Craft, Creativity & Community: Musings on Menopause and Adulting
Craft, creativity and community. Three essences that flow through the spine of my life. I feel like they are proclamations really, a way of calling myself out to something I need a lot more of, something that when I spend time with the bell of truth rings strong.
Adulting can be a lot. Adulting for me has been a lot and with that and years of feeling over extended and multi tasked OUT, I have been setting my gaze to aspects that support my health, my changing mind and body differently. Patterns die hard and change can take time, I have found that sustainable shift happens best when I work in all aspects of my mind, body and spirit. So the interwoven braid of craft, creativity and community are intentional and part of that sort of tending. While they are each distinct subjects, it is their weave where I am most interested. It is their weave that opens the portal of something that is highly resonate, stabilizing and calibrating on me, in me, holistically.
There is magic here
There is breath here
There is wisdom here
These are the phrases that are whispered to me as I sit with friends, new and old, and my hands get busy. I don’t have too much technical skill with craft, honestly. My years have been spent doing other things and so my knowledge and technique are simple but that does not make the experience any less profound, any less important. With my hands as the tools I find myself mostly drawn to natural materials: clay, flowers, yarn, thread-each of them calling from the land to ground, to nourish, to care. Each of my fingers, touching, working, creating a repetitive action, a rhythm. My mind becomes fixed on the job at hand, keeping me, reminding me, to be here with the work at hand. Mind and body working together, my breath follows sensing the steady forge she is laying down and with it: FLOW. Flow, the natural state and fusion of mind, body and spirit. When I am in good flow I can feel the well of creativity come alive. It is its own type of Yoga really.
I have learned a few things about myself over the years. I do well with time spent in small groups of people especially people I feel commonality and connection with. I also find that sometimes a lot of talking and chatting can really put me into my head. Sometimes that can be useful but other times I don’t find it so. I have also noticed that when I am crafting and creating AND being in community the conversation is different, the feeling is different. And what makes it different, I think, is in the spaces…in the spaces of crafting. In the spaces of crafting there is room for breath, for quiet and well..just space. I can be in the very same room with others, often quiet AND enjoying their company. It’s like the portal of weaving hands, weaving breath, weaving energy creates its own unique braid, its own processing and rhythm and with that I feel the HUM. The HUM of the vibration that flows from within that coalesces all my parts. It is the map of bandwidth and nourishment and exactly the type of support that is needed. This map is the map of my life: the mountains and high terrain, the lowlands and swampy marshes, the vast prairie lands, the waterways and oceans. All of it. And there is a lot of it. Life. There is a lot of life here, in me, in you. That life is full of the experiences that make us who we are. And sometimes that life can feel hard. The terrain can be rough and rocky. Navigating it can be so much work and it’s very easy to forget, lose, set aside the parts of us that are creative and wild. Like I said, adulting can be a lot.
But with middle age and all this change, it can be a wake up, a reminder. A reminder that we are inherently creative and that community can be nourishing and supportive. And moving our fingers, in so many different ways, is actually moving our hearts and that action created is a representation of something so much greater than the thing we set out to create in the first place. I feel quite sure this makes a difference: in your health, in your bandwidth and the world around us.
Reach out. Try it out. Tell me your thoughts, your observations, your musings. I am listening.