I don’t believe I have ever made a sacrifice in life.
I have, however,often given up something I valued for the sake of other considerations.
Surely that is just part of normal life and does not deserve the grandiose title of sacrifice.
This morning I got out of a comfy bed to let Hugo out for a wee. An entirely practical consideration in my opinion. I chose to do that.
I am wary of people who say they sacrificed something. The word is just all a bit too ‘drama queen’ for my liking.
But yesterday some light pruning occurred in our yard. Old blooms cut off to allow new blooms to flourish. That is about as sacrificial as it gets in our house. Anything else is a choice.
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
If I could eliminate non-productive distraction from my life I would have an extra hour or two every day. My problem with being certain that I want less distraction is that I never know if distraction is an entirely bad thing. Distraction only happens because something interrupts me and I am too nosey to let it pass, usually because my interest in what I am doing is wavering a bit.*
*I am able to be super focussed and single minded. In the right conditions I can turn my ears off.
To be pedantic, I only want the right amount of dull and pointless distraction removed from my life. The joyous life-enhancing distraction is always welcome.
Here is a conundrum. I did not see the last live performance that I experienced but I did hear it. I went to Plymouth Hoe, this morning, for the V E Day 80 Civic service and arrived too late to see anything apart from service personnel’s bottoms.
Or the back of the Mayoral Party.
But I did hear some marvelous music and listened to the Churchill V E Day speech in full for the first time. All in all a most exceptional and interesting dog walk .
Even more thrilling, one of the people at the top of the Lighthouse is my friend Jenny. She is the smaller human of the three.
List the people you admire and look to for advice…
My actual list of admired people that I would go to for advice, specific to me, is subject to a strict Non Disclosure Agreement with myself.
They know who they are.
But I am an advice and knowledge junkie and will take advice or knowledge from anyone, admired or not if advice or wisdom is needed.
Unsolicited advice though, is not my thing. Just about tolerable if given with love or care but most of it just rinses off, unrequired, unrequested and unneeded. Selected deafness can be a superpower.
So can a killer sentence.
“That is really interesting, but I am afraid I am not interested”
Maybe just as a thought bubble or a quote on a T-Shirt. I will leave that to your own discretion.
I do. Quite a few years ago I narrowly avoided running over a political leader, he was a lucky man that I was concentrating. I was in bits he had stepped out in front of me from between two parked cars. He shrugged his shoulders in his expensive camel coat, gave me a small hand flap of thanks and went on his way. This seemingly minor moment in my life when I absolutely did the right thing always haunts me when I consider the damage he has done to our country. This morning is no different.
Moving swiftly on, our first rose bloom ever on our defensive planting scheme bloomed and drooped. We plucked her tiny head from her damaged stem and popped it in a shot glass.
She is a very thorny rose who has been purchased specifically to ramble over our garage roof to deter the neighbourhood cats from getting into our yard and having a shit. Which is exactly the word I used when I nearly ran over the politician. At the time I said it because I was frightened. Now, well…
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
An evening walk at a marina gave me the perfect image to describe a favourite type of holiday. And I am not a boaty person, but the name says it all.
Not just holidays though although I may have to google the word holiday.
Holidays are just an extension of ‘ moments’ or ‘taking a break’ Periods of life that differ significantly from the mundanity of the norm.
I had loads to do yesterday but the two big dog walks of the day gave me the chance to take two mini coddiwomples. The one in the boatyard and one in a city park.
The city park, courtesy of Victorian municipal planning gave me quite the tiny coddiwomple in bright April sunlight. From a shady English Woodland…
To the fiery colours of Far Eastern Azalea bushes, simply by turning my body 90 degrees.
Two unknown destinations when I set out on my mini coddiwomple. A tiny holiday from the days admin.
Now I am very much risk averse , harm averse would better describe me. But if I switch the word risk for unpredictable outcome or experimentation then I am much more comfortable with the whole concept of taking a risk. I am not a huge fan of timid or obnoxiously certain people because their place on the risk taking spectrum is so different from mine.
Arty and creative risks are my favourite things to do. A bin full of failure is the foundation of my creative practice.
I took a risk with the picture above. I had a stash of very old (20 years) but very good quality Ink Jet paper.
This image is a bit of everything, gelli printing, collage, watercolour and pastels. Under such pressure many papers would fail and this one was no different. But the failure, where the surface pulled off is almost its greatest success. The orange area above the boat got a bit too wet in the process and the surface started to lift off. Working into the area with pastels created the cloud texture.
Then a bit of photo meddling created two different images.
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
Sometimes the prompts from my blog hosts are interesting and can feed into an interesting ponder. Most of the time they are just of no interest to me, so are swiftly scrolled past. Occasionally one like this holds no interest but there is a glimmer of interest in the irritation I feel at the absurdity of the question.
Surely the result of every decision made,big or small, good or bad creates learning and growth. This is why we only tend to stub our baby toes once in a given location.
I took this picture yesterday not for the graffiti particularly but because of the softness of the vivid colours in the puddle.
Puddle pictures are one of my favourite things when they are beautiful. It is just that muddy/dirty puddles are the norm.
I wanted to get this vibrancy into one of my seascapes for the upcoming Turner exhibition. This puddle set me thinking, the results of that thinking might appear any time soon. Or perhaps they won’t.
What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
When this question popped up on my blog host site overnight, I was a little perplexed. There must be millions of places in the world that I wouldn’t want to visit but surely I would have to visit them or have very solid research first to realise that. Life is too short for such ponderings. I will never visit all the places in the world that I want to visit or revisit. I suspect this particular question is one of my ‘ Great imponderables’
Much better on a rainy day to think of somewhere in the world I would like to be. Sitting in the shade on a very warm day eating figs fresh from the tree. Again there must be millions of places around the world where I could achieve this. Hunting for the positive is so much more enriching than dwelling on the negative.
I am not much of a repeat reader. If I reread a book it is often circumstantial rather than a choice. Book Club is a good source of a re-read but with the added benefits of being able to talk with a group of fascinating people about the book. This last month I read the book club book twice and I had also read it a few years ago. 3 times for a book I consider to be not worth reading. I probably didn’t finish it the first time. I didn’t plan to give it such diligence this month but after the first read I researched the reviews from when it was first published and gave it a skim-read second/third go.
I am an ardent reader for pleasure. The more I read this book the more I took from it, but pleasure was not something extracted on any one of my three adventures between its covers.
I feel I have failed by not thinking that this book is an insightful and fitting final novel by a great writer. But in truth this is not her final novel. She didn’t finish it and her hastily written manuscripts fueled by end-of-life medications were assembled by her much respected editor. Would she have sent it out in that form to her adoring public?
Could it ever be accurately judged as it was published after her death. Once one critic, from an unreliable cohort, mostly white men, had said it was her masterpiece ( mistresspiece) could anyone have disagreed?
Much better to read this article and the books mentioned. Written a day after her death the article mentions my personal favourite The Birthday Boys about Scott , a local Plymouth hero. But read by me long before I lived here.
I am going to read it again now. I suppose despite what I said earlier I am a re-reader. Just not over and over again. Life is too short!
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