The List-Late Winter 2024

Most of my art conjures from the making of lists...things that inspire me at the moment, things I become interested in, things I notice and appreciate in my day to day life, and things that may come as an epiphany in my overthinking, world-building brain.

This has been a difficult one.

Truth be told I've not been in the list making feeling the past few months. The inspirations are there, the ideas and plans...too many plans really. I've been overwhelmed. Attempts to clear my mind have been futile. Efforts to pinpoint and plan coherently have been futile. The world has made it back into my psyche and I feel engulphed in the muggle world yet again, with all its struggles and bad news. It's been bills and shopping lists and to do lists and dinner and dishes and snowy cold commutes and shoveling slush and collecting tax documents and endless laundry and cat barf on the carpet. But that's just life, ...and you have it so much better off than other people, you say. I know. I do. I've always tried to romanticize life, and I can be successful at that, but lately the nonsense of society has crept in and had been corrupting my heart with all the bitterness that comes with the well rounded envelopment that modern society and its mind eating influence can have.

The idea of a shifting into two parallel realities has become more and more evident to me. Remember December 2021? A transition into the Age of Aquarius? If you're enmeshed in the spiritual world, it was a time where society was supposed to come together and raise up into a much higher frequency? Yea I was skeptical, but I can see the shift...and it's not for the better for most. I see so many caught up in the despair, the political discord, the taking of sides and throwing shade to those who may have a different opinion or perspective. The hatred. The victimization. I'm not going to get political here. That's not my intention. These are simply observations. I also have found lovely individuals and communities who have felt the call to rise up, help, and guide those who choose not to walk the path an inherently sick and exploitive society has laid out before us. To live with intention for a higher purpose...to fulfill their soul contract.

The shift began during Covid...most of us felt it...the questioning of society and how it goes around, and why we go around with it. Some returned fighting and thrashing to that previous way of life of hustle and the amusements society provides, while some of us did not. If you're here I'm guessing you are one of the souls who questioned everything about a society that we had no way of really escaping, and never really looked into any ways of escaping since it seemed there was no way out anyway...and we had no comprehension that it even could be any other way since it was all we had ever known.

I could go on and on here, and here are some truths:

The covid years, aside from the fears and losses, were the best times of my life. For the first time in my adult life I had no anxiety manifest from hustle culture and the expectation to participate in every social event, no reason to pretend I was someone I was not, no reason to tolerate judgement or beratement for the sake of keeping the peace. My perspective on the overall sickness of society changed. I saw a way out that was laid before me. I swore I would never return to that life, and truth be told it's been difficult. The world has been gnashing and clawing at me ever since...trying to drag me back into monotonous blind slumber.

I refuse to be oblivious to the world around me, but at the same time I refuse to be dragged down by the negatives that be and are hard at work here. The idea of 'walking the hedge line' has taken on a new form it seems.

Slowly, I'm traversing my way back into my own world, and the list is a bit more abstract. A bit more thought provoking. I bit harder to articulate, and even harder to render into some form of art.

The List

• I've has some extraordinary happenings lately with my continuation of studies of the fae, and how I believe them to be sentient protective nature spirits for the species they represent...you know, when too many coincidences become just not coincidence anymore.
  

• First Stirrings. Imbolc. The coming back to life. New beginnings. Fresh starts. Renewed hope. Gemstones in pastel shades. (this is the theme of my soon to be released jewelry line!) I've also got some drawings along this theme that need to be worked on. I've never really been a Spring person, but I've felt myself during the last couple weeks yearning for the mesmerizing song of spring peepers that instantly lifts my soul up and off into the treetops in the tepid, pale spring dusk, the sweet smell of the earliest shoots of flora mixed with the scent of damp fresh earth, and walking through those odd pockets of warm or cold air that happen in the evenings.
  

• Reality Shaping. (not to be confused with reality shifting) Oh this one...its so expansive, endless, complex. I spoke before of walking the hedge line and how that meaning, at least for me, has transformed. Wherein one must dip into that realm in order to survive and keep a roof over one's head, then balance...and dip back to the other side of the hedge into a much more magical and meaningful reality. I remember an old saying I found humorous years ago...'I reject your reality and substitute my own!' Oh if I only knew then what I know now, and how that quote went from funny quip to life altering mission!
  

• Dispelling Beliefs. This one is constant, ongoing. Why do I believe that? Is it because someone told me to, or is it based on my experience and interpretation of the world around me? That interpretation is a can of worms in itself that dives deep into the workings of the mind, the idea of 'self' as its own entity disconnected from thought, emotion, and life experience...and how all those aspects interconnect to form an individualized understanding and interpretation of the default reality in which we all begin...and that, in itself, has created so many differing opinion of which, it seems, none of us can agree on.
  

• I-Woke-Up-One-Day-And-Became-A-Birdwatcher. This is a right of passage. I have my 'bird station' in my front yard outside my studio window. It's been there for years. I feed them. Put out fruit. Decorate that sparse blue spruce at the wood's edge with cranberry and popcorn strings and star shaped seed treats in December. They eat. Then one day I saw the three squirrel litter mates playing, the lone cardinal that loves to roost in the thicket of multiflora rose, and that bird that sings that I still can't get a good audio to identify it, when the Blue Jays roll in, when the Mourning Doves make an appearance in the sunny, late afternoons. When the warbler sits high in the trees on rainy summer days and sings that magical song... When everyone freezes when a hawk glides over. I see them now.

I hope your winter is going well,

Best Wishes,

Archaena