It’s 2017 … and I didn’t make any resolutions.  Any of you who have been following along are well aware of how my planning nature can culminate in tremendous success and misery in equal measure.

I’m living, just living.

Today I have no aspirations for tomorrow or plans for next week.  Today I am enjoying my tea, enjoying my job, sinking into my existence and learning to appreciate the space my body inhabits.

At the start of 2016, if someone had told me this is where I would be I would have called them foolish and desperately misguided.  Honestly.  I may have finally accepted that my ability to predict my own life is as faulty as my ability to control it.

Some of you may have noticed that I have closed my shop.  I’m tired of selling/marketing my art and am finding that having my art for sale is compromising my very desire to create it.  As Alan Watts famously said “The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”  I was forgetting that.  So I’m trying to dance more.

This doesn’t mean that creation has stopped, I’m still drawing and painting (even writing a smidge) … but no one can buy it.  Right now, it’s only for me … only what I love and only when I love it.

I’m also reading … MOUNTAINS.  Spending my free time learning about the anatomy of the brain and how the various areas are impacted by trauma is fascinating and incredibly useful.  The work of Bessel van der Kolk is particularly intriguing to me and he’s taking up much of my waking time.

The rest of the time, I am spending with my children.  Traveling over the holiday (long road trips are the bomb), baking, cleaning, watching tv and generally just existing together and breathing the same air.

I can’t say I’m happy, but I’m settling into a curious contentment.  Accepting that I cannot plan or predict my life is beginning to cultivate a curiosity about what will happen next.  It’s a melancholy place to be, but it’s my place.

All my love, Heather