L

L has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer - I am without words...

L

This week I received one of those 'slap on the side of the head - get life in perspective' moments ... A friend has just received news that she has a malignant pelvic growth - she is my age - mid 50's...

I hadn't heard from L since before Christmas - we really have only 'just kept up contact' since I moved away 12 years ago - our lives have taken us in different directions and we have 'drifted' significantly...

I first met L when I went to a meeting of the then called "Mother's Club" when my eldest daughter had just started Preps. I can recall the first time I saw her - I remember thinking what a well groomed woman she was and she had the most amazing hair style that was all of the go back then in the mid seventies...

We became firm friend and shared all the sorts of activities that those years of primary school brings - we did Mother's Day stalls, election cake stall, lunch days, school fetes, school council, etc. Outside of school hours we did the occasional dinner party with spouses and other friends. We went shopping together, had birthday lunches, did various phases of craft together - she still talks about the four foot geese cross stitch I started 'way back when' - her piece was finished in a respectable time - mine is unfinished and pushed to the back of the cupboard somewhere... In other words our lives were fairly involved as you do when your kids are in the same age range....

Yesterdays news shocked me back to my core and I had to read the email quite a few times before it sunk in... I rung her immediately and we chatted for a couple of hours at the end of our conversation I left her laughing and I made a silent commitment to myself that I would see her soon. She is prepared for the long haul - surgery and chemotherapy. L is an optimistic person but she's a realist - both her parents had cancer - neither survived it - L knows she is preparing herself for battle...

Faith

I decided in a mad moment to 'play' in one of the swaps in an on-line craft group I belong to. The title of the swap was 'faith' and you could create anything you wanted using that as your theme...

As I am not a particularly religious person I don't really have 'a faith' so to speak - however I do have a belief that there is something bigger than me... One of the memories I have as a very young child watching a trail of ants and trying to answer the question of 'if I am big to an ant what is big to me' and staring skywards. It also occurred to me to question what was the governing power - something so large and unseen that kept the world, indeed the universe on it orbit...

That question has remained something which I have never answered satisfactorily... So to create something that uses faith as its central theme posed an exciting challenge.

Just prior to the swap announcement I noticed an orb spider building its web between the house and the camellia tree outside our bedroom window - and while I don't like spiders - the orb spider fascinates me with it beautiful web designs. One night while standing in the dark watching the spider at work weaving its web it came to me that the spider just 'did this' every night - built its web. Did it have faith in its own spidery way? Faith that it could do it, faith that it would do it. At the same time I became aware of the night sky behind the web -with the stars seemingly 'hung' almost web like - were the stars part of a greater web - a web which was built by an unseen force. I too had faith that night would repeat itself every few hours - without a doubt - faith it would happen. Was the spider web the microcosm and the night sky the macrocosm. Was the same pattern repeated in larger and small...

When the swap list was announced I knew at once what I was going to do and so I sketched an idea of a night sky with a main star and then a 'snapshot' piece of a spiders web woven between grasses with dew drops strung on its threads... This piece would be sewn over the corner of the main piece - raw edged - as to give the impression it had been plucked out of the 'bigger picture' so to speak. I thought the idea of the 'snapshot piece' would further endorse my idea of a repeated pattern in life - like the old adage so above so below...

As luck would have it the Australasian Quilters Convention was here in Melbourne so I made sure I looked for some night sky material which I found at Dyed and Gone to Heaven - aptly named I thought... It was a mixture of blues, greys, silvers. and gold - I then used watercolour paints to emphasis some parts of the sky...

So far I have accomplished this...

I am not that happy with the main star - I wanted to give the impression of the morning star - bigger and brighter than the rest - but is early days yet and all could change... I am on a bit of a deadline with this one -it has to be in the post by next Monday 17th...

Art & Fear

E brought this home from her course - obligatory reading for all the students... I have read just the first few pages and they speak volumes - so much so that E and I decided that it is a title worth having on our shelf...

I think that fear plagues most people who produce creatively... I know it does for me...