My Dreams, My Art and The Happy Home Inside of Me

These Winter Potholders have me in their grip.

I go to my studio, thinking I’ll start something new.  But the scraps from my Evergreen Bird and  Winter Woods Potholders  are still on my work table and it’s like they’re calling to me.   Like they’re telling me that there are still more potholders to be made.

I was talking to my therapist today about the importance of dreams.  She was saying how we work out our issues, from the day or from our past, in our sleep.  That through dreams our subconscious can reveal our truths and help us heal.

I know this is true about my dreams and even sleep itself.  I’ve experienced it many times.  But I do like having it confirmed by a professional that I trust.

It made me think  how it is the same with my art.  How my art has always told me things about myself that I wasn’t aware of.

I am often drawn to making something without really understanding why or what it will become. But as I work it begins to reveal itself, or when I am done I look at it and can see what it is about or what it is saying to me.

It demands a certain amount of trust, to continue working on something even if I’m not sure why,  but I have come to trust my these creative impulses.

That’s the subconscious at work.  And it makes me feel lucky to be able to have this connection to my subconscious while sleeping, but also when I’m awake.

Often I’ve thought of how my art is healing to me as well as the people who eventually live with it, or even the people who see it being made on my blog.

My Happy Home Potholders weren’t as popular as many of my pieces.  But I know I needed to make them.  That they speak not as much to the idea of a house or family as home, but to myself as my home.

I was reading about the Psychologist Richard Schwartz  in the book  The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk.  He came up with the idea that people who have experienced childhood trauma have ” a family” inside of them.  These are the parts of the a person that split off in order to deal with the trauma.

To me it’s similar to the idea of  Soul Retrievals, practiced by Shamans.

It’s about finding and talking to the hurt parts of ourselves, often the child part, but also the angry adult who lashes out or behaves erratically.    The parts of us that don’t have words or the ability to deal with what is happening to them.

I like the idea that “a family” lives inside of me. That I’m made up of different parts and that there is one part of me, my true self,  that is undamaged.  That through techniques that once served me like hyper vigilance and anxiety, my “undamaged essence” survived.  And that it is “confident, curious and calm.”  So when  the child in me need reassuring, or the adult calming,  the true me is there for her.

Just as Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ always had the power to go home, the “happy home”  was inside of me all the time.

I just had to find if for myself.