Love Notes

I bought some watercolour pencils last week and have been having so much fun playing around with them. Last night I decided to make some of my experiments into little note cards to send to friends via snail mail. I have a pretty big collection of stationary already, but there is something extra sweet about sending something handmade.

Scribblings

I've been in a creative funk lately. One of my lovely readers, Hannah - whose blog, The Storialist, is absolutely delightful - commented on my last post and voiced a niggling feeling I had been having: "There will always be more creativity. Scribble and out it will come." So, I took her quite literally today. I pulled out a sketchbook and a trusty black felt tip pen and scribbled. I didn't produce anything earth-shattering, but it was a good feeling to be creative, to fill pages with doodles and sketches and, well, scribbles. It's been seriously weird the last couple weeks. I've felt as if my skeleton has been pulled from my body. Just limp and lifeless. The only time I've felt really whole has been when I've been immersed in a good book (still working my way through Sylvia Plath's journals and loving it). It's nice to get a bit of creative spark back and begin to feel more solid once again.

Smile, Baby

Today I was amazed by the power of a simple smile. I had a long, long day. Yesterday was a long, long day. The next three days will be long, long days. It could easily have become a day where I got crabby. One of my friends though, who I didn't even have an actual conversation with, smiled at me this afternoon across the hallway and that alone was enough to keep my day from descending into disgusting realms of crabbiness. Amazing.

To Make Love Necessary

I know I must honour Athos's lessons, especially one: to make love necessary. -- Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels 

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in a casket or coffin of your own selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. -- C.S. Lewis

Every so often I find that there is a topic that comes up in my life over and over again. This semester one of the topics we discussed in Psyc-Lit was the connection between vulnerability and love. It came up in at least three of the texts we discussed, including Fugitive Pieces which I adore, and I wrote two papers on this idea. It's something that has been popping up in my personal life too. I've been doing some serious thinking about the state of my heart and how I treat it. Then awhile ago one of my friends posted some lyrics from The Frozen Ocean's "In the Garden" as his Facebook status. This reminded me how much I really like The Frozen Ocean and sent me searching through my iTunes for their music and then listening to it over and over again. One of their songs, "Lost at Sea", starts with a reading of this quote from C.S. Lewis. I've been having some deep conversations with a girl who is quickly becoming one of my dearest friends, the kind of conversations that require trust from both parties. One of the things that she pointed out to me not so long ago is that one of the themes that seems to be emerging in my life is "make love necessary". It's true too. If I had to choose some touchstone words for my life as I head into 2011 I think they would be "love", "balance", "vulnerability" and "beauty". I like to think that when something keeps popping up in your life over and over again it is something you should probably do some serious thinking about. So I am. Just thought I would let you know that.

Dreary Days

The weather has turned grey and rainy lately. This would be perfectly acceptable except for the fact that the wind has also picked up to ridiculous levels making it next to impossible to be outside for any length of time. Plus the wind negates any possibility of using an umbrella. I moved out of the apartment today and this windy rainy grossness is definitely not ideal moving weather. On the subject of activities that are not ideal in this weather, I am getting a haircut tomorrow (yay!) which means that I have to head down to Whyte on the bus in the rainy windy grossness.

The scribbly, mindless nature of this picture kind of sums up how I'm feeling right now. The dullness of the weather plus the post-exams sensation of brainlessness plus the ridiculousness of packing/unpacking plus the beginning of the job hunt have all combined to reduce my mind to little more than a bowl of soup. I hate these transitional phases. They are always awkward and leave me feeling all off-kilter. I know that once I find a job for the summer things will settle down and feel a little less awkward, but just the nature of being a student seems to leave me in this position a lot. Even though my parents' house is still home it just feels impermenant somehow. I think because I'm only here for four months over the summer...I don't know. I read a post a while ago from Delightfully Tacky, one of my favorite bloggers, where she talked about the feeling that a phase of your life is like a puzzle piece that just doesn't quite fit. That is exactly the sensation that I have right now. Scribbles. Mashed puzzle pieces. It's like someone let a two year old loose in my life.

Doodles

I literally feel like my brain has stopped working. I'm still forming complete sentences though so that is a good thing. I had an unintended nap this afternoon so I don't feel tired, but I do feel rather useless and that is not making the process of editing my Art History paper that is due tomorrow very pleasant. This mental state made a picture of random doodling seem appropriate since this is about the level my brain is functioning at. I actually like this picture for its sheer randomness and its color.

If you have some time to kill you should wander over to "My Love for You is a Stampede of Horses" and read this post on a studio visit with Steve MacDonald (aka Ramblin Worker). He works mostly with sewing and machine embroidery and some of his work is really really cool. I am loving the alphabet print and the bicycle print. Either of those would make a super cute skirt or dress or tshirt. Actually, on his facebook fan page he has pictures of a tshirt that has both letters and bikes on it...awesome.