Sometimes...

Sometimes you just wonder...

...what am I doing here?

... what am I for?

...why?

... how can I be better?

And it's okay to ask questions.

Slow life

There is much to be said for living a slow life. I have time in my schedule to say 'yes' to things that come up...

... like a 10km walk with a friend last week.

I have time to spend with people when they need it.

I have time to appreciate the small things because I'm not rushing past them.

New angles

Come at it from another angle.

The tree on this page is a hand-carved stamp. I put the one on 'the right way round' first, but then felt a real tug to put another on coming in from the side. When you tilt the page you get a whole different point of view. Suddenly there is a path going off into the distance and a twister coming in from the right.

In landscape orientation I feel drawn into the page. Looking at the page the original way round, things seem to be tipping in from the right like a tall wave waiting to fall.

The same page looks so different from a different angle. It reminds me that it's always worth looking at those things that seem to be problems from a different direction to see if there is a solution that hasn't occurred to you before.

Knots

If you can, unravel the knot, while realising that sometimes it's beyond repair and needs to be cut.

Having done a lot of knitting in my life, I know that patience with unravelling is rewarded. Most knots can be undone and yarn reclaimed with time and patience. But there are times where the knot is too tight, the yarn worn too thin, and then you just have to cut out the ruined part.

The same can be said for relationships. They take patience; they are worth the effort to get right; most knots can be worked loose and undone. But sometimes you just have to cut loose.

Transparency

Transparency: let your vulnerability show.

I turned this page on its side and upside-down while trying to decide what it was all about. The thing I finally realised was that the layers were transparent and it was easy to see what lay beneath.

When we are transparent we let our vulnerability show rather than trying to hide it. Transparency is another facet to authenticity. To be our true authentic self we cannot hide what we are.

Remembrance

Remembrance can creep up on you.

There are small things that remind you. That favourite author. A note in the margin of a book. A place where you drank tea and ate cake. A phrase, an accent - just the small stuff.

Swirling thoughts

My thoughts swirl and are difficult to pin down.

The background for this page is a gelli-print stuck to the page. I love the swirly pattern which is the ghost print made after using a mask. The suggested cloud shapes and the swirling just felt like my thoughts - like knitting fog or pinning down clouds. There are different shapes and marks, just a variety of bits and pieces that don't necessarily seem to fit together. Like the inside of my head at the moment.

Menopause sucks!

Just thought I'd share that 😳

Foundations

What is your foundation?

In mining my word for the year - authentic/authenticity - I started thinking about foundations. If 'authentic' is defined as ' made or done in the original way' then it is necessary to work out what the foundations are. What is the 'original way'?

This page has a cross in its background. There is a lot of other 'noise' on the page, but the base, the foundation, is a cross. Sometimes we have to peel away the extraneous parts and remember what it's really all about. What are the parts that cannot be dispensed with without destroying the original?

Authentic - digging deeper

Digging deeper on my word for the year. Authentic - made or done in the original way or in a way that faithfully resembles the original.

And isn't that what Christians are supposed to do - live a life that resembles that of Christ? It seems that authenticity means stripping away those extraneous things like masks and walls that we have built and getting back to the 'original factory settings'.

The path of life

The path of life. It isn't straight and smooth.

The pink across the centre of this page made me think about the path of life. It has wiggles. It has blind ends that seem to be the start of a path in another direction, but then stop, maybe showing a momentary distraction that leads off course for a while. The edges aren't well-defined, making the path narrow in some parts and broader in others. But all the time it continues in roughly the same direction.