I've been beading therapeutically for some years (in 2014 with a growing inkling to turn the pieces into a wearable collection), but sometimes even now it stops being a 'project' or a 'business' and goes back to being therapy, time-filler, time-waster, something to keep the hands busy.
On Saturday, I returned to the studio after a week and a half away, sick and adjusting to some new medication, handling (not with aplomb) family matters, meeting with new doctors, suffering a small injury, and so on––
sitting at my desk I was unsure what to do. Saturday afternoon. The sun not throwing itself aggressively down my skylight but the sky was unobtrusively and very prettily blue. It was not precisely a block, the way they call it, but rather that everything was precisely where I had left it, untouched, but I felt a million miles away and at the time it seemed unclear if I was 'allowed' to touch. This will or will not make sense to you.
It was a transient feeling but one that occasionally comes and goes when you break the regularity of studio practice. Introducing new habits can also disrupt the creative process. Medication, meditation, psychotherapy, hard running on the piers, an injury, these can all bring me to another plane of being/thinking too far from baseline to recall how to 'make like I used to'––sometimes the plane is six inches off of reality, sometimes it is out in the cosmos.
Cat's first day in the shop.
I finally made a small painting––oily, scratchy, with wet spots, like a little dog needing a bath––and it was a picture of what I felt my mind was capable of that day––and while I waited for it to dry I sat in the sunlight and beaded.
I haven't had a manicure since my friend bought me one in 2006.
It was a few hours after I'd driven in to Brooklyn that I drove out of Brooklyn, and I'd made some sort of nonsense necklace, but my hands felt worked and I thought things were returning to normalcy, somewhat.
Cupped sequins and smoky hexagonal quartz.
