Hairself

I’ve been thinking about coming back to blogging for a while, my wishes as ever preceding my energy, but have felt weary about it as during the last few months I have not produced any artwork – I’ve got nothing to show. (Here's a tailor-made proverb - nothing crocheted, nothing gained...) I have not been entirely uncreative - my poetry-vein has been pulsing off and on and I have started to note down the first stirrings of ideas. But for a lot of that tired tired tired time I felt out of touch, my bed an island afloat on a glassy sea, no land in sight.
Had a dream the other week, about coming back to art college after a longish absence, maybe from illness, and finding that in the meantime the other students had learned new processes. One, A., with whom I did go to college, had made a pair of boots from thin smooth gleaming brass, with a machine-made look, which I didn't much like, but she’d actually made them herself. So everybody had made progress, while I had been standing, or rather lying, still. Neatly sums up some of my anxieties about my art-work, about blogging, about a lot of life watched from the sidelines demarcated by M.E. I feel not being involved in art-making as a loss of identity and it wrenches me. But strange things happen: As I wrote this out just now I was zoomed right back to my artist-self by a little mistake: instead of writing ‘she’s made them herself’ I wrote ‘hairself’. It pierces and pleases me with its crazy rightness. Hey, that's me! I’m back!
So - I'm marginally less tired and penning my first lines, for blogs, ideas, poems... Here’s hoping that I will get beyond these and build and grow and turn and shine. And communicate and exchange and feedback with you all again...
In the meantime I'm holding my breath - never have I been so anxious and so hopeful about an election. All fingers and toes and everything else crossed for American voters to do their bit and elect Barack Obama, for themselves and for all of us.