Gold in Dark Times

2021

 

Hi everyone, I hope you are well.  It's been a long time since I've written here, for a proliferation of reasons, but I have missed chronicling my creative thoughts here.  So, for 2021, that will be something I plan to do more of.  What a crazy past 12 months!  

Above are a set of 2 mini 2021 journals for sale in my shop.  I made them at the close of last year in anticipation of the challenges and beauty of the upcoming year - the culmination of social distancing, enlightenment, stress, and yes, the extreme highs and lows of 2020.  It feels like it's been a lifetime.

Thank you for being here with me.  Even after 11 years (I now, right??), I am still thrown into a flurry of excitement and joy when I receive an order.  Your support is so deeply appreciated.  This year, I'll be sharing more here about what's been creatively dear to my heart, what I call this heartbeat, because I feel that that's all we can do right now.  Live by every heartbeat and every breath.  Thankful for the little things.  

No more poignant than today.  I posted this poem a handful of years ago on this blog, and felt it was appropriate right now.  Stay safe and healthy!

Nature Inspiration

 

via my Instagram account

I enjoy the anonymity of visiting less-traveled public spaces, exploring their nooks and crannies, getting lost in the surreal nature of their very existence. My little girl is often my sidekick on these adventures; occasionally a friend joins in. But the experience, even if my anonymity is no longer viable, is always a soul-stirring moment. I rarely capture the true essence of a scene, but I proved myself wrong with this capture.

Inspiration: Peace Pendant

Peace Pendant

I'm an on-hiatus jewelry maker, but looking at jewelry is one of my favorite things to do when the toddler sleeps.  And since I'm not a metalsmith, looking at hand-fabricated pieces has always been fun for me.  The above piece, by Promethean Design, has stolen my heart.  It's recycled sterling silver made from scraps the designer had from previous pieces.  Lucky is the person who purchases it.  Baby A. would have too much of a field day swinging it around and bonking her head in the process.  Ah, toddlerhood.

Be Happy

via Etsy

Meiko | I Do

From Meiko's new album, Moving Day.

Happy Autumn

via Instagram

Been quiet around here.  Spending time outdoors to take in the start of autumn: the profuse colors, scents, and sounds.  The fog rolling in and then out, the stillness that abounds.  A heat wave has found its way here, and because of it I move languidly among the mums, blueberries, and dainty yellow daisies.  Hopefully this heat wave is short lived.  The earthy, rich colors though are here to stay as I stroll around and attempt to capture their beauty through the opportune lens of a smartphone.  Clumsily, quietly, I prevail.

Bright Days

I've never really been a bright color type of girl.  Often, I favor earth tones and neutrals, plus the occasional dusty pink, jade green, or plum purple come fall.  But lately, I don't know.  Maybe it's the summer warmth, the longer days, the onset of sun.  All I know is that it's a welcome change.

Here are some of my favorite recent Pinterest finds:

via Pinterest

via Pinterest

via Pinterest

via Pinterest

via Pinterest

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Hope you're all having a wonderful summer.  This time of year is definitely a creativity booster, and I'm working with it to the fullest.

  If you're interested, please follow along on Pinterest here.

Behind the Scenes of an Old Book

This is a photo I took a few years ago, but it's still one of my favorites.  The book is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, and is a 19th-century marvel of utterly romantic (and disturbing...) proportions.  My edition was printed in the 1990s.  

From the pages of this book, I create the majority of my stamped book page items for sale in shop.  There's just something gorgeous and tactile about these particular pages: the outside edges are a soft golden hue that mellow inward into unobtrusive font on a pale cream-colored background.  It leaves me to wonder if the book was, in a previous life, placed on a bookshelf near a sunny window where sunlight left its heated imprint on the exterior of the text.  Or maybe the book was read once for a college English literature class and then discarded among other literary treasures of its kind in an indistinguishable book stack.  Who knows?  It's mine now.  The book's story is now this: a good number of its pages have been distributed throughout the US as stamped book page goods from my shop--I think this is a pretty unique outcome for a once-inconsequential used book.  Also, the cover is moody and ambient in varying shades of blue, which I find awe-inspiring to stare at. 

In other words, this particular book is a keeper.

Writer's Stuff

Some favorites from my Writer's Stuff Etsy board.
Follow along if you're so inclined!

Inspiration: Spring Greenery

                                                                    via my Pinterest account


Winter isn't over yet, but I've been fawning over spring-green finds on Pinterest.  Images of florals and architecture and nature, especially.  An intoxicating splash of deep green always finds its way into my curated boards.  My most popular board is Romantic Wedding, followed by Write, Write, Write, and Gifts for the Writer (in that order).  It's my hope that my shop-specific boards will become favorites, as well.  Feel free to follow along for visual inspiration, DIY ideas, and new pins (added weekly).

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Have you heard?  This year, I'm donating $1 from every listing purchased to the nationwide food bank charity, Feeding America.  This means your purchase will have a doubly good purpose! #goodsforgood  My 2016 goal is to donate a total of $175.

A donation will be made at the end of each month--with your support, I donated $15 last month.
Read the full details here.

Book Inspiration: Villette

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I'm getting ready to make my first monthly donation (2016 donation goal of $175)!  With each listing purchased in shop, I'll donate $1 to Feeding America--read the details here.

A Rainy Day

It's been a rainy January here.  These photos were taken this month on my smartphone, except for the window shot, which was from my camera.  With this month's steady rain, I've been testing the limits of my smartphone's camera, and have since learned that with it, indoor window shots (of a dark sky and raindrops) always turn out blurry.   

Been trying to not repost my daily Instagram photos here.  It's important to me that content is fresh and kept separate, although subject matter may overlap.  (Twitter, on the other hand, still confuses me--too many options for retweeting.)  Post-rain outdoor photography sessions are this month's muse...

The foggy chill after a heavy rain first pulls me outside, while capturing raindrops on camera (or smartphone) comes in a close second.  Standing, crouching, and shivering to the bone in the post-rain drab awakens my senses to a new world around me.  Five minutes turn in to fifteen, and soon half an hour slips by.  I blink, peering just close enough to see the last drop fall.

An Elusive Gem

Been rereading one of my favorite novels, Villette, by Charlotte Bronte, and found this inspiring gem of a quote that's pertinent to jewelry making:

"Pendant from the dome, flamed a mass that dazzled me - a mass, I thought, of rock-crystal, sparkling with facets, streaming with drops, ablaze with stars, and gorgeously tinged with dews of gems dissolved, or fragments of rainbows shivered.  It was only the chandelier, reader, but for me it seemed the work of eastern genii..."

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Another 2016 goal of mine is to make more jewelry: ideas for both simple gemmy bits and funky color clashes have been brewing steadily in my mind--and have since been translated on to paper.  Shortly, I'll be making these paper- and mind-bound ideas a tangible reality.  Can't wait to share the process with you all.  Stay tuned...

Sparseness of Space

via Pinterest

This may seem a little austere, but I'd love to partake in some serious writing and thinking in this workspace of writer E.B. White.  Some may see an empty space, sparse and rudimentary, but in it I see a readymade canvas ripe with possibilities--a space for thought and imagination, for developing and molding ideas to fulfill a creative, spirited slant.  A site for daydreaming plots and character flaws, a room where one can pace back and forth in, amble around while lost in thought: hearing the floorboards creak underfoot, seeing the cobwebs dangle and the spiders weave, and feeling a bold thrill when the wind breezes through the wide-open window--the smell of outside air a welcome revival for the weary senses.  Ambient light mirroring the body's circadian rhythms, as if whispering the time constraints (dawn and dusk, only); a rigid wooden bench urging movement of body and mind.  Solace and continuity.

But most of all, this desolate-seeming workspace is a fitting reprieve from everyday distractions: the cellphone and the Internet; and on occasion, people.  Writing is hard work--it's a temperamental business, especially with distractions everywhere that masquerade as modern daily conveniences.  Sometimes another's voice can be the breaking point between concentration and the loss of thought; a text message can be an aberration; the Internet so loud that the mind clogs with an endless barrage of others' wordiness, in particular, rampant self-promotion over quality and content.  It's an overstimulating technicolor gleam.  Not all the time, but sometimes.  I myself feel the pull, down the dark rabbit hole of it all.  Not every day, but on some days.  Distracted, the writer sighs; she grumbles and drags herself, heavy-footed, back to the drawing board...

Perhaps writing is one task where I'd love to be completely alone: solitary and lost in thought, a laptop sans Internet, my imagination flitting through cracks in the floor, encompassing the sparse accommodations, the senses alight.

The Literary Class

Came across this thoughtful article, by Lorraine Berry, about the economics behind writing-class privilege.  Thought I'd share an except here (emphases are my own):

If literature is to mean something in the lives of those who read it, it has to do more than open up a new world of possibilities. Many of us have been the child (and adult) who was mesmerized by dreaming about doing the things that a book’s characters are doing. But, as I teach my students, reading is also about resonance, that moment of connection when what the writer is feeling in the words is being felt by the reader, that strum in the chest that signals that someone “gets” it. And while I might feel emotional resonance, I find myself longing to know that someone else understands what it feels like to know that the plain breakfast cereal in the cupboard is all there is until a parent gets paid. Literature should not function as a dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, just as the expansion of the literary world to more fairly represent a world in which people are more than white or male or straight has added untold riches to the canon, so too would the stories of working-class folk go a long way toward improving our representation of and understanding of the greater world. Most important, at least for me, knowing that it’s not class or money that determines whose writing is worth publishing would make me feel less like a fraud when I encourage my students to pursue a career in a publishing field where they’re already steps behind those whose economic privilege has already opened doors.

I have been hesitant to write this essay, lest it come across as mere personal complaint—if there’s one thing most working-class folks have little tolerance for, it’s complaining when there’s nothing that’s really wrong. At the same time, the creation of literature demands a certain honesty about one’s experiences, that we might narrow the gaps between our fellow human beings. In making art, writing about my experiences gives me a space in which to create resonance, and be truthful. There have been times in my life I’ve wished I had the money or the connections that would allow me to travel around the world for a year, to write a book about everything I’d seen and felt. And then I remind myself that I come from a long line of men and women who have survived being poor peasants, and then survived working down in the mines, and on the floors of the factories of Manchester. My father was a little boy when his family moved out of the Manchester slums and into a semi-detached house away from the urban-industrial grime. That’s a legacy to be proud of. And so, as I go forward, I choose to keep writing about that kind of working-class experience, to continue carving out a place for that kind of story in what we think of as literature.

Read the entire article here.

Blueberry Sunrise | Zara & Anicia

The fresh, funk-tastic beat of this song, Blueberry Sunrise, by Zara & Anicia calms the craziest of days; their playful vocal harmonies put a smile on my face.  Best of all, the album that includes this song can be downloaded for free here--expect lots of ambient California folksy singer-songwriter vibes.  Have a great rest of the week!

Footsteps

Jess Lambert: Footsteps

Warrior Woman

Zitkala-Ša,
American Indian writer, teacher, activist
(via Pinterest)