I had three collages in my Freedom Book that I was working on today along with the bigger collages. These are all three of them. I consider them finished. There are all 4″x5″.
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“One Pink Boot” In My Freedom Book
Once a week Emily Gold (a fellow Bellydancer) and I have a Zoom Studio Share. We talk mostly about what art we made that week.
This week Emily was working on animating one of her drawings. (you can see some of her work including some of her animations here) and I showed her my collages.
Emily has been doing collage for a long time. She was the one who inspired and encouraged me to try it.
I was telling her how I realize that I’m just learning how to use the different materials. And that I’m still very unsure about what I’m doing. Although I do have the feeling that the pieces are, like my other work, beginning to let me know what they want.
One of the things we talked about was keeping the subject matter simple. Either repeating one image or idea or just creating a ground with the collage and then having one image or idea that the piece is about.
It was with our conversation in mind that I made the collage above.
The photo below is what the collage looked like yesterday.
A part of me wonders about covering up all those interesting images. But I’m thinking that maybe all of that is necessary to get to the point where I am now. That the images, composition and color wouldn’t have happened without first laying down all drawings, fabric, paper etc. that I did.
Freedom Book Collage
I started this collage today in my Freedom Book. It’s about 5″x8″.
I’m still peeling matt medium off my fingers from working on the two collages today. I can’t seem to just use a brush. My fingers always want to get involved. And I often work on a wet surface because I don’t have the patience to wait for the paint or medium to dry.
Sometimes that works out okay and sometimes it just makes a mess.
Freedom Book, My Artist Residency Begins
I didn’t plan on beginning my self-imposed artist residency today, but when I woke up this morning, it felt like it had begun.
I don’t know how to explain it except that despite some voices in my head that said otherwise, my body was ready. And it wasn’t going to do anything it didn’t want to. So I got last week’s potholders that I sold over the weekend in the mail and went to my studio.
Once again I had a few ideas that ricocheted around in my head, but I wasn’t thinking about what to do, I just began doing it.
I pulled out a piece of cardboard that I saved to cover my desk so I won’t have to worry about keeping it clean for my sewing and dumped out the padded envelope of supplies that Emily sent me last week. I got my big jar of matt medium, some markers and transparent hankies and turned the pages of the little 4″x5″ book that Emily made and gave to me.
I looked at the collages I started making a few weeks ago and for the next couple of hours, I tore and glued and cut and painted and drew and colored. I pulled up some of the pieces I glued down two weeks ago, cut them up and moved them around.
When I stopped, I had three collages.
I’m not sure if they’re done or not. I’ll give them a chance to be for a while and see if they need anything else.
One thing I notice about making these is that it’s so easy to make a mark, to cut and paste that I work quickly. Too quickly I think. I need to slow myself down, to let them speak to me like I do my other work. It’s such a new medium for me, I’m just learning how to work with it.
I worked on all three at the same time never giving each one the time to dry. They’re in a book so it matters because the pages stick together and some of the edges don’t stick.
But that didn’t stop me. I don’t want to exert that much control over the materials. I like that they sometimes do their own thing. And if I decide I don’t like it, I can always put something over it or just remove it.
So far, for me, these are all about freedom, intuition, and feeling. Maybe that’s a good name for them. They’re Freedom Collages in my Freedom Book.
The Other Side Of Fear Is Freedom
I lay in bed and the fear rose up in me. For the first time in my adult life I did not send my brother a birthday card. I haven’t spoken to him for years, but still the cards at Christmas and on birthdays were sent and arrived, a white flag in the silence. A nod to the unspoken rules of the family.
I’ve been breaking the family rules for some time now and each time I do, it continues to frighten me.
I didn’t think much about this one, I just didn’t do it.
And then the fear came in the night.
My instinct was to run from it. Divert my attention, distract the menacing hum gathering in my body. Instead, I let myself feel the fear. I allowed the voices to have their say.
As the nun from my dream the night before instructed, I looked inside myself.
And when I did, I saw the fear of abandonment, of not belonging, of getting in the kind of trouble that can hurt a child, dependent on her family. But now it was as if I was observing the feelings instead of feeling them. That what my body was experiencing had nothing to do with the person I was at that moment.
There was a flash of color and light, an indecipherable image and a sense of before and after. I felt the freedom before my mind made it all into the words: The other side of this is freedom.
Not only did I know it was true, but I could feel it. I knew myself as the person who lived in that freedom.
This was a panic attack averted.
My panic attacks turn me into a frightened child. They make me irritable and short-tempered. When I’m having a panic attack, I feel so out of control, I go to extremes to feel in control. Small things that have no great importance become big in my mind. An object out of place or in my way can become the target of my fear-driven frustration. As can a person or animal who doesn’t behave exactly what I want them to.
Panic attacks are also physically and emotionally exhausting and distract me from doing my work.
Just the thought of visiting my mother throws me into a panic attack. Days before the visit, I start to sink into a fearful and depressive state. After the visit, which is always cordial, I am relieved and wonder why I had the reaction I did before the visit.
I’ve been consciously repeating this pattern for years.
I’ve been to therapists, healers and have read many books on the subject. I understand that contact with my family is a trigger. I have learned techniques to deal with it to a point.
I’ve also learned that it will probably never completely go away.
So today, when I was trying to walk off the physical effects of a panic attack, I found myself yelling at Fate, loud enough to hurt my throat, who was eating the remains of a deer.
After we had moved on, away from the deer, I stopped and gathered myself. This is not who I am, I said out loud. I am not a fearful controlling person, not anymore.
It was at that moment I decided I would not put myself into a situation that caused me to panic if I could help it. I knew what I was going through wasn’t healthy for me or the people and animals around me.
And I knew I could avoid it.
The panic came when I thought about making plans to visit my mother. But it began to subside when I told myself I wouldn’t do it today. I would take it a day at a time, gauging how I felt and not doing anything that caused me to have a panic attack.
I don’t want to hurt my mother by not visiting her when I said I would. But I also don’t want to put myself through this anymore.
Right now I’m not feeling the guilt and obligation that made me consider making plans for a visit in the first place. I’m not sure why, maybe they were pushed aside when my sense of self-preservation took over.
I’m not thinking about tomorrow. I’m only trying to hold on to the feeling of what is best for me and my life right now.
And I’m also trying to hold on to that feeling of freedom that lives on the other side of fear and panic.
Book Tour, Sweeter Than Before
Oh, how book tours have changed. And how sweet they are now.
Jon and I aren’t flying to big cities and staying in fancy hotels anymore. I’m not dropping him off and picking him up at the airport every few days.
And I know in some ways, that’s difficult for Jon. Just this morning he wondered out loud if it would have been better not to have experienced the old days of publishing. If it would be easier never to have had it.
For me, I’m glad I got to experience the way things used to be. It was fun and exciting to be a part of. But actually, whether we’re traveling around the country or going no further than Vermont, I get just as excited about Jon’s book tours.
Of course I wish he got the attention he used to get when a book came out. I wish publishing hadn’t changed as it has, for the sake of so many writers and for us readers. But that change helped bring about the success of Jon’s blog, Bedlam Farm Journal. A form of writing I believe Jon loves just as much, or maybe even more than book writing.
And that work, that creative struggle to make our lives according to our wants and needs, is something we share. Jon may not make as much money, or get TV interviews like he used to, but he gets the freedom to write what he wants. There are no regrets when it comes to that.
And it’s true, if we had more money, neither of us would have to work as hard or be as creative in creating and marketing what we do. I don’t believe we’d be as prolific and I don’t know if our work would be as good.
So Jon’s book tour may not be as big as it used to be, but it is sweeter. And it speaks to our whole life, not just one book.
Tonight Jon will give a reading at Battenkill Books. Our bookstore, in our town, with our community. Tomorrow he’ll sign more books, (in our bookstore, in our town) which will be shipped around the country to our other community, the on-line community.
Book Tours are not the same, and it may not feel like the same kind of success as the big crowds, long signing lines and dinners with publishers.
But it’s a different kind of success. A handmade success. It’s not just about selling the most books, it’s more holistic. It’s about freedom, and the creative integration of life and work and community.
You can buy Jon’s new book “Talking To Animals” and support our community bookstore Battenkill Books here.
Freedom Burns My Bones
Freedom Burns My Bones
I gather myself
in the bathtub
crouching in its heat
How can it be that I’ve lived in this house
three years and this is my first bath
Why have I deprived myself this pleasure
When I no longer believe
that suffering will save me
I want to live like the heroine
in the book
The independent one
who makes her own decisions
without remorse
or feels remorse and does it anyway
The bath water is so hot
it makes the cold air
warm
on my naked body
Freedom burns my bones
And I melt into the sun.
Freedom To Be Creative
One of the things that happened when Jon was in the hospital and even after he came home was that I wasn’t working. And before he went into the hospital I hadn’t been in my studio because I was preparing for the Open House. So all totaled, I didn’t work in my studio for about four weeks. This is the longest amount of time I’ve ever spent not working in my studio. I’ve taken vacations of 4 or 5 days, but would never have imagined not being in my studio for so long.
I remember last year, when Jon had Lyme Disease and was so sick he couldn’t get out of bed, wondering what would happen if I couldn’t get into my studio to do my work. I worried about it not so much creatively as financially. Because I had gotten in the habit of making something in a day or two (or longer for a quilt) and selling it right away. I got good at making things people wanted to buy. Which, of course, is a good thing because it allows me to do what I love and make a living at it.
But lately, the pressure was starting to get to me. I felt that if I made something and it didn’t sell right away (meaning within a few hours or a day at the latest) that I was over. People had gotten tired of my work and didn’t want it anymore. Knowing if my work was good was becoming dependent on whether or not someone wanted to buy it or how many comments I got about it on facebook or my blog. I was looking too much outside of myself for validation.
But then it happened. Jon was in the hospital and I wasn’t making art to sell for four whole weeks. And suddenly my great fear of not making art and selling it every day vanished. I realized that I could survive without spending every Monday through Friday doing my work. And with this realization came a sense of freedom. Freedom in knowing that I could spend time in my studio and make something without knowing if it will sell or not. Freedom to be creative in a new way, to explore what I might do if I didn’t have to think about selling it.
The anxiety of having to sell everything I make, that I’ve had for the past six years since I started my business, has dissipated. That’s why I was able to make my Linen Napkin Notebook pieces and “Boot” which I made yesterday. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to sell my art anymore, or that I don’t need to. I do. It just takes some of the pressure off and allows me to be more creative and try different things.
I would never have imagined that Jon having open heart surgery could relieve stress for me in some way. I would have imagined it could only do the opposite. I hope not to squander this gift, to be able to remember it and incorporate it into my life permanently. It was too hard to come by to just give away.
Freedom to…..
After Strut, the rooster, was no longer around I noticed that the chickens would wander more. They don’t stick together as much and we’d see them way off in the pasture. Yes, it is probably more dangerous for them, but they get to go where they want when they want. I’d choose freedom over safety any day. This morning when the hens stayed on the roost until after 10am JoAnne on facebook suggested that maybe since Strut wasn’t pushing them out of the chicken house, they chose to sleep late. I made this potholder last week when I first noticed the difference in the hen’s behavior. I guess my next one will be Freedom to Sleep Late.
Freedom to Wander is SOLD for sale for $25 + $5 shipping, if you’re interested in it, just email me here at [email protected]
Defending My Freedom
I started this pillow last week, and once again I can hardly remember the process. Although looking at it now I can see I dug deep for this one. I’ve been reading the Christiane Northrup book on menopause and she wrote that during perimenopause we pick up where we left off in adolescence when it come to individuation. Freedom is a state of mind, once you have it, there’s no going back.
In Defending my Freedom, Blessing my Anger the warrior goddess looks like she’s ready to fight, although her weapon has a heart on it. For most of my life I’ve been afraid of my anger and other peoples anger too. But I’ve learned, like every emotion it has a purpose and when used properly, is very powerful. 
I think of the poem A Just Anger by Marge Piercy : “…A good anger acted upon is beautiful as lightning and swift with power. A good anger swallowed clots the blood to slime.”
“Freedom is burning a hole in my soul, the desert of my heart knows rain, defending my freedom, blessing my anger, know me, desire me, feed me, fill me up, I am perfect”
Defending My Freedom, Blessing My Anger is sold. The streaming piece is about 12″x16″ and the whole pillow is 21″x 28″.
