New Life, New Ways

Need to find ways to recharge my artistic energy. NEW ways. The old ones aren’t working anymore because my life isn’t my old life. New life, new ways. I can’t sit with my journal and pens and paints for hours and hours anymore, staring off into space and letting my fingers get dirty. Now, there’s a little boy who needs watching, and wants to make his own messes. Which I then have to clean up. I know little excercises might work. I know. But it’s so hard to get the juices going, to switch gears, to come up with something while little man is sitting there, or standing there, or laying there kicking his heels up.

I get ideas when I don’t have opportunity to try them out. Like wanting to draw pictures of the things from his day—the cherry blossoms and lilacs from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A great cartoon dog from a book at Barnes and Noble. Or a real dog named Pinky, sitting outside of Teddy’s Bar and Grill, which Gabriel spent hours watching.

I read blogs and sites about creative types, and it is inspiring, it is. But I don’t have that time that I used to. Once upon a time, I would read my blogs or books and then I would go paint or write and do whatever I had been inspired to do. Now, I read, and then hear the baby stirring from his nap in the other room. Mommy time over.

I know it’s possible. I have to work on it. Figure out this new trick.

Like a baby learning how to stand, how to walk, how to talk. I'm new at this, just like Gabriel.