Hello
Sometimes I feel like I write you the same letter every Sunday. The truth is the themes are always the same. I don’t have a new story every week. I just carry the same old truths around with me from week to week.
Still I write.
It is like if I hooked a house, and said, well, I hooked a house so that’s done. Or if I said I made a flower rug so now I am finished with flowers. We don’t do that. We work on themes for a long time. We make them, we leave them, we revisit them. Ideas are like that, they need to be pondered.
So each week I tell you about things like the importance of reaching out, of making, of being good to others. I remind you of the importance of our senses, seeing, touching, feeling, breathing in the scent of the world around us, and listening closely.
I tell you that beauty is important. It is important to make and to see. I reassure you that creativity is in you, and in all of us. That it is worth pursuing because it deepens your life.
I go on about the importance of gratitude, of living fully, of forgiveness.
I tell you that a life is meant to be lived as much as it meant to be questioned.
And I tell you these things not to speak just to you but to speak to myself. To remind myself of the importance of all these things. For I so easily forget them as I get caught up in the day to day. I tell you these things as a way of talking to myself.
The little things are so easy to leave behind. It is easy to forget to pick the lilacs while they bloom. It is easier not to bake the cookies and fill the house with beautiful scents because you might eat them all. You could bake them, have two or four and share them. It will make your day and some one else’s. These little things make a life, especially as you get older.
Domesticity, simplicity, your own small home traditions and daily rituals become more and more important. I sometimes battle between savouring and falling so deeply into them that I become slightly disconnected from the world around me. Because I know that connection is deeply important especially as we age I reach out.
These letters can sound like fairy talk ( my daughter’s words…I love them) but as my friend Lily says as you get older you really like the sound of fairy talk. You connect with the little things in a way you never thought you would.
I can tell you from experience that a wild rose smells different at twenty five than it does at fifty five. At fifty five it is so much more evocative of what is left behind. At fifty five it is time travel. It takes you back to the land of yesterday. And yesterday does seem like a fairy land, like a place that used to be, like a place of filigree that you slip through seeing but not being seen.
That is what stopping to smell the roses can do.
So I’ll keep this writing to you because when I write to you I go places unseen, unexpected. The themes may be the same but only like a day is a day. Everyone the same, only different somehow.
Each week you let me take you on a little story ride into my own creative life. What I really hope it that it carries you into your own creative life, because that is where you’ll find an energy and love that will drive your spirit to make.
Thank you for reading
Deanne
PS. There are only three more days to pre-register for the Painting with Jeanne Oliver Class before the price increase from $42 US to $62 US.
PPS. Our create beauty everyday ring is not just for rug hookers. It is a great gift for any one who makes things. It is a reminder to bring beauty into your life on a daily basis.
