Reasons to Blog

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Number One: Coming Home to Yourself and the Beauty All Around

My head is full of lumpy clatter. What on earth will I blog about? I don’t know.

What if I give myself permission

to not know,

to down-slow?

 

mindfulness home

I notice the garlic clothed in spectacularly stripey purple and off-white skin. I notice the dented, browning bits.

What if I pause? What if any of us pause, slow down and allow the spaces; even brief ones. Is it possible to allow a minute or two to let up with the voice that badgers us to get something done?

How is it that capital P Productivity became King, while the Duchess of Doing-Very-Little lurks in the shadows? She is guilt-stricken and spurned.

Can it please be OK to relish a moment of Simply Being?

mindful photograpy Swain

If you can’t manage real flowers in your micro-garden, fabric flowers are the go, even if they become soil-stained

We seem to know that mindful self-care is essential nourishment, but hey. Intellectually knowing something and embodying it are two different things.

Might I allow a pocket of presence?

And might I bring self-compassion to that presence in an act of kindfulness?

Can I rest in the empty space – the minuscule bracket of blankness between one thought-train and the next?

mindful photography garden

Cracked rabbit, neon centipede. All the garden friends.

What will I blog about?

This. Exactly what’s happening (or not happening) in my creative process. Even someone who has pretty much dedicated her life to her own creativity and to nurturing creativity in others, struggles to justify the carving out of fertile space. Even someone who deeply knows the value of letting the field lie fallow, is obliged to wrestle with inner critic creatures.

mindful art Swain

a city flamingo meets its leaf

So

I stop. I slow down. I notice the inner objections. I slow down and breathe.

Breathe. See. Breathe. Listen. Breathe. Feel.

What comes to my attention? Odd corners of my imperfect inner-city dwelling.

Everything is grubby, dusty, stained, especially when you look up close in the bright spring light. No matter.

I will claim its beauty regardless.

I will photograph small nodes of life and decay. I will photograph interrelationships of objects, including the mouldy fabric and the dry leaves.

kangaroo skull mindful

a poor old kangaroo skull that I indeed found in Kangaroo Valley

I am home. I have landed back into myself.

inner critic small moment

the comfort of cloth, folded, awaiting the linen cupboard

Reasons to Blog. Number One: Coming Home to Yourself and the Beauty All Around

Writing a blog is an incentive to slow down, to touch base with yourself and to truly inhabit moment-to-moment experience. It’s an invitation to become aware of niggly-nasty voices that obstruct and then to bring self-compassion or kindfulness to the turmoil.

Blessings! To blog is to bless oneself and then hopefully others.

Here are a couple of mindfulness/kindfulness links:

Open Ground Mindfulness Training Australia

Center for Mindful Self Compassion

A writer called Lorin Clarke writes a delightful column ‘This is a Public Service Announcement’ for the Big Issue, which seems to me largely about mindful kindfulness.

And on our very own Art and Soul Space blog, here’s the Mindful, Kindful Texture Walk

Stay tuned for further reasons to blog.

ornaments small slow down

Kindfulness is a red and blue duck

with love, art and soul from Sally

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11 thoughts on “Reasons to Blog”

  1. Thank you Sally. Reading this has made me slow down and drop down into mindful-kindfullness. I really did need that too. I love the photos of your dear surrounding object-friends too. And how the big close-ups of them seem to really pull focus to one moment at a time. So beautiful. Thank you ❤️

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    • Glad so glad you have slowed down and dropped into mindful kindfulness. Thank you, Sally M, for recognising the dearness of my object-friends. They often get taken for granted, so I think they are feeling chuffed about the attention.

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  2. Thanks for a gentle breathing space after my day of feeling chastised by King Productivity for doing nothing useful. Is the bowl for the garlic and ginger Poole pottery? It looks very like one of my favourite Poole mugs, inherited from my aunt.

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    • You are AMAZING! Yes. I checked and it is Poole pottery. What does this mean? I did receive it from my mother. All I know of Poole is that my English-born mum recited a ditty ending with ‘Poole’s in Dorset’. Anyways, so pleased that you found a gentle breathing space. King Productivity rules over a large realm, wouldn’t you say?

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      • Indeed, I would! I don’t know about the ditty ending with ‘Poole’s in Dorset’ but it most certainly is! 🙂 I think we both have something from Poole’s twintone range. My mother took a fancy to Poole pottery in the 1970s. Perhaps your mother did, too.

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  4. thanks for this wonderful post, Sally. I must admit,sometimes i unfold all my pretty tea towels and lay them out on my kitchen benches. Laid out side by side they look like a colourful tapestry, a piece of domestic art, …i do similar things with my favourite colored bowls and dishes…i leave them around my flat, just so i can enjoy the colours and shapes…xx

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    • Ohhh Linda! You are a true artist in so many ways. Inescapably, flowingly, colourfully, heartfully, delightfully, an artist. Thank you for sharing your tea towel adventures. I wonder if I might see photos at some stage. ?? x

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  5. …or i hang up my favourite clothes (usually op shopped) from the picture hooks on my wall: a blue and white patterned, full-length, pure cotton, hand made kimono; a Parisian-inspired fit n flare dress with croissants, jam and cream bordering the hem; a fire engine red, faux fur 70s crop jacket, a skirt made out of old Tibetan cloth….a halter necked top made out of old lace doilies…

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