Time to venture into the attic
I love window candles. I celebrate the winter through the ebb and flow of light; winter starlight, moonlight, and the yearly all night fire I keep at the winter solstice to usher in the longer days. This year, I did mark the New Year on the calendar, but for some time now, I have been starting my New Year every day. I have learned that I am not capable of imagining activity for a year at a time. However, I can make each passage of daylight to darkness, each twenty four hour period, meaningful.
Hormic psychology is centered around “purposive forces in behavior”( to quote a generic online dictionary). As an artist and a creative, with a purpose that centers around both my own creative output as well as facilitating others with similar goals, I find that even when I think my daily tasks are mundane or do not outwardly seem to lead to what I believe my end goal to be, in actuality in doing anything at all, I am getting there.
Today, I will go into my attic, which is a musty tangle of boxes and bags full of materials for projects, old clothes, old furniture, paper to make enough journals to last ten lifetimes, notebooks full of lesson plans, shoes, lamps, fans…. and I will take down the suitcases I keep the window candles in and carefully pack them away, ready for the next long winter nights. And I know that as my hands and mind are outwardly engaged in this task, my inner creative will be working away, noticing images, angles of light, stray dust motes shining across an old spider web, filing themselves into the Cabinet of Curiosities that is my subconscious. According to Graham Wallis, to cultivate our thought patterns, we must learn to observe our “less conscious as well as our more conscious psychological experiences”.
This afternoon I will enter my studio and stitch. I will create “how to” material on threading a needle. My attic experience, seemingly unrelated, will still be with me.
Happy New Year, everyone
