Finding creative spark when the fire's burning low

I've been feeling just a tad stretched thin lately.  I'm sure everyone has these times, when you have to dig deep in the bottom corners of your inspiration pockets to come up with something to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.  I've also been doing a lot of thinking about what's important to me to pursue and what I can dispose of to make way for new "inventions."  Have I mentioned I'm a bit of a packrat?  I'll be willing to lay money that there's a few more like me out there, and you know who you are;)  

Believe it or not, about a week ago I got rid of a pile of bottle caps I've been saving for mosaic.  Now this may not seem like a big deal, and in the overall scheme of things it's not, except that it's the first time in a long time that I have given up on pursuing something artistic or crafty.  And I mean a long time.  So it was something of a minor victory for me, in a couple of ways.

I don't believe in spilling my guts all the time, that gets old and can become an end in and of itself, and I like to think I can find better things to do with my time.  Plus I hate to be a whiner.  However, I can honestly say I have been through some real intense crap in my life, ever since I was born, and I kid you not.  Alcoholism in the family, child abuse and neglect, a marriage that turned abusive, divorce, and some pretty screwed up emotional issues, not only in myself, but also in my kids.  Domestic violence does a huge number on the heads of women and children, and it takes a long hard climb to get up and face the world coming out of such a marriage.  Years and years of problems and therapy and problems.  Big ugly scars.  Recovery is possible, and I'm happy and proud to say that I am recovering (still) and so are my kids, all grown now, but it does take work.

Anyway, one theme that has always been part of my life is poverty.  I didn't realize, as a very young child, that we were poor.  My parents never let on to that, although to be fair, they were a little busy with all the other things going on and going wrong in the family.  Appearances were kept up.  There were standards, customs...manners.  In many ways we grew up very much like other kids; we went to church (if not very often); education was important, especially since my parents, both older than most of my friends' parents, had not been able to finish school in their youths.  They had both survived the Great Depression and wanted us to graduate from high school, and I know my mother wanted me to go to college.  But underneath the facade of being a normal American family in the fifties, sixties, and seventies was the fact of a chronic lack of money.  I didn't know it when I was little, but looking back through the lens of life experience, I can see that things were hard.  We always ate, and we had clothes, and had a car.  I'm thankful my parents were able to at least give us that, in spite of all the things they did wrong to us.  

Poverty has different effects on different people.  When my father died just before I turned thirteen, my mother must have been terrified about the family finances.  She was left alone with three daughters at home, the youngest severely mentally handicapped.  My father had been the one that stayed home and took care of the house and kids for a number of years, while my mother worked.  Now she had to quit her job, and apply for Social Security for survivors (my father was disabled and on SS before his death).  And we were on welfare, although I never knew that until much later when I was grown.  But somehow she kept it together for us and we still had food, shelter, clothing, and some money leftover for some of the niceties of life.  My mother tended to spend first and make plans later.  Never once did she share the burden with us, which cut both ways: she did it to protect us, I know, but I never learned how to handle money before I grew up.  I went out on my own without a clue how to balance a checkbook, how much living was going to cost me, nothing.  I was lucky in that in those times, it was possible to get a factory job at minimum wage (which in 1973 was $2.00 an hour!), and be able to afford to live, pay rent, and eat.  Try that now.  Not gonna happen.  But anyway, I didn't begin to feel the pinch of poverty until...I got pregnant, got dumped by my boyfriend, and wound up on welfare.  From that time to this, poverty has been my constant companion and worry.  

Poverty gets into your mind.  It's like a parasite that you don't necessarily know you have; it affects you in ways you don't perceive or ways you can hide - from yourself as well as other people.  Poverty causes shame, and shame can cause people to do many things they wouldn't want to do, and wouldn't have to do if they had adequate funds to keep the wolf from the door.  I have been barring the wolf from my door for a long, long time now.  Anyone besides me watching the TV show "Hoarders"?  Well, poverty is often the demon that drives hoarders to hoard.  Not always, but often.  You want to gather up what you can when you can, in order to have enough when cash runs low or out.  For some folks, like my mom, this is expressed in poor spending decisions.  In other people, that urge, that thrifty, frugal character trait, just gets kicked into high gear, gets perverted.  Of course, there is a lot more to the hoarding disorder, but I can definitely see how it can get started.

I did say I'm a packrat, didn't I?  Well, I am, though I am not a hoarder, thank goodness.  But over the past dozen or so years, maybe even further, I've collected a whole lotta stuff for my artistic urges.  Mostly it started with my interest in sewing, which I learned when I was a young teen sewing my own clothes with my big sister's help, on our old treadle Singer.  I don't know how old it was, but I know it was always in our house as long as I can remember.  I even remember putting the needle through my finger when I was a tiny child of maybe two years old.  Boy was I scared!  I don't know what scared me more, the blood or my mother discovering what I was up to!  So I've had a long love affair with fabric.  I love the colors, patterns, textures.  There is something seductive about a bolt of uncut cloth, such possibilities!  And when I was grown, I got into making quilts in the early eighties, so I had an excuse!  I bought fabric.  I kept all my scraps, no matter how tiny.  I "inherited" fabric other people were getting rid of.  I still have some of that fabric, going back even into the late seventies.  What can I say?  It's like paint to a painter.  Oh dear...did I mention I also have paint?  At least fifty bottles of craft paints, probably more.  Plus oil pastels, chalk pastels, markers, pens, pencils, brushes, etc.  Sketchbooks.  Construction paper.  Scrapbooking paper.  

And then there are the calenders...I buy beautiful calenders because they make me happy.  Every month a new work of art, or photograph of gorgeous natural scenery.  However, I have a difficult time giving them up when it's time to hang a new one.  There are some great works of art in there!  Plus often I've kept records of events that occurred during the year, such as when we got the first snow, saw the first flock of geese returning in the spring or leaving in the fall, when the crocuses first popped through the soil in spring.  Last year I recorded a rare event that I may never have again: I saw an indigo bunting, a male, at my bird feeder one day; if you've ever seen one, you'll know why I was so excited.  They are absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, truly indigo in color, and they are getting more rare.  I had never seen one before, and I don't think I'm likely to again, so it was something to record.  Thus I don't throw calenders away.  I always have good intentions of cutting them up and matting and/or framing the pictures for my walls...yet I haven't done that.  I probably have at least ten packed away.  (never mind that I don't have a clue where, mind you)

There are the kids' outgrown clothes - the special items - that I've hung onto for sentimental reasons.  Baby gowns that they wore.  Tiny shoes.  A raincoat or some overalls from their toddlerhoods.  Now that they are all grown, I've been giving these things to them, but for a long time they were just packed in boxes that I never seem to have an attic to store them in.  I've moved a lot in my life, and some of the boxes I have now have been moved multiple times and go back some thirty years.

I have bought a ton of yarn over the years.  There must be a couple of well-packed cartons of that hanging around my closet.  I used to crochet a lot; now it's a sometime thing at best, but I have trouble getting rid of the yarn because you never know when the urge will hit and I wouldn't want to be caught unprepared!  I have a huge box of sewing patterns, some brand new, never used or cut, and many of them vintage.  Hell, some of the fashions are back!  I might want to make a caftan or a peasant blouse, or a tunic with bell sleeves, you know?  I'll be ready for the next fashion trend for sure.  

Glue.  Glitter.  Pompoms. Popsicle sticks - I bought a box of a thousand back in 1985 and I have yet to use them up.  LOL!  Lace.  Trims.  Buttons.  And then there are the BEADS...

I could literally open a bead store.  I am not lying.  I can't even buy any more beads because I already have pretty much everything out there.  Glass beads, mostly.  Vintage and new.  Hanks and hanks of seedbeads.  Swarovski crystals.  Lampwork beads.  Czech pressed glass.  Indian beads.  Big beads.  Small beads.  I once bought 50 pounds of beads in one fell swoop - yes I did!  I could bead everything I own and still have beads leftover.  I have so many I can't even have them all available to work with, because of the sheer overwhelming quantity of them that are still packed in boxes from my last move.  Have you ever moved a box of glass beads?  They are HEAVY.  

Tools, sewing machines, and a felting machine.  Polymer clay, a pasta machine for polymer clay, and a toaster oven for baking it.  Wool roving in all colors of the rainbow, plus white, and wool dyes to dye it myself.  Items I've collected to recycle into art, or use to produce art (like phone books for pressing leaves!  can you believe it?)  On and on it goes.  Picture frames.  Children's books I like for the art.  Supply catalogs.  Beading magazines.  My current favorite mags, "Cloth, Paper, Scissors" and "Quilting Arts".  Anything that I find visually appealing.  I am a color junkie.  I'm constantly looking for visual stimulation, and this leads to more collecting.  

Somebody stop me, please!  

So...going back to the collection of bottle caps that I brought up way earlier in this rambling confession of my poverty-driven, anxiety-ridden excess...it was a really exhilarating feeling, putting my bottle caps in the garbage.  (our recycling center doesn't take them, sheesh)  It was oddly freeing.  I felt lightened, even though I have a lot more stuff I want to sort out and dispose of, donate, give away.  It was, in short, a big step.  You see, I feel the effects of the times of lack that I've endured, both during my childhood and my adulthood, and too often in the past I have coped with the anxiety of no cashflow (raising kids on one's own requires determination and sacrifice, and often welfare, alas) by accumulating the tools and materials of my artistic trade to excess.  But that comes with a price that has nothing to do with the cost of whatever it is:

Too much is, well, too much.  Sooner or later, you run out of room.  And you lose things, because so much is packed in boxes that you forget what you have and where the hell you put it.  Or you think you know where it is, you can picture in your mind (or so you think) where you last saw something, only to find when you go there that what you want isn't there at all.  Frantic searching ensues, often followed by a)mess-making, and b)frustration, and c)a complete brain shitstorm.  And re-purchasing something that you KNOW you own but can't find at the moment.  Only to find it next Thursday, in a different box in another closet that you could swear you haven't touched since 2007, so how in the world did you ever think you'd seen the damn thing recently anyway??? 

You get my point.  Phew.

Some of you know what I'm talking about only too well, and you know who you are.  And this brings me to my recently-acquired new philosophy of life: LESS IS MORE.  I must admit I was quite shocked when this occurred to me, but there it is.  Less is more.  Let me give you an example: less fabric is more opportunity to use it, because you don't have to search through the last three decades of accumulation to find that snippet or fat quarter or two yards of whatever gem it currently is that you just found the perfect project for (after all these years).  And another: Fewer bottles of paint to choose from means it's much more likely that half of them won't be dried up, have permanently stuck caps, or separated/settled/changed from beautiful pink to something that more closely resembles baby vomit.  Same with glues.  If I had a buck for every damn solidified bottle or tube of glue, I could go buy some more...er....glue:D  And so on and so on.  I'm sure you can come up with your own examples.  But the biggest thing of all that I am just beginning to discover is that the less stuff you have to wade through to start working on or continue a project, the more time you have to actually create.


And what in the world does this all have to do with finding one's inspiration when you're feeling tapped out?  Here it is: whatever it is that gets you going again will be right at your finger tips and you'll know where it is when you empty the pockets of your smock and find nothing but lint balls, looking for that spark.  Because the spark is there somewhere.  It would just be a shame if you burn down the studio with it because you have so much stuff.  

So, while I'm waiting for the next inspiration to present itself, I'm going to go sort out another box and see what I can give or throw away.  I'll then be able to clear not only my cluttered space but also my cluttered mind.  And that, my friends, will free my mind to fan the flames of creativity when that little spark emerges to begin making art anew.

And now it's deep in the quiet hours of the night.  My family is sleeping.  I'm getting ready to hit the sack myself.  One final thought I'll share before I go:

What the hell should I do with the dozens of used/damaged/obsolete CDs I know I have?  He he...maybe we should have a CHALLENGE...hmmm.  ;)

Night folks.  Sweet dreams.