if indeed they exist), I would not trade my delight in indulging in 'translogical thinking', in getting off the highway into the interesting sidetracks, and in listening to the whispers of the muse, for what might be an easier, and more....normal?!...way of thinking.

Inspiration or madness...or both?

Ahhh, a new moveable feast is arising, starting on Terri Windling's blog with a wonderful post "On Artistic Inspiration."  There she discusses the strange relationship the artist has with the 'muse', with the worlds they are creating (through words or paints or music or whatever), and how sometimes it can seem more than a little like madness.  But what is considered madness these days was in the past sometimes considered to be the ability to 'walk between the worlds', to enter the underworld or another spiritual dimension, to contact other beings and most importantly, return bringing all they have learnt back to their people.  The path of the shaman.

Most of us who are likely to be reading this will be well aware of the contradictions this presents.  We live in the modern age, a rational/logical society that has, mostly, eschewed 'superstition' and the notion of a spirit filled world.  Or at least, it likes to think it has, and does not treat those who disagree kindly.  The trouble is, as Howard Gayton (Terri's husband) mentions in his interview with Brian and Wendy Froud, artists "often do live in two worlds," and that second world is frequently not in the slightest bit logical and rational.

As Howard also mentions, "It is a fine line to walk when you are dealing with these principles, treading between what is believable and what is not. When I read about magical principals, a part of me thinks: this is definitely true; and another part thinks: no, this is mad. It's like living in two worlds at once."  I find this happens to me often, as if I have two voices in my head (perhaps an argument between the left side of my brain and the right?!), one leans in closer and says "Wow, tell me more," and at the same time, another voice is standing back and scoffing at the silliness of it.  Yes, I have Mulder and Scully inside my brain!  I can often be pretty cynical about new age type spirituality.  My default reaction to people who claim to channel spirits from Atlantis, or beings from the planet Sirius, is generally "Yeah right, and I suppose you were Cleopatra in a previous life too."  The trouble is, as an artist (and interestingly enough, as a singer), I've had that feeling of someone/thing working through me to create.  Something I can't pin down, I can't put my finger on.  It's illusive and mutable and inconstant.  But I create work, not all the time, but often enough, that seems to come from somewhere else and I almost feel guilty putting my name on it.  The fact that sometimes I create artworks that can trigger deep feelings for someone else, that they see things in my art that seem magical and full of strange meaning, doesn't surprise me because I think that's what art is supposed to do.  The artist creates something that will resonate far beyond their initial idea/theme/skill, because something in the piece speaks to the personal experiences of another person in a way the artist can never plan for, or understand.  But the fact that sometimes my artwork does this to me in surprising ways, still confounds me.  It isn't necessarily big, grand artworks that do this for me.  In fact, more often that not it's the smaller, odd little ones.  The Talesingrs do.  Both the stories and the artworks, but perhaps the stories most.  Maybe I've just somehow convinced my subconscious that what started as a bit of fun (the invention of the 'anthropological' material and my fictitious Professor Woodford-Harding) is all true.  But really, it was the other way around.  The stories felt to me as if they had come from somewhere else, they felt old.  They don't feel like mine, so I almost felt they deserved a historical context.  It's not an attempt to convince anyone they are 'real', and I hope no-one has thought they were and been disappointed.  But at the same time, they are real.  On some level I can't explain.

After a quick search on the web, it is clear there is a great deal of ongoing debate about the link between creativity and mental illness of various kinds.  It's an idea with tenacity, it has been around for a very long time, and it seems the jury is still out.  Some claim it's just an unhelpful stereotype that can do real damage.  Others are adamant it's true.  But I remember seeing a documentary a few years ago, and the brains of an artist with no symptoms of mental illness and a person suffering schizophrenia were scanned, and when the artist was in 'creative mode', their brains fired in the same way as the person with the mental illness.  The difference, I remember, was that they were not stuck in that mode.  They seemed to be able to turn it on and off.  In doing my quick skim on the web I found this article, and in it I found this particular quote, which jumped out at me.

"Specifically, Rothenberg's research concludes that translogical types of thinking characterize both psychotics and highly creatives. Translogical thinking, he explains, is a type of conceptualizing in which the thinking processes transcend the common modes of ordinary logical thinking. 

It involves what Rothenberg calls janusian and homospatial processes. Janusian thinking is a conscious process of combining paradoxical or antagonistic objects into a single entity. Homospatial process is the essence of good metaphor. It means to superimpose or bring together multiple, discrete objects."

And here, again, the same idea.

"Two aspects of thinking in particular are pronounced in both creative and hypomanic thought: fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought on the one hand, and the ability to combine ideas or categories of thought in order to form new and original connections on the other"

Translogical thinking.  It's this idea that struck me, simply because it's news to me that this is unusual.  I presumed everyone did this, but maybe they don't?  The idea of thinking as a game, where you play with ideas, moving them around and putting odd combinations together just to see what you might get.

So what is happening?  Are we all mad?  I'm thinking back to another post I wrote ages ago, about the beauty of the unfinished piece, whether it be painting, poem, story or whatever.  That the unfinished piece holds a kind of magic that the finished piece doesn't, a dynamism and vitality because all the possibilities and potentials still exist.  And that is the exciting part for me as an artist.  Because while that piece stays unfinished, I can hold all those possibilities inside my mind, I can be in all those 'otherworlds' at once.  All those contradictions, and impossibilities can co-exist happily.  I can move around them, look at them from different points of view, try out different reactions to them.  I can thread two together that might seem utterly opposite, and find something beautiful or powerful in that conjunction.  And I think this is often the point where that something 'mystical' happens (if we want to put it like that), as if by putting together two disparate ideas we create a pathway that allows something else to come through, something that feels like it doesn't belong to us.  A secret whispered in our ears by a muse.  Who knows!  I once told a uni lecturer that I considered myself a 'post-modern humanist', and was told that was impossible because they are utterly contradictory schools of thought.  But it makes sense to me.  I can believe in faeries on one hand, and not believe in them at the same time.  And both are the truth.  I can look at an artwork I have created and see every painstaking line, every problem I had to resolve, remember seeing my hand create this and remember all the thought processes that have gone into it, and see it as nothing more than a thing I have made.  And at the same time I can be amazed and awed by what seems to be so much more than the fruits of my labour, a thing magical with a power of its own that is nothing to do with me.

This has probably gone on quite long enough, but it is a subject that I find endlessly fascinating, and enlightening to contemplate.  So this may just be 'Part 1.'   We'll see.  But for now, I'd better get both feet back into the real world, and bring my washing in!



Sometime later....!  Author Margo Lanagan's latest post, 'Truly, Madly, Deeply', just popped up in my blog reader.  I thought it worthwhile mentioning it here!

Still here...

Yes...it's been a while I know.  There isn't really a good reason, just lots of silly small ones I guess, you know, busy with things that often aren't really important but they take up time and more importantly, energy.  Boring life stuff.  Mojo a bit low too, and feeling that I haven't really got anything particularly interesting to tell you.  And at the same time, weirdly, too much to say to know where to start.  And good old procrastination of course.  So I won't rabbit on a lot now, just dipping my toe back in, and to show you a couple of things I've done in the last two weeks.  A big and a small painting, with a bit of scribbling on them.  Because I am, as I'm sure you well know, an inveterate scribbler!

"In the Realm of the Night."  I had two heavy, rustic wood frames made by a friend many years ago, which I've never been quite sure what to do with.  They called out to be much more than just frames, so I made this one part of the painting, with beads and fabric and bits of old jewellery all added into the mix.

This is "The Ragged Soul", to illustrate THIS poem of mine.  For anyone who has ever felt they weren't good enough, had failed, or just weren't the person they though they would be.

Acrylic, coloured pencil, pastel and ink.