Clear Vision, Living with Grace, I'm back!

Who's Grace, you may ask...as Tim did. By Grace, I mean to try to keep my head and proceed moment by moment with a minimum of railing against the inevitable changes that come with my accumulating time on the planet. To be grateful for what I have, instead of craving what I have not or have lost...and my recent cataract surgery has made me most grateful for colors and clarity.

It has been a while since I've posted, lying low, healing, trying to be Grateful for What I have. Bertha Cooper, at right, interviewed me about losing my vision, and now i have something of a reprieve. Colors and clarity are improving daily, although I need to go back and have my eyeball pressure checked again in two days, and my
pupils are still somewhat dilated from 5 hours ago--
I don't re-adjust as rapidly as I used to...in lots of ways.





Since I'm back to having a day off in the middle of the week again, today in fact, I'm hearing from my Hot Flash Women class and noticing for my own life that having too many good things to do, and feeling like a spinning top as I turn from one to the other, never staying in one place long enough to accomplish anything and just generally driving myself crazy.

Diana Somerville, science writer and environmental activist. She's fighting a proposed co-generation plant that would burn logging slash and pollute our pristine air. I'm reading AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY, by David C Korten, tracing our devolution to a culture run by corporations for corporations, but as Allen, at Port Book and News says, the large populations of emerging economies like China and India are not willingly going to give up raping and pillaging the environment the way we did to get all the "goodies" of "advanced civilization."

I have been concentrating on painting my
100 Hot Flash Women portraits, but that has been on hold while I get used to my new vision...this morning I did everything I could to avoid returning to the painting I started before surgery...what's that about? I also have a bunch of ideas for soft sculptures or mixed media sculptures, since I'm really really happy and calm when I do some stitching every day.

I started a fabric book that I was going to teach back when I thought I might do a week-long class in France. I've since decided that the economy and my shaky job situation dictate that I don't think about traveling any more...I have been to Paris and down the Nile, so what else do I really need to see, except vicariously. The fabric book is called FRANCE/ROMANCE, and I see that maybe I'm bidding good bye to both of those. (an old flame
was going to come and visit at the end of March,
but canceled a week and a half before. Part of me
was disappointed and a part relieved.) A simpler life is...a simpler life.

I don't want to think that I am limiting myself more than I need to. It has been fun to pick the fabric book back up again, and it gives me a small project to stitch on while I watch movies, AND I can enter it in the Fiber Arts Festival in Sequim in October...I try to consolidate projects to fit multiple needs. There are also two classes not too far away, one with Anne Grgich http://www.annegrgich.com/ and one with Jonathan Talbot...both on collage and layers... I don't know about you, but sometimes I go through periods of not wanting to do anything for myself that involves either time or money...maybe the way we women were raised, the stupid martyr complex just makes me angry in the end.

I was looking through my stash last night, and now there's fabric all over the floor of my sewing room, but I'm thinking of another run of Venus of Willendorf-like figures, somewhat different from the ones I did last year, but I'm liking series of 100. I also did 100 small drawings last year, with limited parameters, (size, colors, materials) and for me a series gets me past the point of too much preciousness and worry about making just the perfect one.

I am Amazed and Delighted at the clarity of my view of the world outside--must bring that clarity to my view of my own life and activities.

OK, I'm still avoiding painting, so I'll sign off.