Clutter from Tuesday is here - weird kitchen clutter. I was helped hugely by a post on zen habits, here. It talks about reducing things to the essential. I have discovered this year that I can be hugely influenced by just reframing how I think about a problem. I was tidying one day and found myself asking "Do I need this?" about an item. Framed like that, I easily answered "no!". Usually I would think "should I keep this?" - that leads to all the "well, it might come in handy" and "well, it was a gift, she might come over sometime..." scenarios. But "do I need it?" cuts through all of that waffle. And yes, if you love it, then you do need it. The zen habits post on the laws of simplicity did the same thing in my head, it all became clear... keep only the essential. Okay, I am applying that rule with a very light touch, but it was enough to convince me that two traditional corkscrews, a picnic corkscrew and a beer opener were probably not essential!

I have art too at last. I have been fairly behind in posting stuff. This is an unbound journal page for an "outside the book/inside the box" project for journal type work that doesn't seem to fit my everyday journal or my creative journey journal. I was really tired on Monday or Tuesday and headed to bed, but I felt irritable and frustrated. Reading a magazine in bed, I realised it was because I hadn't been creating since I got home, so I got up and grabbed some paint and a handful of magazine pages and other collage papers, whatever caught my eye while I was rummaging. I just started ripping up graph paper and envelopes and applying it, then the landscape got added. The face (smudged out to protect the photographer's copyright, but intact on my original) was a wonderful picture of a certain singer exhausted and satisfied after a performance. I added between layers, stamped and painted my words and transferred the self portrait. Very much just unconscious play. Then I had to laugh, suddenly realising that there was a connection between my words and the singer in the magazine portrait & I added the quote "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." I love the way my unconscious created a page with the very words I needed to hear: I need to make art, nothing else matters, not how it is received, not my inner critic, just the process and the intrinsic growth.