Why Not Call it Artwork?

We have two houses: one in South Dakota where my husband lives full-time and I come home for the weekends and one in Wyoming where I live during the weeks while I’m working.  

This is not an optimum situation and it wasn’t what we intended when we bought the place after selling our own houses elsewhere and starting a life together. But, circumstances, (read: my job), forced us here. 

I try and come “home” every weekend, but sometimes I’m foiled by bad weather (bad roads) or just sheer exhaustion. Sometimes we have trips planned and sometimes I’m travelling in another state completely for work. At any rate, I’m home about every other weekend.

This weekend, I didn’t travel home. I decided the 9 hours of driving would be better spent creating. No trips out of town, no kids visiting, no work in North Dakota or Montana, no need for me to BE anywhere other than where I chose to be. The downside: no time with John. The upside: a more relaxed weekend.

The upside I never intended: time to spend with myself crafting something other than hard copy artwork; this weekend I’ve been crafting Brenda “digital” artwork, artwork in my mind, not the kind that goes on the wall or under your feet, but the kind that is percolating inside me - not stuff that anyone else will see and enjoy (and/or hate), but internal stuff. Writing, question answering, pondering, analyzing, not analyzing, looking in the mirror naked, looking at my wrinkles (more on those two later).

- Why not call it artwork?  

I just looked down at the coffee table to clear some stuff up from my productive weekend, so I could plug in the almost dead computer, and noticed that there were four!!! pairs of scissors on the coffee table. This brought my attention to the room; scattered around were: an ironing board with iron plugged in, fabric everywhere in various states of being, buttons, threads, notebooks with pages open, drawings opened up, lists, papers scattered around, my idea books open, CD’s. (If you’re wondering about the scissors, they each have their own specific wonderful purpose – a good sign that I had A LOT in the works.)

Unfortunately, even though it seemed I had everything at my disposal, (by the appearance of the room), I spent a good ten minutes this morning searching for a scrap of paper that must be at the other house. A scrap of paper I’ve been carrying around with me for ten years. It has my core values on it and every so often I re-evaluate these values. I keep coming back to that single scrap of paper and finding that my core values haven’t changed.

You’d think that I’d have them memorized by now, and, of course, to a certain extent I do. But, what doesn’t completely come to mind without the scrap of paper is the little tick marks on that scrap of paper from different tallies I’ve done over the years and what value seems to be on top right now. I really needed that today.

So, in a completely random way, I came up with a list of problems and a course for the future, as a result of this weekend:

(ah, another list- hahaha)

PROBLEM: We’re newlyweds, what the heck are we doing apart? We screwed up thirty years ago, got a second chance and we’re still screwing it up again. All for “the plan”. Screw “the plan”. (I can say this with impunity since it’s my “plan” to begin with.)

PROBLEM: I carry too much stuff around from place to place, hoping to get a random hour to create. Just the fact that all of my ideabooks go back and forth every weekend is a problem. Those ideabooks must look at me and shake their little heads and say, “Doesn’t she get the point? We’re being mis-used as project management tools.”

PROBLEM: No studio space in South Dakota. I miss the big Colorado studio where I could leave everything out and I had enough space to dance if I wanted to.

PROBLEM: There’s no way to have everything with me at all times, I’m always going to be missing something no matter which house I’m at.

PROBLEM: I spend a LOT of time on the road. Time not wasted, but lost.

Here’s where “A Year With Myself” comes in. Chapter 4 (a very hard chapter, if I may say so) asks us to complete a truth telling template. I have a lot of truths that I easily share with others, but this one was VERY hard to articulate, being the career driven workaholic that I AM.  This truth has the solution to all the problems above imbedded within it.

The Truth that will out:

 I don’t want to work at all! I want to create!

 And, oh, by the way, the serendipitous COLLISION of the title of this blog and “the truth that will out” is this:  Yes, I intended to think of my internal “work” as artwork, but who’s to say that I can’t also call any “work” I do, “artwork”? After all, there are no limits. Holy smokes, a new part of my brain just opened up:

And what if I become an “artworkaholic” instead?