I have come to the conclusion that I have to take the time to create something beautiful for as long as I want to work on it before I return to my food preservation and pressure canning adventure.
As much as I have been enjoying working with food, it is actually not my first choice. One of the reasons that I love preparing meals ahead of time is so that I can work uninterruptedly on projects which I love.
I just realized that my time has gotten upside down with respect to my priorities. So I will return to making journal covers and the play of fabric colors and textures which feels so good to me.
Then, when I am full and overflowing with the happiness of creating beauty, I will be able to return to what we generally term “practical” work.
But why not think of creating beauty as practical?
We don’t really live our lives only in terms of necessity.
There are many more dimensions to life than just the necessity of providing for ourselves.
The article by Jeremy Rifkin, about the “radical new economic system” which will “emerge from the collapse of capitalism”, gives us many more options for living sustainably and satisfyingly. http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/nov/07/radical-new-economic-system-will-emerge-from-collapse-of-capitalism
Buckminster Fuller also talks about the advantages of life today that do not require people to labor full-time and overtime. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/133403
My own sense is that the human mind likes to solve puzzles, and that we have now put ourselves in the position where we have to figure out an entirely new system which takes care of all of us.
Creating beauty is one of the ways in which we take care of ourselves. We can also celebrate artists, musicians, dancers, and writers instead of penalizing them subject to a money-making quantity measurement.
How much joy and inspiration and appreciation and happiness and reflection do they provide and how do you put a price tag on that?
I offer another quote, this time from Neil Gaiman, that whatever else is happening, good or bad, “Make good art”. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/20415110-make-good-art
© 2015 Kathryn Hardage
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