I am doing something audacious for me and posting videos of my attempts to learn the uke this year. Subscribe if you’d like or watch from here! Also, this is the first time I’m actually singing for all of you. Hope you enjoy it because it’s going to be a regular thing now. :-p
It’s been a while since I’ve shared what I’ve been working on, so I thought I would pop by and do that. Everything is taking much longer than I’ve wanted it to with my personal projects, but I’ve come to expect that in my life of parenting and freelancing.
Art – I’ve been working on colored pencil illustrations for my next poetry collection, which will be a sampling of my poetry on love. I hope to finish these up in the next couple of weeks and begin prepping the book for publication. I’m also in the middle of my first big illustration in a while to accompany my Humpty Dumpty poem, which I posted a couple in progress pics on my Instagram account. I’m really hoping to finish that one up this week. And I’ve started working on art because I want to try my hand at designing fabric, so I probably won’t be posting any of that here.
Music – After the success of fully putting down on paper my first song in years, I had hoped that the process would get easier, but my next song is proving difficult, and I am scrapping what I’ve started to rewrite part of it. As I have nothing really planned yet for my music, I want to take the time to get it the way I really want it. I also am starting to do my vocal exercises and play my flute more regularly, which is important. I really want to find a way to be making music more a part of my life again. It’s just one of those things that got put on hold when both my kids were young and we were in transition. But it is still one of the easiest ways for me to center myself and decompress.
Writing – I have been chipping away at both a new short story that I want to shop around and my novel. While I can’t always find the time to write every day, I’ve recently been writing longer chunks when I do sit down, so hopefully I can continue growing that. I’m also continuing to produce poems and pieces for another couple collections I’m working toward. I want to try submitting some poems places too, but that means I can’t share them here, and that is tough for me.
Other creative stuff I’m currently sewing a gift for someone that I’m really excited about, and I’ve been doing a lot of work with building my sewing and costuming work, which is good because this is where my money is coming in.
So slow progress is better than no progress, and as I come off of my contract job, I’m looking forward to having a few weeks of more time before the next contract really takes off. I am also going to try to post here more regularly again, but we shall see how that goes.
I am combining my year-end reflection and look to the future this year, as this is the first chance I’ve had to really sit and think things through. I dubbed 2016 my Year of Change, 2017 my Year of Recovery from all the change I went through, and 2018 was supposed to be the year I started living the life I’ve always wanted, to step into my full being. Things have not worked out the way I wanted to or as fast as I wanted it to, and I had to contend with some serious disappointments and sad moments this year. I’ve felt ready, but stuck, and I came to the realization yesterday that it’s all been in good time. I’ve been like a seed that has begun to sprout but still needs to work it’s way through the dirt until the sun and air can be felt fully. I’ve done so much to push that dirt out of the way, and now, now I am finally feeling the freshness above me.
So 2018 was a year of internal adjustments, of letting go of some resentment, of recognizing limitations and yet still pushing against them for personal growth. I didn’t get to create as much as I wanted, but I managed to do a little. I finished three paintings and an illustration. I wrote a lot of poems and chipped away at my novel and wrote and published a short story. I wrote one song fully out and really love it. And I created a couple of cool fiber art pieces – one for myself to hang and one for a friend’s wedding gift. I also did and continue to do so much planning.
This coming year, 2019, is a year of Spiraling upward and outward, both for myself personally and collectively. I can feel it. I will be giving notice soon at work, but hopefully leaving myself open to freelancing there if I need to later. I have two big costuming gigs lined up that will take me through spring that will hopefully provide income so I can focus more on the kids and personal creative projects this summer. But I know things will happen as they will. All I can do is say yes to opportunities as they come and make the effort toward creating as I can do so.
I hope you all feel the spiraling energy and let it flow through you this year, that we all have a year of action and of love.
I have been feeling this increasing need to create for several months now. I’ve laid a lot of groundwork, have my pieces all laid out on the game board, but things keep getting in the way, not least of which is my refusal to ever work myself sick again. Not excuses, just frustration at the delay.
My goal is for all my creative endeavors to be fueling each other, for the art and writing to flow back and forth, to use them as inspiration for both my music and my costuming. My husband and I are talking about starting to sell homemade bath and beauty products which we did as an offshoot of our Fairy Magik label years ago but at the tail end, so we didn’t give it a very good go. To do all of that while taking in freelance sewing work and spending more time with the children. But to do more than chip away at that requires me first and foremost getting out of this stressful and physically exhausting job I’m currently in, which we’re working on.
I’ve been posting older work on Instagram to inspire me to continue chipping away, but honestly, by the time I sit down and have a few minutes to work, it’s so late at night that I’m spent and can’t tap the space I need to be in. Everything comes in it’s own time, and I feel the “soon, the time isn’t right just yet, but soon”, but patience has never been one of my strongest points. So the fires within continue to burn, to grow, threatening to overwhelm me.
When I finally unleash the fire, it will be a sight to behold.
I successfully opened my first show since the fiasco of working myself sick and getting fired late 2016. It felt good to design again, and to work with new people. But leading up to the week before opening, I was having a lot of trouble internally. My brain was constantly switching into “fight or flight” mode, and I was experiencing intense moments of anxiety that nearly crippled me. In fact, there was a day or two in the beginning when there was a delay in our being able to sign the contract that I almost decided to back out of doing the show all together.
It took until the week before the show opened for me to realize that I was experiencing all of these feelings because I was flashing back to my bad experience at my last job. At first I was angry and annoyed that it still was having such an affect on me, but realizing that it was from that past experience made all the difference in the world because I was able to finally work through a lot of crap that I had been repressing for over a year. It was a huge weight off of my shoulders, I was able to fully enjoy the final stage of the process, and the patch of psoriasis I had on my back since getting fired has since completely cleared up (though my hands are still horrible… we shall see if they improve as the cold weather wanes). And I feel ready to go down either direction in the fork that life has for me coming up because I know my own strength and fortitude.
Our bodies and minds are truly remarkable. They take a trauma and will hold it until we are strong enough to cope with it. The problem is that many of us never actually feel strong enough to cope with it. We get that first “danger danger” signal from our brain and rather than access whether we actually are in danger or not, we bury those feelings deeper and find outside means of hiding those feelings. And then we start experiencing the mental anguish in physical form and we do what we have to in order to ignore that too. But if we trust in the process, and we are willing to engage our dark sides, we have truly remarkable self-healing powers. It has to be done in stages and it is intensely difficult work, but it is so worth it.
Anyway, it’s been a couple of weeks since that has happened, and I’ve been playing catch up on life and my regular work (it’s our busy time), ironically my entire fee for the design went toward a car repair instead of getting us ahead like I wanted to (but thank goodness that fee was on hand for that) and the last of my daughter’s 1 year molars are finally almost through, but I want to be doing more here and with my creative work so I’m working towards that. All part of the healing process, right?
I have a lot going on in my head right now. The currents are threatening to thrash me about and pull me under if I let them.
So, in the midst of all of this, I have to keep myself centered. I have to take care of myself in the ways I know how and shut my mind up enough to be able to listen to the intuitive inner self. I need to keep stepping forward in the creative process. It’s going to be really difficult, but I am up for this challenge.
I spent time tonight with blank ledger lines for the first time in eons, wrestled with lyrics to a second verse, and made significant progress (for me). It feels good. Now I must stop because I need to tackle a commission before completely losing steam, but I am giddy enough to share that progress has been made!
This is especially good because last night when I had set aside time to delve into my novel for the first time in ages as well, my teething daughter made that an impossibility. So getting to touch my piano tonight and tap into creativity in a way I haven’t in a long time soothed my wounded creative from last night.
My hope is to do a little time five days a week working on my own compositions, then have one day to sing from my collection to help build my voice back up again, and one day to play the flute a week. I know life will get in the way of that, but with set days to work on certain things, I’ll at least get a couple of hours in each week, which is loads more than I’ve been getting.
Yay progress!
As part of my commitment to releasing more work this year, I’ve set up an Instagram. You can add me if you like here. I plan on posting progress pics of artwork and to begin with, I’ll start posting old poems that I’ve already shared here, and maybe do some more readings that I’ll then upload onto my youtube channel. Maybe I’ll even be brave enough to record some of my music, but probably not for a while! Once in a while I’ll crosspost to the blog, but I’ll try to keep things fresh.
Next week I’ll hopefully get around to updating the contact buttons on the various sites, link everything together, and add the first content to my Instagram account, but I wanted to let you all know in case you want to be the first to start following. I generally follow back unless it’s an especially spam-y account.
I found this quote I had pulled from a book I read and written out way back in 2010, and I wanted to share it.
“The skjald is,” he says, “the chosen lookout of life who must reveal from his mountain what he sees at life’s deep fountain. When gripped by his vision,” he says further, the skjald is “neither quiescent nor lifeless but, on the contrary, lifted up into an exceptional state of sensitiveness in which he sees and feels things with peculiar vividness and power. I know of nothing in this material world to which the skjald may more fittingly be likened than a tuned harp with the wind playing upon it.” The hymnist Gruntvig quoted in Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark by JA Aaberg.
The skjald in Danish is a poet but moreso, one who speaks truth of the surrounding world even when others don’t want to hear it, or in ways that others can’t always understand. It is a definition difficult to translate into English, but I love this metaphor of a tuned harp being played by the wind. I feel very connected with this entire description.
This past week, while waiting for people and on mini breaks at work, I read through my blog from the very beginning, way back in 2012. It was an interesting trip back for me. Eye opening, and very helpful in finally honing in on the next direction of my life.
The first few years of doing this blog focused a lot on writing as that was what I was prepping for release into the world. I also kept talking about music and art projects that I wanted to tackle. And I really miss having projects that I am passionate about. I miss all parts of that process.
I also posted my dream schedule of balancing parenting with being a freelance creator, and I am so far from that dream at the moment, it is laughable. Working full time (plus) in theater left me with barely any other creative time, let alone quality parenting time, and while the job was fulfilling in different ways before the leadership shift and it gave me the stability to get a mortgage and health insurance to have my 2nd child, I was so much happier when I was only working part time for them. Then going back into a different full time position doing bridal alterations has been draining in a very different way, and because of the hours the shop is open, even though I am physically working less hours, I still feel like I never get to see my kids or create anything extra. Especially since I’m still self-healing from last year. I feel all this pent up creative force longing to burst forth though.
So, the goal for the past couple of months now has been to be freelancing by the end of the year and becoming the at-home parent. Once that happens, I will still do some alterations. I will do some costuming work too as it comes up and as I can find time to do it. But I want to focus the bulk of my energies on my kids and on creating my own work again. I need to feel that passion for creating that I get sucked out of me by scraping myself dry through overwork.
Kat Micari 