Winter Solstice

Sharing a little poem I wrote for the Winter Solstice in 2006...

Original painting by Matt Armington as inspired by poem. (Thank you Matt!)

Solstice Night

The moonless air is still
and dark.
Shadowless we wait
with eyes skyward
and frozen breath
curling
into the night.

Deep within our souls
we ache
with desire to embark
upon the timeless journey,
of night into day,
transforming
dark into light.

All wings must rest
folded
marking the time
until the heart calls.
Suspended in slumber
awaiting
time for flight.

Crystalline silken threads
spun
on winter dreams
by cryptic mystic spiders
lacing lives and loves
concealing
within a fragile web.

Diamond stars sparkle
escorts
from the shadowed realm
point to awakened roots
taking hold within us,
illuminating
slender slivers of hope.


Copyright Liv Herbert 2006

Crafting from the Roots Up

Coming into midlife has been challenging for me. I struggle with relinquishing who I was as a young adult, and I balk at moving into a future that is frighteningly wide open. I am emerging from my middle age metamorphic cocoon still not knowing what type of butterfly I am. What do I want to do with my life – the second half? The excitement of being able to reinvent myself is counterbalanced by the lonely glare of a blank slate framed by adult fear and indecision. I could reinvent myself…but as what? There are so many vocational options, unlimited activities to try, dozens of interesting crafts calling my name, and many facets of my personality to explore. I feel like a teenager again. Yet unlike a girl of 18, I am a “mature” woman with a lot less time to waste. My second half has an expiration date that was absent in my first half. I’d like to get to the heart of the matter soon and spend those precious second-half days doing things that make me truly happy; I want to grow back into the soul of the child I was meant to be.

There is something very overwhelming about having too many options. Which one of those numerous potential new activities and creative pursuits is “the one”? In order to discover my lost self, I had to take a trip back in time to my crafting roots. Was there an art or craft that always captured my heart? I began to remember the things I asked for as a child: crayons, books, a typewriter, paper, pencils, thread, fabric, a camera, more paper, more crayons, yet more books...some items were very prominent in my recollections. These key objects represented activities that brought me joy at an early age, and are interests to which I am drawn once again.

Looking back, I always liked to play with color and texture. I can remember the pleasure of opening a fresh box of Crayola crayons with their rainbow of colors to delight the eye. One Christmas I received an enormous box of crayons, well over a hundred, packed neatly in a large, flat box along with a crayon sharpener and a few other art supplies. I was in heaven! Then there was the holiday which brought a “learn to draw” set which came with a pressed board drawing surface, a book on how to draw horses (my passion at the time), a sketch book, a box of charcoals, and some professional pencils. I felt like an artist. When I was older, my mother bought me a “real” set of Prismacolor colored pencils and a small palette of Grumbacher watercolors. We even went to an honest-to-goodness art store to purchase them. I spent hours drawing, mostly horses and other animals, but I also designed clothes and imagined they would be in pattern books or fashion magazines some day. Many of those colored pencils were worn down to little stubs in no time, but I never had the heart to throw them away.

Does anyone remember collecting S&H Green Stamps years ago? My mother would get these stamps when she made purchases at the grocery store; when you saved enough stamps and pasted them in a little paperback book, you could get your choice of items from a catalog. After weeks of squirreling away and attaching those little green tickets (I can still taste the stamp glue!), I was able to make my dream purchase: my first camera. I was still in elementary school at the time so this was very exciting. My choice was a Spartus Vanguard, made by Herold Products. It took color or black-and-white photographs with 127 film and it had a bulbous flash set in a silver-lined cup that looked like a small radar dish. It seems so antiquated now, but at the time it was my window on the world; it was a way to capture the beauty of nature or to forever frame a moment in time. I wanted my photos to be like the ones in National Geographic magazine, which came every month like clockwork in my parents’ mail. The magazine’s pictures seemed perfectly composed, romantic and mysterious. Every one told a wordless story about people and places that existed in a world different from my own. Of course, of the hundreds of pictures I took with that boxy camera, only a few turned out even remotely like the magazine shots, but I kept trying.

And let’s not forget the world of crafting. During my younger days I tried a lot of different things from sewing to knitting to embroidery. In middle school I learned to follow a pattern to make clothes, and I sewed some simple decorating items for my room. Like a lot of other little girls I made clothes and jewelry for my Barbie dolls, and I created jewelry for myself from beads and buttons. (Have you ever seen beads made from drops of Elmer’s glue?!) One of my favorite collections that I still have today is a mixture of plastic beads that I keep in an old, blue and white, metal cookie tin. One day my family stopped at a country store not far from a relative’s house. In one room of the store was a large, wooden whiskey barrel filled with beads. For a small amount one could purchase a bag of beads in a random assortment of sizes and hues. I remember dipping my hands deep into that cornucopia of color and wiggling my fingers through the round bits of plastic as if I had discovered a pirate’s chest filled with gold coins.

But the most enduring of my childhood passions grew from my love of books, which were my constant childhood companions. Like photographs, books could transport me into foreign places and let me tag along on adventures that could only take place in my imagination. Words were enticing and playful, beautiful and magical. They had power and yet they could be shaped into landscapes, actions and images. Words could communicate on paper what a shy kid like me couldn't verbalize. I loved those words and I wanted to write them too. So sometime when I was about 8, I asked my parents for a way to write faster than I could by hand. My wish was granted in the form of a brown, plastic typewriter that had cream-toned keys. I banged on that typewriter for hours; my parents got their money’s worth from that purchase! Eventually I graduated to a more grown-up, metal, Smith-Corona and, sadly, the poor little plastic typewriter went the way of all well-used toys. However, it will always have a fond place in my heart.

Vintage Hermes 3000 typewriter I purchased at a yard sale brings back memories of my childhood writing friend.

So, as we grow older, do we grow back into the creative people we used to be; the people we were born to be? If we are lucky, I think the answer is yes. Though many of my interests popped up here and there during my 20’s and 30’s, I am now beginning to return to my roots with more fervor in my midlife rediscovery of drawing, needlework, sewing, photography, beading, and, through the wonders of technology, writing. Blogging is undoubtedly an addictive outlet for word-lovers! This emerging butterfly might have finally found her wings.

I asked friends in my Etsy BBEST team (Boomer and Beyond Etsy Street Team) to look back at what arts and crafts they were drawn to as children. Did they carry these interests into adulthood or do they find themselves returning to these parts of their earlier selves? Their insightful and interesting answers will be posted tomorrow!

Creative Composting

Writing has always been one of my favorite pastimes, but my inspiration for it comes in waves, and I don't produce a steady stream of written works all year long. I tend to focus my energies on different projects in different seasons. I haven’t been attending to my writing during the past few months because I have been researching, planning, and nurturing my incipient garden, which is promising to be bigger than it was last year at this time. For the past two summers I have been experimenting with one method of raised bed gardening that reminds me of the ebb and flow of my writing endeavors: lasagna or sheet-mulch planting. For those not familiar with this method, here is a summary. Place a thick layer of newspapers and cardboard over the grass. Soak thoroughly with water. One can construct foot-high, wooden walls for the new garden bed, but it isn’t entirely necessary. Add straw and other organic waste matter – wood chips, kitchen vegetable scraps, grass clippings, leaves, yard trimmings, or any kind of non-toxic plant matter. Then pile on a layer of compost, and mulch generously. One option is to cover this layer cake with a sheet of black plastic to speed up the decomposition process, but it isn’t absolutely necessary. And voila, in a couple of months, depending on the temperature, you will start to have a nice, rich earthy mass of nutrients to feed your plants. No double-digging or sweating for hours with a hoe and shovel trying to encourage our rocky New England soil to part with its rubble. This method builds up rather than excavates down. With any luck, you will also be able to dig down into the rotting pile of biological refuse to find a squirming layer of earthworms busy doing their job churning life into the future soil you have started.

It’s really quite a magical natural process, and it all happens without much effort on the gardener’s part beyond the initial set-up. One can even toss in non-animal food scraps and grass clippings over the course of the year and enrich the pile, heaping on new fodder for future gardening. Keep adding organic matter to the mess as time goes on and the soil just gets better and better. And it all happens underneath the surface, under the cover of mulch or plastic, and completely out of view. The magic happens so subtly that peeking under the outer layer during the incubating period would not be advised. Allow the mystery to stay behind Mother Nature’s magic curtain. It is best just to have faith and believe that, indeed, a voluptuous brown earth, steaming and teeming with vital nutrients, will be waiting to nourish your plants and, in the end, you.

Our "Arbor Garden" with its archway made from a recycled cedar swing set.
Hinged, arched doors were created out of reclaimed, old barn boards.

How does decaying vegetal matter remind me of writing you ask? Well I don’t want to reveal too much of what goes on under my mulch, but trust me, covering up the brain and letting the worms work into that gray matter is an absolutely necessary part of my creative process. I suppose that doesn’t paint a very pretty picture, but I warned you not to peek under the outer layer until it’s time to plant! I’ve been very guilty of lifting up that thought-incubating plastic way too many times before the soil was ripe; I was often repulsed and discouraged against creating anything by the nasty sight of ideas not yet fully ready for growing into fully-leafed projects. Remember: Never peek! Trust that nature is stewing and churning beneath the surface of your skull.

When the time is right, and the temperature has the reached proper level, the stink of rotting thoughts subsides and the pleasantly sweet aroma of creative compost will signal that your mind-garden is ready for cultivation. Lift up the top mulch, throw in some seeds, and watch what grows. A veritable cornucopia of essays and poems, art work, and literary fruits will blossom if you just let the land between your ears lay fallow for a little while. Composing in the compost increases your creative yield. Trust me, decay and dirt are good things despite what your mother may have taught you. Now pardon me while I put back my mulch. My artistic compost pile needs to stew a little longer.