I love it when boy and I have a quiet day at home, being together happily doing our own thing. He regularly comes to tell me all about what he is up to and to check what I’m doing, in case it’s of any interest to him – like I’m baking a cake or something…
Today is a quiet day. I keep a hot water bottle against my back, as I sit and paint and sip on a cup of tea. While the watercolour paint is drying I knit a bit more of my fern shawl.
I only finished Mr Mallard today. I have been busy with other worldly things and also I felt like taking my time over painting him, I tried to put extra care in making his feathers.
I finished my sketchbook today. It’s interesting for me to flick through it and notice my progress… I have always wanted to be able to paint but somehow I was never brave enough to overcome my shyness. When I was growing up I had a few friends who were naturally very gifted artists and that was hard for me to even try to paint around them, and I developed some sort of inferiority complex… Like I loved drawing and painting but I wasn’t really good at it. So I became very shy, and quietly kept art journals.
It has been a big deal for me to share my paintings here, and I have – I think – overcome my fear of showing my paintings to others. My son, I must say also played a big part here. I started painting again with him, and children are the best art teachers in the world as they don’t care about the outcome, it’s all about the process of making, painting, creating, building… It has been a very healing experience for me to learn to paint with my son. He always had a fascination for birds, especially owls, so he would ask me to paint them for him. I did and I couldn’t put the brush down. Then I briefly met a dog called Zara, a week before she passed away, last autumn. She told me I could and should paint. I clumsily tried to paint her and I just kept painting ever since…
Whatever reasons brought you here, thank you for crossing my path!
If you ever left a comment, thank you! It’s greatly appreciated.
Noemie.
This is one of the frog who lives in our vegetable patch at the allotment…
This is a part of the forest we visit pretty much everyday at the moment. We clear debris from shipwrecks in that very stream (we have cleared the wrecks of the Fern, The Moss and Titanic only a few hours ago)… and Thom’s boat gave a lift to a spider and a woodlouse across the rapids of the red iron-rich waters.
I don’t know what tomorrow has in store, but I remind myself daily to enjoy and make the most of this special time… Being 7 is quite a magical time in one’s life, and the beauty of having children, is that we are given the opportunity to re live it all again, through them. We get the chance to put the 7 years old goggles back on and see the world through their eyes, a world just as it should be!
Buzzard follows me
or maybe I follow you
as I walk, drive, breath…
“Life is a journey, not a destination” – Ralph Waldo Emerson. Our world has been turned upside down recently, as we moved house… We left an old cottage in the woods for a more urban dwelling in a very quiet town on the edge of the forest. We had to readjust a little bit to our new surroundings, and now we are pretty much settled in. We had to change our habits and a house move was a great opportunity to get rid of a lot of our possessions that were just sitting around. I believe that if we have too many things, then these things end up owning you as you will need a bigger house to accommodate all of your belongings, therefore you will need more money and will have less time for yourself, and your dear ones… I was worried that our cat Henry was going to suffer the move as he was so used to living in our old neighbourhood where he was thoroughly enjoying a busy social life of his own, with some of the neighbours, people and cats alike. He was invited for dinner to a few houses a few times a week, eating with his feline friends and their people! I’m sure he is sadly missed! So I was worried that he would struggle to live in a town, even though we have a private garden surrounded by other gardens… He is so sociable… But soon he made friends with another cat, had a few fights with the hot locals and has already seduced a few human ladies…. I have caught my neighbour feeding him cat biscuits the day before yesterday. 
His Royal Highness Henry the 1st.
Thom and I have been immersed in The story of Peter Pan, reading a new chapter of the book every night… 
We watched a beautiful Peter Pan broadway musical and we had great discussions about the story, went to a pirate event by the sea front, had a boat ride around Eastbourne’s harbour and Thom enjoyed dressing up as a pirate a lot… Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading J.M. Barrie’s book, which gave me a deeper understanding of the character of Captain Hook, captain Paul Watson remains my favourite pirate ;)
I have been struggling with sciatica for 9 months now, and things got worse a couple of weeks ago when I did my back on top of it… After 3 days stuck in bed I ended up being just about able to make my way to the osteopath, who said she would have rather seen me 9 months ago… So it was time for me to surrender to stillness… Stillness is a great place for me to make felted animals from…
Here are 2 of the animals I made :)
Thom called the blue tit Mr Nice
And this is Lady Nice, which I made for Thom’s birthday but I gave her a makeover…
And I made another owl for the birthday of a special little girl who turned 7 last week…
Thom and I have a great project on the go, we have exactly the same sketchbook and we do a double page spread everyday. Whatever we feel like doing. So far it’s been water colours, drawing and glitter for both of us. It’s nice to sit down together at the coffee table and start our daily creation :)
Yesterday’s paintings
Today’s creations… (You may have noticed, owl is one of our totem animals :)
We have also been doing some action painting in our new patio, which I found to be very therapeutic! Thom really enjoyed mixing all the colours together to create new ones and we were drumming with our brushes on a large sheet of paper pegged on a laundry line… It was grand… We ended up experimenting holding the brushes with our toes, and then just walking in paint and all over big sheets of paper rolled out on the floor… It got messy, but it was fun. I think process art is definitely the way to go, for children and adults. If we are not attached to produce something “nice” then we can thoroughly enjoy the creative process, the release of tension and blocked emotions and letting go of inhibitions that hold us back. Plus for kids experimenting helps them to understand better how things work, build their confidence and problem solving skills (along with free play and good stories to feed their imagination… ) Well to my humble experience anyway…
:)
What about you? How do you nurture your creativity? Do you manage to make time for it?
I definitely feel happier when I do :)
Speak soon,
Noemie.
My recent times have been busy with home-educating my son, my yoga course, gardening, enjoying quiet family time, educating myself on the Ayurvedic system (and being amazed at how much it makes sense), and spending quality time in the woods with my canine friend Tara.
I’m feeling the need to connect with my creativity so I’ve been writing regularly, enjoying looking around me with a sense of wonder, and I even started to draw again.
I think all human beings need to find ways to express their creativity… Music and Photography used to be my ways of expressing myself back in my 20’s, and when I became a mum I started to cook a lot instead and of course I have a well-documented child, as I took quite a lot of photos of him as a baby and toddler.
Although at some point I had no camera… that was a dark era!
Portrait photography used to be my specialty, I used to enjoy taking portraits of animals a lot, and also trees, flowers, stones… I did take a lot of portraits of people too. Some of them were famous in their scene, others were famous with their Mums… it didn’t matter to me who they were. With every single being I had the honour to photograph (note I’m deliberatly not using the expression “taking” a photo…) I got to have a glimpse of their soul, and I must say that with animals that experience is often a lot more powerful than with humans, because animals just “let you in” without any attempt to shield anything.
Since being a Mum I have been constantly amazed by the sense of creativity that is innate to children. They are naturally creative as they don’t have any blockages within their creative process or great expectations for the result. Making a mess certainly doesn’t stop them getting started. Most of us adults have been conditioned when we were kids to care about how the things we make/create look like. We were compared with one another by thoughtless teachers or parents, some of us were told we were not good at arts, or that we didn’t have any talent in a particular subject whereas others may have been told they were creative geniuses and had to live up to the expectations that come with such a statement… I have met quite a few very talented artists and some of them seemed to be carrying their gift like a heavy load on their shoulders… that’s possibly why :-)
But for kids, art is just easy:
Thom and I go for long walks in the woods regularly and it amazes me to see how he comes up with Land Art projects on his own, and really enjoys immersing himself in the zone of creativity, creating a world made out of stones, earth and sticks…
He started to write on his own last year, because he was attracted by letters. So he started copying them on his own and now he writes his own name on everything and inserts random letters in his drawings as a part of the picture, because he likes the look of them.
Nothing seems to intimidate him, a few months ago we went to march to protest against the badger cull in the UK. I asked him to make his own sign and he just drew a badger, from the top of his head, just like that:
Obviously I’m aware that it doesn’t look exactly like a real badger, but I really like the fact that he didnt have anything holding him back from just doing it, even if he has never done it before!
(Re)opening the creativity channel doesnt need to be a complicated process. Even if as adults we may have forgotten the simplicity of just drawing or painting whatever comes to us. It is in fact a very liberating activity.
I find that writing a few pages first thing every morning helps. Most of the time I just start to write with no particular goal and my ideas just articulate themselves, and as I allow the pen to connect with my soul I realise in amazement that I’m releasing a few things that were stuck somewhere, in the back of my mind.
Going somewhere we have never been before can help, and also revisiting old places every once in a while to re discover them with new eyes is definitely an interesting experience too.
The practice of Yoga is a great way to release old blockages, to connect with ourselves and discover new possibilities – extending and stretching our own limitations.
Carrying a note pad and pen with you when out and about is useful as you may feel like writing something down while being in an inspiring place, such as the woods or the sea front… or in a cafe in town. One of my favourite activities back when I was travelling a lot used to be sitting down in a cafe somewhere and just writing anything that would go through my mind. Sometimes it was bits of conversations I could pick up around me, or words from a song… I have filled lots and lots of books like this. With poetry it sometimes feels that there is no thread to follow at all… but every single entry is an instant of my life. I would just spend hours writing, filling up pages and pages… and I would also sketch a lot.
Music is a great way to release blockages too. Singing makes you feel great, drumming can be very liberating and dancing is a very powerful way to release emotional build up!
The possibilities are infinite, but if you feel stuck you need to feed and nurture your creative self. That can be done through spending some time on your own in an inspiring place, to reconnect with yourself, and recharge. That can be in nature, in the woods, in a park, in the mountains, by the sea or in a museum, a cafe…
Sometimes yoga teachers advise their students to take on a creative activity to release certain blocks, so they might advise them to start playing a musical instrument, or to start singing. Creativity is a very healing process if we are open to let go of our fears/apprehensions and just go for it!
Releasing blockages through creativity is empowering and very useful when one is learning to communicate telepathically with animals or any other beings. It stretches our minds to towards infinite possibilities, giving us a sense of strength and joyfulness that elevates us to a higher state of consciousness because we are really connecting with ourselves and the world around us…
So don’t fear judgements or criticisms and enjoy every single step of your unique creative process, and remember: The journey is more important than the destination.
Namaste!
Noemie.
FocalHeart 