nanke's stuff

Autumn is my very favorite season.  It's such a treat for all of my senses.  The muted, subtle color changes of some of the leaves, and the bright, gaudy colors of some of the others dazzle my eyes and make me want to draw and paint them.  The scent of apple cider, the smell of burning leaves, and the wonderful aromas of fall dishes like stew and hot, creamy soups, and fruit pies,  put me in the mood for cooking and baking.  The sound of dry leaves blowing when the cold, autumn winds come through, and the crunch the leaves make when you walk through them makes me smile and drag my feet as I walk.  I love the cozy feel of sweaters and quilts.  We've started having fires in the fireplace, and I love the ritual of laying the logs and kindling ahead of time so that when it gets dark (or sometimes even in the afternoon), all we have to do is light a match.  I find watching the flames mesmerizing and soothing.   Sometimes we eat dinner by the fire - I really love it when we do that.
I love the respite from the feeling that I should be doing some kind of work in the garden.  Never mind that I haven't done any fall clean-up and there's many dead plants that should come out.  It doesn't matter.  For some reason, it doesn't bother me like it does in the spring and summer when the gardens need attention.  Autumn is for hunkering down, reading books, drawing, baking, writing, and listening to music.  Autumn outside is for taking walks and snapping photos of the fast-fading beauty of the season.  So, lean back, have a nice cup of tea or maybe some hot cider, and enjoy the most beautiful season of the year!

So, there's often talk among artists about our insecurities. Sometimes it's referred to as our muse abandoning us, or our inner critic is coming through loud and clear rendering us paralyzed. It can be a crisis of confidence that we'll never be able to create any art again. Anything we ever did in the past was a fluke, never to be repeated. There's the voice that says, "what makes you think you're an artist, anyway?", - that's always good for some time in the wilderness.

There's another stumbling block that doesn't just relate to art. It can affect almost any area of life. We know it's important to keep our word, and we really try to do that all the time. Except that we don't. All too often we don't keep the commitments we make to ourselves. I can't tell you how many times I've fallen off the exercise wagon (as in, right now I'm laying on the ground with the wagon continuing to move on down the highway without me). There's the intention to do our art every day, and sometimes we keep it, and sometimes we don't. The thing is, usually these intentions are very important to us - they're not something trivial. So for me, the mystery remains unsolved as to why I find myself in that place of not doing those things that I believe are important to me and feeling really crummy about it! This is today's journal page that I did while pondering that very question.