Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

Are you also amazed by how quickly chaos can set in and completely take over? I sometimes wonder if some of us are more susceptible to this than others. I certainly have felt like a chaos magnet at times in life. I have always really admired neat, orderly schedules, routines, and spaces. I look at a picture of a well-ordered space and breath a sigh of ahhhhhhh, peace, but life does not work that way here.

We live in a very small house for all the activities that happen within. As compared to the standard size house in the first half of the twentieth century, it is a medium to maybe even large size house, but by current standards, it is very compact. It seemed much smaller when our two children still lived here. Now our children are grown and gone, but we still have some of their stuff—very little that belongs to the oldest, but quite a lot that belongs to the youngest. But I do not mean to blame the chaos on them when it squarely belongs to my husband and me, and mostly to me.

The problem is that there are too many things I do and am interested in. I like to make things, so there are lots of making supplies, materials, tools, and machines in this house. There are lots of books about making things in this house. There are lots of things I have made in this house. Thankfully, family members are amenable to both having things made for them and taking existing makes home to live with them. Besides that, we run our business out of this house. Years ago, I remember hearing that we would have a paper-free society soon with the advent of computers. What ever happened to that?

Remember I finished a read-the-Bible-in-a-year program earlier in December? This was my third one, and I had finally gotten as consistent at getting up and reading first thing in the morning as anything I have ever done. This is one of the reasons I have been doing this—to develop a positive habit to start my days and help hold the chaos back some. As of the first of January, I have a new morning habit I am trying to get to stick—a small sketch every morning. I bought a small sketchbook and got out many of the various drawing pencils and related items I have accumulated, then joined a thirty-day sketchbook challenge. Every evening, I get an email with the next day’s prompt, and every morning I make my coffee then sit down at my table. I aim to spend about twenty minutes, but I got a bit carried away yesterday with my sketch of pecans. I am keeping my subject matter, tools, and techniques very simple for the duration of this challenge. It gives me a quiet, meditative, and centering time in the mornings.

This new habit is working as planned, which is the same as the reading habit—I start my day consistently with something that leaves me feeling a sense of accomplishment and with a brain that has been put in a quiet, orderly gear for the day. I am hoping that taming the chaos that tends to exist in my head if left to its own devices will help me tame and hold back the chaos that crops up around me. I think I will go sew up some of that ton of fabric I have now. SpringCreekArtsGuild@ gmail.com