Making the most of right now

dining-table.jpeg

A couple of years ago, I decided to indulge in a daydream. The dream was a house, a big and beautiful and very designed house, with a little studio in the garden for creating. I love daydreams, but this one quickly turned into more of an obsession as I decided to add a little more realistic detail to my imagining. Besides the scrolling through social media for inspiration, I started researching house prices, builders, materials, mortgages, and started thinking that just maybe, if we worked and saved really hard (and took on a ton of debt), it could become a reality. And then our real lives could begin, and I could start properly creating.

I don’t feel like it was a bad thing to indulge in aesthetic escapism, especially in the early days of motherhood where life can sometimes be chaotic and yet incredibly dull at the same time. But it took a while for me to admit to myself that obsessively “researching” this unattainable future state was holding me back from appreciating and allowing myself to enjoy what I have right now. Whilst yes, this season of my life doesn’t lend itself to big messy hobbies, I’m finding new ways to add small, nimble creative projects that are beautiful in their own way. There’s something satisfying about something being exactly what it needs to be, nothing more or less. There’s ingenuity in working within constraints to come up with solutions that wouldn’t have been found otherwise. There’s a connectedness that comes with living in close proximity to others. And I don't think I have the patience to clean a huge house!

So it looks like I’ll be writing and drawing and painting from my dining table for some time to come (which I knew from the beginning anyway), and making the most of right now.

I've been creating

sketchbook30.jpeg|Photo of my sketchbook, showing highlighter sketches of banksias and birds on power lines
sketchbook31.jpeg|Photo of my sketchbook, showing highlighter sketches of things I saw in a cafe

sketchbook32.jpeg|Photo of my sketchbook, showing coloured pencil sketches of my weekend

  1. Sketchbook pages - this week has been big on socialising and less on sketching, which is nice every once in a while.
  2. Space in the pantry for my baking adventures. Limited storage in our house definitely puts a cap on any mindless consumption - anything new requires some rationalisation or reduction of what we already have. I'm pretty happy with the way we've been able to shuffle things around for our shifting needs.
  3. Drawings for the kids - I've been doing my best to fulfil requests, including fire trucks, dinosaurs, volcanos, and their new pet fish.
    fishy.jpeg
    Their names are Orangey (not pictured) and Bingo

I've been consuming

  1. PS: more than an afterthought is a newsletter I've been enjoying lately for thoughts on motherhood and minimalism. Celebrating mediocrity really spoke to my house daydreaming. We don’t need grandiose houses, or an abundance of space or to go into eye watering debt for brand new furniture in order to live happy, contented, sustainable lives. I suppose it really comes down to priorities (like most things), of valuing time or money, of celebrating the remarkable ordinary and being okay with charming mediocrity.
  2. Via Swiss Miss
    Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. – David Whyte
  3. Kawa Leaf | A story about life and loss really got me, as someone who has experienced grieft recently - although it's something never really goes away.
    Grief, I have learnt, is something you always carry with you. It’s like an amulet I will always wear. I feel her so intensely in my heart and know that she is always there.