November 1, 2005

"Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change." Ingrid Bengis

My introduction is late -- I can see that the difficult part of this journey (as I know from other journeys or attempts at them) is going to be the computer work. I started my morning pages on Saturday morning -- up early before my fellow weekend quilters were up and about, so I had the downstairs to myself and the words just flowed. Sunday morning I wasn't the first up and the others weren't far behind me. Much more difficult when there is conversation flowing around you, even if you "try" not to take part. Now that I'm home, I am still managing the morning pages, even did some of the exercises in Chapter 1 this morning -- I've read the introductory parts of the book and Chapter 1, some of it twice. Yesterday and today, I am VERY, VERY tired. More tired than I should be from my weekend trip -- I didn't get that little sleep while I was gone that I should be feeling this drained. Am I really this tired for good reason, or am I coming down with something? Or am I falling back on my time-honored method of dealing with things that are uncomfortable by sleeping to avoid them? Used to do this when I was a teenager and my dad and brother fought all the time. I would just go to bed and sleep to avoid the confrontations, and they weren't even my confrontations really. Tonight I'm going to give in and take a bath and go to bed very early and see if I can "sleep it off" so to speak. But I made myself promise that I would post here first so that if that's what the issue really is, I'm not letting myself get by with skipping out on this. I could tell from the very first day's morning pages that things would come to me to help me deal with this block and move forward, if I would just keep myself moving on this.

One of the monsters that haunts me is the fact that I would love to retire from the law firm life and be able to just make quilts. Now in order to do that, I have to win the lottery or find an outlet to sell some of my work. I have people at work ask me "do you ever sell your quilts?" I appear to be incapable to saying yes AND telling them a price that would make it worth my while to sell them. I think about all those hand-quilted (in some third world country where labor is very cheap) quilts you can get in any size for $59.99 everywhere you look, and I just can't say Yes I do sell them and a queen size quilt would cost you $350 or $500 or $1,000 -whatever the price would turn out to be. It's easier to make them and give them away to my friends and family, even though that may win me lots of accolades from them, but gets me no closer to my dream. I don't think that there's a specific person at any point in my life that I can attribute this hangup of mine to - or at least it hasn't come to me yet if there is. But it's a little bit like feeling that you can't be a real artist unless you've studied art -- for some reason, I feel like I can't sell my quilts for a price that would make it worthwhile because there are cheap quilts available out there and people won't understand if I ask for more than $60 for my quilt. It's a block that I need to move past, so I'll have to think more about it.

I love traveling in Mexico and since it's the appropriate season for their Day of the Dead ceremony, that has been on my mind a lot this week. My mom passed away last April, and since I'm too far from Southern Illinois to visit her grave to pay my respects, I thought perhaps I could use my artist date to create a little home altar in her honor. I have a picture of her that I've never framed, so I went to T.J. Maxx today and looked through their frames to see what I could come up with to frame the picture. Of course I didn't have the picture with me and the frames I picked up weren't the right size, so I'll have to head back there later this week, photo in hand, to see if I can find something that fits - it's one of those odd size photos, approx. 3x3", so I may have to get creative with something a bit too large for it -- a candle or two, some incense, I have a rose that I dried from one of the floral pieces at her funeral that I keep in a wine glass, rocks, crystals -- I have a lot of options here, now to decide where to put the altar and get it finished.

Okay, I'm heading for a nice bath with sea salt and eucalyptus oil now!

Pat