A New Year and Gratitude

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm excited to be starting a fresh new year, to dig in to new challenges, to create beauty. I'm ready to feel my soul grow again this year.

Last year was a big one for me. My son turned 3, and I came out of my parent-focused shell. I launched myself onto a creative growth path that has been quietly dancing around to me for years (for most of my life I guess, I just wasn't quite ready to understand what it all meant). I just knew that it was time. Time to find my creative self, to trust my instincts, to follow those callings and leap towards everything that felt right to me. I did just that. I put logic aside. I sacrificed a lot. And I felt alive for the first time in years. Over the next six months I took two online mixed media courses, a creative business class, started blogging about my journey, designed and launched a new and improved website for my creative business, launched a company page on facebook, painted more than I have in the last 5 years, started exploring doing prints of my art, and am now I am working towards opening an Etsy shop to sell my art & reproductions. I have come alive. I am buzzing with creativity, calm with strong confidence, quiet as I listen to myself and trust that I know the way, and grateful for this life I am creating.

I am serious, excited and scared.

I've only ever felt whole when I was creating. As a youngster I lived on a rural acreage, immersed in nature, usually alone and outdoors. I had a vivid imagination and was always working on something. I started with drawing, gluing, crafting, doodling and storytelling. My dad got me started painting when I was about 5. Then handmade floral jewelry and hair clips when I was about 8. Then it was book-making, book-marks, art cards. Then as a pre-teen I was writing stories; mostly unfinished novels. I figure skated, took dance lessons. And through it all I was painting. I took every art-related opportunity that was available to me in a small town, and I relished in every lesson. I danced, skated, glued, pasted, brushed, wrote. It poured out of me. I distinctly remember feeling more at home in my high school art room than anywhere else.

And when I grew up I tried to keep art at the centre of my life but slowly it drifted off to the periphery. It was a once-in-a-while hobby. My design work is wonderfully creative, but still something was always missing in my life. I traveled and explored and tried to fill that quiet void, but it wasn't until last summer that my life exploded with the joy I always knew was waiting. I had been admiring the works of Anahata Katkin and Papaya Art for a few years and then one day in the late spring of 2012 I looked up their website on a whim. It led me to a whole new world of art - mixed media art -and my world immediately expanded, as though I had taken a huge breath. I knew instantly that I had found my place. It was then my mixed media art course with Danita, and a book called Taking Flight by Kelly Rae Roberts that had me riveted and in no time I was changing the whole course of my life, knowing with complete certainty that this with the path for me.

And here I am today. Embarking on a new year, ready for all that it brings and feeling grateful. And feeling, finally, at home.

With renewed energy, and gratitude, thank you for sharing this experience with me.