I would like to introduce my little gypsy girl, "For the love of art." Last Saturday I took a workshop taught by Suzi Blu at Paper Tales, a scrapbooking store, in San Diego. After posting my girl on Facebook, a friend asked if she was going to have a horse. Not this time. Gypsy girl has a horse, but she is out of the saddle today. One has to spend some time out of the saddle in order to keep from getting sore.
This brings me to the topic I keep pondering ~ the tension between being social and spending time alone. With my growing new love for mixed media, I am realizing that I need "down time" or time out of the saddle. Gypsy girl represents the evolution of a cowgirl as I am still learning how to draw heads,faces, and bodies. As much as I love Suzi Blu's girls, I want to create ones that model who I am. To practice this kind of creativity, I need time to think, and to play on paper. But there is a side of my personality that longs to be social, to be included in those special events that bring us together. This week in particular I've been feeling the tension between these two opposites that reside inside of who I am.
Spending time alone is nothing new to me. Growing up, I played paper dolls for hours under my family's dining room table. One day, my mother said, "You need to get out and be with people," so I crawled out from under the table, and did just that, went out and made friends. The tension between alone and social time began a long, long time ago.
I am realizing that to have the pull of the melancholy vs. the sanguine in my personality is how God created me. The challenge is to find and keep the balance between the two. The "how" to apply this balance is simple, yet difficult to practice. It is knowing when to say "yes," and when to say, "no." And practice is what I am doing at this later stage of life. I may not always get it right, but that's okay. Most of the time I seem to be getting it right, and I'm sure as heck not sore from being in the saddle too long.
