looking for something to be

The holidays are quite the whirlwind of emotions, aren't they. Exciting and fun, filled with laughter and family and love; but also tiring and chaotic, leaving you wanting nothing more than to escape from the world and curl up under a comforting blanket with your favorite cup of tea. I'm afraid I've been spending a lot of time in the latter camp described there, and my art and writing habits have suffered for it over the past few weeks. I'm trying my best to cut myself slack though, because if I've learned anything over the past year it's how easily the positive things in life are lost to the overlay of negative if you do not give yourself time and space to see both.

So I haven't been drawing as much as I would like to, and I haven't posted much of anything in my usual shop fronts since the stickers that I designed for the Advent and Christmas season, but that's okay. I'm getting there.  What I have done is started to keep track of things that I do accomplish in my journal at the end of the day, so that if some of the tasks I had laid out were not finished I can look back and remind myself of the things that were. I've continued to attend R.C.I.A. with my husband, and as that progresses we are both more and more excited to finally "officially" join the Church. New Year New Me is a popular saying in this month, but I try not to think of things with such a harsh line on midnight of that final day in December. It is a new year, and there are new chances to do new things and find more of yourself - but every day is a new chance to find more of yourself. You don't need a new date on the calendar for that.

Clearly, I have a tendency to ramble; but I suppose that's what I created this blog for in the first place! I did have somewhat of a point to this conversation with you though, and that's to remind everyone that it's okay to do nothing, if that's what you need. The past few weeks for me have been a lot of doing nothing in the art department, and most of the year has been a lot of doing nothing in the writing department. I did open my notebook today, though. I've found myself lately feeling a pull towards writing poetry again, and I wanted to write some thoughts down on what inspiration feels like. I have a tendency to scribble thoughts onto the page and forget about them afterwards, and as I flipped through the pages to start writing today I came across some writing that I did sometime in autumn. It's not quite a poem, because I have not put all the pieces in just the right place, but it does have the essence of one. I thought it might be nice to share this 'skeleton in my closet,' so to speak. The skeleton of a maybe-someday poem, and the skeleton of the emotions that I was working through at the time.

I'll end my post with sharing those words, but first I also want to take a moment and remind whoever is reading this -- no matter where you are right now, in the world or in your own mind and heart, you are worthy of something to everyone, and you are worth everything to someone.

.:an almost-poem about the leaves:.

The leaves are changing.
Somehow an entire summer has passed,
and not a single page was filled.

I remember last winter.
It was cold, lonely, painful,
hard to bear, harder still to live through.
Spring brought hope for a fresh start, but
this went deeper than the winter frost.

A longing for quiet and a desperate need for sound.
Exhaustion and an unending supply of energy.
The need to run with no motivation to move.
A call for company and a leer to anyone who comes near.
A voice that wants to be heard
to spread the Word across the world
and no way to speak.
No spark to feed the sleeping flames.
Scattered words without a poem to fit inside.
Half-baked characters with no story to call home.

A will to be heard, known, seen, needed,
without the motivation...to be.