On muses and rules

I have been pondering on much lately... On how I got at the point that I don't blog, don't bead, don't create at all for that matter. Why has my muse left me? Or should I say: why have I abandoned my muse? Did I leave her somewhere and forgot all about her? Then, what is inspiration? Who is my muse? How can I meet her, and tap into her energy? Now that I re-read my last post, I realize that I have tried to examine my sudden lack of creativity and found some answers already. But still, all these big questions won't leave me.

Last year I embarked on this journey called The Bead Journal Project, or shortly the BJP. I was filled with enthusiasm, new ideas and had even managed to get a compassionate look at me, for I was a beginner. But somewhere over time my inner critic must have gotten a strong hold of me again and pushed the other voices into the background, leaving them too little space to breathe, be and create. Consuming a lot of the space they left open with new rules, set to keep in control of everything. Wait a minute... that's exactly what I wrote last time, and then I felt I could ignore her because she was shouting so blatantly in my face. That was October of last year, and I have still to pick up my beads again. Alas, I did pick them up once about 5 weeks ago or so, to start back at my May project... to no avail it seems.

Last time I wrote:
"Loyal as I usually am to the rules I set myself - and believe me, they are quite strict - I wouldn't allow me to start another project before the last one was finished and since I got stuck on that one... there is a huge roadblock to overcome."
Apparently, there are more rules than only this one or I would probably be back on track. What are those new rules then?

For starters, I was adamant about keeping up with each month (as I found out already), about making my own life the subject of all pieces, and about blogging on my doings regularly... Hmm, the first I failed at the start: it was well into February that I finished my January project. But at that point I did blog about my doings and thoughts, even about my life, so I wasn't too upset with myself. I still could be compassionate with me, so far so good. I kept up my work, but slowly got behind more and more. Next I realized that making my own, inner life the subject of all my pieces was a hard-core rule that kept me from simply having fun beading. I cut myself some slack and told myself that is was O.K. if I took a break and beaded about something else. But still this wasn't enough to silence my critic. She kept on shouting and I faltered on my blogging too, feeling that I wasn't worth being read if I didn't have anything good to tell.

Now I am at this point of return... I do want to get back to beading again, but am not sure whether or not to pick up last years BJP. Naturally, my inner critic wants me too, she won't be content with unfinished business. It was better to never have started if you aren't going to stick to it. Yet another rule unveiled!

From February untill early July 2010 I have spent more time in the hospital then at home, going through an emotional journey that felt like a roller-coaster from hell. During those months I switched medication 3 times, weaned off medicine at all, lost 11 kg (approximately 24 pounds), was nauseous every single day, didn't sleep well, had anxiety attacks... That was my status quo on homecoming. Getting back into a normal life was hard on these conditions, getting back to beading even more.

Still I have to see how I can make a grand come-back! Backstage I am well on my way. Starting November 29th. I got into a new therapy, based on the Schema Focused Therapy that was invented by Dr. Jeffrey Young. So far it has brought me back in touch with my inner voices, trying to lure the more silent ones out of their little corners. Giving them speech lessons on how to be heard more clearly. As far as I can tell now, it works for me and I grow stronger little by little. I knew that was the case when I realized today (3 weeks after starting writing this post!) that I could finish it... even if it wasn't perfect. AND I came up with a brand new idea!

A short while ago I visited Robin Atkinson's Flickr-page on which she exhibits a wonderfull project of hers: beaded Decade Dolls. Then today I saw a post by Susan Elliot over on Plays with Needles on her concept of an inner Queen... Combined with an idea that was already simmering in my mind to make spirit dolls, I came up with the inspiration to make dolls that represent all of my inner voices.

Now first to set some new rules:

• make no rules!
• enjoy the beading
• share the fun

How's that for a re-entry? I embark again today, and hope to keep you posted. Will you still be with me?

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) Austro-German poet.

What happened?

Oh my, what happened? I know I have been a little off lately, but when I took a peak at my last post I was startled to read it dated from July! Well, my 41st birthday has silently gone by but otherwise some changes have taken place. Last time I wrote: "After 9 years of pills, I am now on my own". I am sorry to say this pill-free episode didn't last very long. Around the time I wrote that, my anxiety/panic-attacks came back so badly that I had no choice but to start back on anti-depressants once again. Because in those past 9 years I have greatly suffered from side-effects of these meds, I was put on yet another one: I can now say I have tried 8 different ones so far. My current medication is tailored to depression and anxiety, so it helps me in both areas now. But before I could enjoy the benefits of this decision, I had to deal with the worst anxiety-attack in my life because of the medication. Luckily my psychiatrist warned me: it felt like a downright psychosis. Bless you if you cannot imagine what that is like!

In the meantime, school ha started again and life needed to go on... Needless to say I haven't been beading. The sad thing is though: I haven't been beading ever since summer. To be honest, I really don't know what has been keeping me. It can't be a lack of time because with losing my job I now have more time on my hands then before. Maybe my inner-voices can shed a little light on that?

There is one voice that keeps on telling me to start again, or I won't be back on track. Then continueing that my work can hardly be taken seriously, because I haven't kept up... But wait a minute: didn't the BJP-rules state that there was only one commmitment, being the one to myself? To go on that there were no such thing as a BJP-police to arrest me if I could not keep up? So frankly, the only one who has to take this seriously is me again! Hmm... my inner-critic is still here and trying to shout in my face so blatantly that I won't buy it this time.

Last time I also wrote: "(...) I think I will not bead the inside of me for a change... I need some vacation from me. Well, I need a little time off of all the therapeutic issues I have been dealing (and beading) with." The biggest thing holding me back I think is the fact that my May-piece didn't come on quite easily (and is still an unfinished one at that too). Loyal as I usually am to the rules I set myself - and believe me, they are quite strict - I wouldn't allow me to start another project before the last one was finished and since I got stuck on that one... there is a huge roadblock to overcome. So, let me start the climb back to the BJP by showing how far I did get om May:

Why my piece is all black&white I will tell you on a later date, i.e. when it has been finished. For now I hope to be back soon both in blogging and in beading. The first step has been set, and that is always the start of progress.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) British journalist, novelist and poet.

thoughts on june and july

For whatever reason, I don't seem to get around blogging these days. Neither am I getting a lot of beading done... still working on my may-piece. The theme of which will be black&white. More on that on a later date, because if I don't put some thoughts on june or july in black and white, I won't know what to bead for these months once I get the time.

For starters I definitely need to make my june piece less elaborate: fully covering a 14x14 cm square of felt with beads and trinkets is a tedious job. Not that I don't love it, but some flow does make it easier on me I discovered. And flow is what is lacking at the moment. In addition I think I will not bead the inside of me for a change... I need some vacation from me. Well, I need a little time off of all the therapeutic issues I have been dealing (and beading) with. The past few months have flown by and at the same time feel like I have lived them a dozen times. So with these things in mind, what does june mean to me?

June means bright red poppies in a field of green grass bathing in sunshine on a bright summersday, something like this:

Every year I can stand in awe looking at the meadows filled with flowers of the field and feel like a little girl again, wanting to braid a wreath of flowers to put in my hair. (If not the stems of poppies were to thin to do so.) I don't know wheather it is the fact that I am a child of summer, or that the sunshine softens my often painfully present symptoms of depression during winter and early spring... Fact is, I long for these days every year and love the colours, the happiness, the light-footed quality of things that I am searching for in my own being.

And then july... It is the month in which I celebrate the birthday of my youngest (he is 6 already!) and my own too (for the 41st time this upcoming week). The month in which we went on a short vacation to France to spend a little time with my parents in law who own a house in the Poitou-Charentes. I guess I will just need some memorabilia from my vacation and try to use them in my beading. It will be a warm reminder of a nice time spend with loved ones.

So far, so good I guess. Now I will have to return to ordinary life in which I am still struggling with my depression. But there is some good news about that too: I am fighting it without any type of medication now! After 9 years of pills, I am now on my own. It is scary, it does come with anxiety and fear, but I am still standing and feeling more then before everything that is within and around me and girl... I can tell you it is as overwhelming as the first landing on the moon must have been the year I was born.

BJP for april 2010

It's been a long time since I've posted, a hazardous journey has begun but I am still here to tell about it.

OK, now is time for a confession: aside from being genetically endowed with genes that make depression run in our family, I also suffer from what is called a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It is hard for me to say this, as for a long time I felt that being diagnosed with BPD meant that one was the kind of person no one would want to be around. Deciding to accept my diagnosis and open myself up to deal with it and start healing was a giant leap. That's why I choose the rabbithole from Alice in Wonderland as my theme for april. Seeing Alice in 3D on the brink of my great adventure seemed like more than a coincidence.

As it is in myth and fairy-tales, the heroine often sets out on a bad start. And so did I on my april piece. I wrote all about that in my previous post. Work on this piece was quite labourious. I got stuck numerous times, started over, got set back, picked it up again... I surrounded the hole by fresh green grass, beaded some pahtways alongside of it, added a few of the beaded flowers that I had made in advance... and now I have something to show for all my effort.

For the first 3 months I divided my pieces in seperate sections and wrote about them, naming them. Not so this time. That's a first for me: I usually need to stick to something once I have started a routine. For me to break that rule feels quite scary. But this is an adventure that is (among others) about breaking the rules of my inner critic! What is most visible in this piece is that the surroundings of my rabbithole are you could say chaotic, but more lovingly I would say variegated. It is, what it is and it is one piece.

I love that the tiny green and red flowerbeads date back from my early teens, when I first picked up making jewelry. The medal dates back even further and is mine from an event called de avondvierdaagse. This is a very Dutch event, where schoolchildren walk a distance varying from 5 to 15 km on 4 consecutive nights. When you have finished your first time around you get a medal, and in later years a small pin to go on the ribbon. I have walked it a couple of times, but only have this medal and no pins. I used it for 2 reasons: I needed me to be in this piece and I deserved some encouragement for having the guts to start this endeavor.

I have chosen Chopin's Etude opus10 nr. 1 to go with my piece. It reflects the ultimate chaos I experienced just before I started my treatment, yet it is one of the most brilliant pieces of pianomusic I know. I hope that's how this all will work out in the end: that I have learned to hear and appreciate all the different tunes in me, that in the end make... ME. So you could say I have landed on the bottom of the hole, and now am out to find my jabberwocky. I have met the red queen, seen glimpses of the white queen... This tale is not over yet.

April-Fool in May

Got all of us (including myself) fooled last month in thinking I had my plan for my april BJP-piece all conjured up. I had cut up my pieces of white and blue felt, sorted out all my shades of white and blue beads.... and then suddenly realized I was not going to make a Delfts Blauw piece all together. I have made myself one promiss when starting out on this journey, and that was making each piece a journal of that particular month. The thoughts I had on the Delftware piece are still very nice, and I did celebrate Koninginnedag but still that doesn't resemble in any way what I have been through in april. So here I am again for something completely different.

As some of you may know, I started an intensive therapy programm april 19th in hope of finding a way to deal with my recurrent and very severe depression(s). A couple of days before I started, I saw the movie Alice with a dear friend, and realized that the beginning of the film - where Alice looks into the rabbithole before falling in - was exactly depicting how I felt. I was sitting an the rim of the hole and knew I had to jump in on monday. It was terrifying! Mostly because I had hardly any idea of what was going to happen after I had taken that giant leap into the unknown. Now I have shrunk and grown and shrunk again a couple of times, I ran through the forest of Underland and am still waiting for the day I will have to slay my own jabberwocky. That is when I decided to bead my own Rabbithole.

So I went to my attic and was very pleased to find some green felt and then it began: the making of the rabbithole was an adventure in itself. I first set out to make a sleeve of plain, black cotton cloth to fit the hole I had cut into the felt. It took a while untill I thought I had succeeded, but the sleeve was to long so I tore off  a just a small part. Ha! It didn't tear straight, because I had sewn the sleeve on leaving the direction of the weave in my cotton slightly slanting (if that is the correct phrase to use). Then I thought that if I would tear in the other direction I would make it straight again... All I did was shorten the sleeve on both occasions, leaving me with just a trim of black cloth around my rabbithole. Feeling very frustrated I took the whole thing off and decided to bead the thing!

You know what was so marvelous in what happenend next? As soon as I started beading around the hole, I knew I was on the right track just because I couldn't stop beading! It started to emerge under my hands as I was picking up the beads. After I had beaded a nice, wobbly edge to my rabbithole I realized I needed it filled up with "dirt". My attic was good to me in providing a good piece of brown felt and I soon was beading away again. Now the rabbitle is done for the time being at least. I had already beaded some flowers to fill up the green. Now on to the next stage... beading a lawn and finding a way to fit me in it.

BJP for march 2010

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my march-piece in my post Growing Strong. Little did I know it would grow out to the extend that it has! It all started with doodling while at work in late january, early february. (For those who have not  followed me here or on Facebook: I have been on sickleave since february 9th.) I doodled a simple tree with just a few leaves, which is exactly what I started out with on this piece.

Soon I added the heart at the centre of my tree and the fringes that most, who saw this beginning, named roots. They were not intended to represent roots, but maybe they have become roots in the process. I wanted to make the trees connection to the soil visible and the nutrients it gets from it. I thought of those tree-foods as the fuel for the tree to be able to live, the "fire within" or Chi, hence the red/orange/yellow beads.

And then all of a sudden, I released myself from hospital and tumbled into turmoil. Because I have the intention to make my pieces real journals, in the sense that I want them to tell my story of that month, the turmoil has become very visible in the end. This is the landscape the tree grew into:

As I did with my other pieces, I want to tell you in more detail what all the parts mean. So I have once againg devided it into sections:

1. I stand strong
I could also call this piece: I will survive. That is exactly what this sturdy tree is meant to be: the confirmation that through all turmoil I will straighten my back and will stand. My feet connected to Mother Earth, growing and nourishing the fire that is crackling in my veins.

2. I'm working in my garden
The garden has, now that I write this down, become my metaphor for the rough times I am working through. In my february-piece I took a piece of my heart and replaced it in a little garden to heal and grow again. In this piece, the righthand corner is the most peacefull and restfull. I loved to play with colors in the beads as well as the thread, and that did make me feel comfortable. Although being in admitted wasn't easy, I found rest and a little distraction in beading which is visible in this part.


3. where I can bloom and lay back
The grass on the bottom is the last part of the piece that I embroidered while still in the hospital, before the turmoil began. Not that my moods weren't swinging from the highest highs to the lowest lows at that time, but I found some ways to still be able to tune in to my inner needs and wishes: to lay back, rest and bloom again. The first few days at home I could tap into that stream although it became harder by the hour. So when I beaded the bright (white) air and the flowers, I stopped working on this corner and moved up.

4. dark clouds are gathering
After a few days it was obvious that my stay in hospital didn't bring me any good. On the contrary, the events of the last days of my stay made it clear that my depression had gotten worse and I was far from laying back and blooming. In fact, I could feel the tension aching in all the fibres of my body. I felt as though a giant thunderstorm was going to overcome me and would wash me away. There was no movement, no going with the flow, just straight lines of fear, anger and sadness, the absence of colour.

5. growing leafs
Then I returned to the heart of my tree, to the fire within, and realized that I had to grow a lot more leafs to reach out to the world, to get in touch with the Earth and myself. So for a couple of nights I franticly beaded leafs.... first in the color of fire, but as they grew more and more to the outer limits of the tree in pale but promissing green. I call them my "ghost-leaves" meaning that they will grow eventually, although now there may still only be a promiss. Then I refound some peace and the skies turned blue again. With white clouds, but blue, meaning the heaviest part of the storm was over... the sun was going to shine again.

March was quite a month, quite a story... but in the end I have learned that somehow, somewhere there must be a way that I can stand up and say: Hey, I am growing strong!

I won't leave you without a proper piece of music to accompany this piece. To be honest it took me quite a while before I found a piece that illustrated my feelings. I think I have found it in this "Little Fugue" in G-minor, BWV 578 by Johann Sebastian Bach (one of my favorite composers). Originally the piece was composed for the organ, but here it is performed on the piano.The sound in this video is not perfect, but the visualization shows how the simple line (doodle) at the start is accompanied by other melodies into quite a sound and then to return to a more peacefull ending.

Here I am

So here I am, working steadily on my march-piece that is branching out to a level I hadn't expected and hesitantly starting thinking on my april piece, while april is already halfway gone! While pondering about what april means to me immediately our national holiday Koninginnedag came to mind. A tradition that started when our late Queen Juliana was crowned, for her birthday was april 30th. After she resigned and our current Queen Beatrix took over her reign she pronounced that april 30th would stay a national holiday in honor of her mother. So for as long as I have lived, april 30th was a very festive day.

The Dutch national color is orange, because our royal family is of the House of Orange-Nassau. Personally I don't care at all for the color orange, so I decided to find a way around using this color. (Note that my april piece has not one bead on it yet!) Staying in line with my wanting to make a Dutch piece, I thought of another well know Dutch thing: Delfts Blauw. Anyone who has ever visited the Netherlands will have seen the little blue and white souvenirs of windmills, clogs, and a sweet girl&boy kissing. I do like this color-combination because of it's simplicity and it's great variation in hues.

Next I also realized that I did not want to make another solidly bead beaded piece, as my march piece is turning out. Not that I don't like it, but is more work then I ever phantomed. I wanted to do something with two layers of felt and realized that I have a handwork encyclopedia with a vast amount of crafts explained in detail. While just browsing the pages I stumbled upon a Hungarian technique of sewing two layers of felt togehter and then cutting out shapes that were outlined in the sewing. I have tried to find an online example of this technique, but haven't been able to.

So here I am, with my april piece taking shape in my mind, and nothing to show for it. It is growing in the shade of my march tree waiting to get a chance...

Climb a tree - it gets you closer to heaven.
Author Unknown