Waking Up

I finally woke up last week. At first I thought I had been in a coma for the past eight months, however, nobody noticed my absence, and it seemed to be a rather dramatic diagnosis. Other possibilities: hibernation, suspended animation, or sleep walking. As my family appears to think that I have been present, I'll have to go with the sleep walking diagnosis as I do have a history of promenading at night. 

True story: when we lived in a ground floor apartment (centuries ago), my husband woke up one night, saw I wasn't there and then found the front door open. He caught up with me half way down the street. "Where are you going, Honey?" "Gotta go to the park, gotta go to the park." "Well, why don't you come back to bed now?" "Oh, okay."
Mr. M. is still traumatized... 



Anyway, last year, I signed up for online classes that were interesting and cheerful, and that would take me by the hand and tell me what to do. I put myself on automatic pilot. I got through the last 8 months of Mr. M's life-threatening illness and surgery, stitching away...

...and nobody knew I was sleep walking. 

Finally, last week I woke up early in the morning and felt like myself. I mean, I really felt like myself. I went through a list in my head of the day's activities and felt some degree of pleasure and a reason to get out of bed. 

I pulled out the Pomegranate Tree Quilt, on which I have been mindlessly stitching French knot leaves in the evening. I spread it out on the bed and examined it, wide awake. Oh my, a whole section of weeds hadn't been finished. I attacked the weeds with determination.

I am now eating healthy (no white sugar or flour), doing a yoga routine every morning, and feeling wide awake and alert. I'm thinking about my artwork again as a body of work. 

Indeed, I made myself a journal to finish up all the lettering begun in online classes, so I can get back to fabric and thread. I have a lot of subject matter in my sketchbooks to digest and interpret into fabric.

My new journal begins with a quote by Joshua W. Shank: "Creative people depend on flexibility to an unusual degree, and their personalities show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. Creative people simply embrace contradictory extremes whereas everyone else learns to develop one or the other."

I'm so glad that I woke up to be able to embrace my contradictory extremes!

May you be wide awake as well.