I’ve participated in SciArt September for a few years and this is year five! Liz Butler and Lucy Gem came up with some excellent prompts. The main theme is Conservation with each week on a different theme: lands, species, water, people, and a shared future. Most of my artwork is anatomy-based so I’ll be playing with the themes, but I have a number of ecological-themed poems so there will be more poetry in what I share this year.
My interview on the Arts Ably podcast is up! Diane and I talked about how my artistic practices in music, writing, and embroidery shift with my ME/CFS and disability.
In April I started a 12-week writing intensive called The Visceral Self with Jeannine Ouellette of Writing in the Dark over on Substack. This intensive was a bit more intense than I anticipated and made me realize that I really need to do things at my own speed. I started off participating fully but had trouble keeping up with the extra reading, and then participating in the comment section fell by the wayside, then I had an infection that meant writing and reading weren’t possible at all for a couple weeks so I had to accept that just doing the main exercises on my own time was all I could manage. I felt that I was missing out by posting things late and not really participating in the comments, but my disability means I have to choose what works for me both physically and cognitively.
Continue readingIt’s been a challenging three months. Winter is always hard on my system and I’ve been getting all my vaccines up to date which has required a fair bit of recovery time. I also found out my cyborg part (an iliac vein stent) needs an adjustment so I’m waiting for a date for day surgery. But, because creative work is what makes me flourish, I’ve done a surprising amount of work in that time.
In December I realized that my routines weren’t working well and were causing me a lot of unnecessary internal urgency so I totally scrapped them and rebuilt them from scratch. It took about a month of trial and error but I now have routines that work so much better for where I’m at cognitively, physically, and with my current projects. My music work is a bit more spaced out now, as is my journaling, but the internal striving and pressure I felt with my old routines is gone.
I do think the impetus for such a large shift is due to my continuing research on the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory. Urgency activates the sympathetic (stress, fight, flight) system, and reducing that means I can come back to ventral vagal (calm and engaged) much more readily which is very good for my entire system.
I recently finished stitching this large (18″x12″) hand embroidery piece based on one of my SciArt text/image pieces. I’ve been working on this piece since June 18, 2018 and finished the stitching July 18, 2020, so it took just over two years to complete it. I’m very pleased with it!