NOTE* Thank you for letting me know the comment settings were incorrect - they have been changed so all can comment. 2/10/14



Sunday, February 9, 2014

Starting this evening I'm taking a vacation - a period of absence from my Social Media accounts at Twitter and at Face Book.

I decided to do this after reading that my acquaintance, Benjamin D. had decided to stay off social media whilst finishing his manuscript.  That got me started thinking about the projects I have going now, and the activities that are rushing at us as we move toward Spring.

There are nine projects in this lovely heap - one queen sized bed cover for our master bedroom, one single bed sized filet crochet lace cover for my studio day bed, 3 wool sculpted animals, and 4 wool paintings (Can't show them to you as they have to stay private till finished).  That's a big pile of art!

Coming towards us with the warmer weather will be the installation of The Tiny Farm's new greenhouse.  We are starting from square one in our plan to make our farm a Farmer's Market seller.  We will be selling early starts, fresh herbs and vegetables, tomatoes, and late season treats.  All will be organically grown from Heritage and Heirloom seed.  So - Big Job Ahead! 

In order to get my art projects finished and the commissioned pieces and gifts to their new owners before the farming season starts up I'm going to need to be very focused.  So off to work I go, and I will be back to catch up with all the doings of my internet friends some time in mid May.

Be kind, please, and stay well.

Namaste
Robyn

Comments and emails will be answered.

Those Funny Names

Uninvited this thought pounced on me and demanded to be written down.  I guess it is that important, because here I am writing it down.

When we tell ourselves to be kind with our grown up selves, to watch our self talk and not use derogatory names on ourselves we seem to miss one really important aspect of that thought.  When we are children (if we are blessed with decent parents) we are never called the horrible names we call ourselves as grown ups.  My folks never called me an idiot, or a fucking moron, or dumb as a sack of hammers when I was growing up!  But I freely use those words on myself when I mess up.  Where is the connection that holds the idea of self criticism together over the years?

What did those loving parents call me?  Silly Old Bean?  Crazy Little Goose Girl?  Truth is - it does not matter what words they used.  What matters is what my child heart heard behind the actual words.  My child heart heard that they were just using cute little nice words on me because I was their daughter and you are not supposed to use the same cutting, hurtful language on your children that you use to describe the neighbor's idiot spawn when they are not around to hear you. It does not matter at this point what they meant - it matters what your heart heard.

So when parent said " Oh don't do that Silly Little Goose - you will fall and get hurt", child me heard them say "Morrie is dumb as a sack of rocks - swear to God that moron is going to kill himself one of these days" or something along those lines.

Point IS........ When you hear yourself say something from your past as negative self talk - take a minute to stop and LOOK at that phrase and truly identify what it meant to you to hear it as a child.  I'm willing to bet that if you can be honest about it you are, in truth, calling yourself something a lot worse than a Silly Old Bean.

The Faerie Opal

A week ago tomorrow my mother died.  After all the bitchery and woe that she brought into my life I have found it hard to grieve for an 86 year old woman who had absolutely everything she could wish for and blew it all out on tranquilizers and alcohol.  But she had changed in the seven years since my Papa died, and I have tried to make peace with her and love her as one should love their mother.  In some ways I have succeeded.  In others I have not.  The woman made my life hell all through school, and when I graduated High School she told my Papa I could no longer live in her house.  So I left.  And I did not go back much.  Once when my daughter was one year old I took her home for her first birthday.  Nothing had changed. I did not go back again for 31 years.  She was still as vicious as I remembered.  How do you grieve for a mother like that?

Today I received the answer to that question.  An email came from my younger sister - the one who has been administering Papa's estate and acting as sole trustee to mother's living trust.  The email said that she is working to get everything valued, sold, straightened out and 'divided up' amongst us.  One of the items that she has to deal with is mother's jewelry.  Mother loved jewels, and my talented artist Papa loved to indulge her.  She had many splendid pieces that he designed and had made for her gifts each year.  My sister has them all photographed, appraised, and insured.  She wants to be sure each sister receives at least one favorite piece from the collection, and Mother would never make any decisions as to who gets what.  Except for one piece.  She said to my sister "Robyn gets the opal."

And that broke open my stubborn heart and let me cry for the Mother I knew as a very young girl - before she turned mean and hateful.  See, when I was born I was not healthy.  I was premature, and some somethings just didn't work right.  I was deadly sick till I was a little over 8 years old.  Mother took me to many many doctors, but in the time and place where we lived nobody could figure out what it was that wasn't working, and I just kept getting sicker.  Mother had a huge opal ring on her right hand - I would watch the light play through that ring for hours and hours.  I called it The Faerie Ring because I knew I could see faeries dancing in there.  Tiny beautiful delicate creatures;  they danced in the sunbeams going through the stone.  Sometimes when the procedures I had to undergo were horrible she would let me hold that hand and watch the faeries dancing.  I dearly loved that magical ring.  Robyn gets the opal. In that little sentence is all the stunning agony of being her daughter, and knowing that she too remembered the little hurting girl who loved the faeries.  I love you Mother.

Reverb10 day 17

Prompt: Lesson learned. What was the best thing you learned about yourself
this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward?

So far the best thing I have learned about myself this year is that *I* own my own past.  Nobody can tell me what I can or cannot say about who I am, what I've done, who I've loved.   That may seem very basic to some of you, but to me it was huge.

I had a friend who wanted me to keep quiet about our relationship because of things that were going on in his life.  When those things ended for him I thought it should be OK to be open about our relationship.  He did not and he pressured me to be quiet - as though he owned my past and had the right to say what I could and could not do with my mementos and memorabilia.  Oh what an enormous blast of light I got when I heard myself exclaim "You don't own my past - I DO!"

So now he is part of my past, and as I go forward now and in to 2011, I intend to hang on to that blast of light and search out any other things I have been giving away that actually belong only to ME!