Puddle Jumper
I think my problem is that I want to be happy. I don’t want to make do with so-so. I don’t want to make do, fullstop. I get one life and in it I want to burn and feel and know what it means to feel really alive. I want to chase down joy, and pin it, eager paws and tail wagging. Because I know it’s out there, see? Because I feel it and I see it. I feel happiness every day, the little slivers of it that make up daily life that lots of people seem to miss. A lot of things make me very very happy indeed. They can be tiny, little firefly dots, and I’ll still hone in on them with everything I’ve got.
But I believe in the big happy too. Not a happily ever after, but something I get to swim in, rather than just jumping from one puddle to another. And I can’t help but look for it. I can’t. And the thing is, I’ve learnt, that you can’t always tell from the start, you can’t always tell whether that puddle sinks a lot deeper than you think it does. And so I’ve become a jumper, two feet first. Because if I don’t? And I if miss it? Life is about risk, isn’t it? It’s how you grow? How you test the limits of who you are and what life means?
Read MoreWin a huge big stash of Disney Cars Lego Duplo!
Me and Kai are proud to be part of a handful of bloggers working in association with Lego Duplo as their ‘experts’. And between us, and thanks to our friends at Lego Duplo, we’re offering our readers a chance to win lots and lots of Lego Duplo, including some great Disney Cars sets, in time for Christmas. There’s 15 prize lots up for grabs, and all you have to do is send an email to duplocompetition@digital-outlook.com, mentioning the name of my blog (Sleep is for the Weak) in the subject and providing your full name and postal address. The competition closes at the end of this week on November 6th, so get your entries in quick and you could win one of these extremely smashing prize bundles…
Read MoreBorrower Hunt
I had a recharge day today. Sleep and sunshine and walking with my eyes looking up at the sky which stayed the bluest blue all day. AND I didn’t get run over. Bonus. I also ate roast chicken and had a wander into the town art gallery to have a look at the latest exhibition before it closed. And do you know what I found there? Tiny people who lived inside of old chairs and under tables. Really really. LOOK!
Brave
For some reason I’ve been really missing my Grandma this week. Not Grandma just before she died so much, but the Grandma from my childhood. Missing her meat pie, and the smell of her old sofa. Missing the rocking chair with the little cushions she’d sewed under the feet. Missing the rough grey of her woolen cardigans and her shooing us out the kitchen, and sitting at the breakfast bar on high orange-topped stools watching cartoons on the tiny television.
I was very very lost when she died in March this year. It brought home a lot of other loss and grief and fear, fear of growing up I guess. As I found my way through, I would hold words of her close like a talisman. She would tell me often how she had lived a good life and held no regrets. She was fearly fearless, my Grandma, very self-reliant, practical and yet full of kindness, and moving forward I vowed I would be like her – no regrets. So I have been holding my head up and taking leaps. Project, ideas, plans. I have been trying to make the best of every day, trying to not wait till a tomorrow. Living spontaneously and fearlessly and creatively. Grandma would be most proud of a bold and daring grand-daughter, a heroine, not a damsel in distress, and I want to be someone she would be proud of.
I’ve been feeling a bit scared again lately. Just overwhelmed really. The responsibility of guiding two lives in the right direction weighs heavily some days. I don’t really know what I’m doing but I’m doing my best. And so because I was missing her, I ordered a pot plant and sent it to myself, from her, and it’s just arrived.
Thank you Grandma, for my plant and your words. I’m getting there you know, I promise. x
Writing Workshop – The girl and the jam jars
She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.
With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.
Read MoreGiant heads and conkers – still life assessment pieces
I’m busy cracking on with my next module, but I thought I’d post the finished assessment pieces from my last one for my learning journal. The brief was a series of studies on still-life subjects, one man made, one natural, culminating in two finished pieces. It’s amazing how much you learn from drawing something over and over again. Change the arrangement, change the light source, change the medium and seeing what works and what doesn’t… The natural pieces are much more my sort of thing and I enjoyed these a million times more, and I think it shows too, cause they’re better drawings and much more full of personality and ‘me’. Anyway. Here they are:
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