I got side tracked and didn't write last week so now I'm all out of sorts, with the rambling left overs of what I had planned to say floating just out of reach. Failing to write a few words once a week has made me even more impressed by my good friend Susie's wonderful blog which she has been writing every day for nearly a year; it's called "Why Today is Brilliant" and must take ages to research let alone write! As for me, I have been thinking a lot about how the creative urge can be captured, tamed and made to keep more sociable hours. I've had several interesting discussions lately about sleeping patterns and daily routines. It seems that many of the most creative people I know keep very strange hours and also struggle with periods of frustrating inertia when inspiration and motivation refuse to co-operate.To completely contradict myself, the most amazingly inspirational artist I know keeps very regular hours and has pretty much painted 9-5, 5 days a week, for the past 60 odd years, so it could just be that I lack gumption and good self discipline. Either way, I often find myself at my most productive late at night which, according to my brother would have made me a rubbish cave man.
These are the kind of things I muse on as I wander about lost in thought; often planning out a whole blog post in my head only to lose the thread before I can trap it. Last week I could have written pages on the overcoming of fear (I'd climbed up the scary rocks on Robinson alone and without my magic "sticky" trainers, celebrating with hot Ribena and feeling as intrepid as anything), I imagined a whole piece on the sensory delights of walking slowly, mindfully I suppose... the sounds of boots in sucking mud, half frozen grass crackling, metallic ringing of rock and shale, a thousand different water sounds, the smell of approaching rain ( do Cumbrians have 50 words for rain like the Inuits do for snow..?) .Anyway, that was last week; this week I slept like a bear, had no energy to walk except for my weekly volunteering at Calvert Trust and couldn't be roused before 10 - but I feel like I'm getting somewhere in the evenings. Listening to Pilgrim on BBCiPlayer I've been cobbling my stand design together for BCTF and embroidering notebooks, making velvet cushions, trying to work out how to display things and putting together a trade catalogue.
At times it feels ridiculous and self indulgent; the annoying devil on my shoulder ( sitting on the big pile of chips) keeps muttering about "real jobs", bills and pension plans but today I collected some card samples from Temporary Measure and I have to say they looked great, really professional and even I have to concede that I'm my own worst enemy. If only self confidence shouted as loudly as that little devil!
So there you go; despite a week in which I've felt incredibly lazy and unproductive because I got up late and didn't walk miles everyday, I've actually achieved quite a lot and this is the point... not everyone is a morning lark, not everyone fits in to the neat slots expected by the modern world and being an owl is nothing to be ashamed of so long as things get done. Which are you an owl or a lark?
Reading: Last weekend's newspapers and a knitting pattern. Listening to: Pilgrim, a radio drama by Sebastian Baczkiewicz