For almost two years now, once a month Juliet Lockhart and I hold space for each other to do something we otherwise put off indefinitely. Usually art related!
Those days have been filled with everything from exhibition prep to tidying the studio, website updates to feather collecting. But today was all about playtime!
There’s been a lot going on in my business and personal lives recently, and I’ve been chafing from the lack of time to flex my creativity a bit – even if I didn’t know quite what it was I wanted to do in that time, I was missing it!
Along came today and my sensible list of updating the shop, creating an email landing page, etc. And then it went out of the window in a fit of rebellion (fully supported by Juliet, who is the BEST at helping me give myself permission for this kind of thing) and I spent the day journalling, painting and experimenting.
Which felt, I have to say, liberating and laced with guilt because I have SO MUCH I should be doing on basically every other list – all the businesses, my house, my life admin.
But no one is going to die and I was desperate for a mental break, so I had it – and I feel SO much better for having done it.
I painted what the inside of my brain feels like, which was illuminating and will probably get a post of its own at some point in the future. I suddenly have a visual representation of why I get so grumpy and irritable when conflicting things need my attention, or when I’m interrupted in the middle of something!
I experimented with painting what autumn feels like, and with a landscape for my hare, and I wrote pages and pages and pages because my feelings are enormous and jumbled this week.
And I drew a hare in silver ink, because that’s what most needed to come out of today. He’s at the top of this post and he’s still making me smile!
Here’s hoping I can sail into tomorrow and smash my to do list into smithereens (of productivity rather than stress, if I can manage it…!).
