The Heart Is a Container : Reading Dana K. White

This year (understatement) has been a doozy. The pandemic hit  and we ALL are feeling the effects on some level. It turned the world upside down in a way that hearkened back to when school ended for my oldest son, who is autistic. He was just getting to the point where he was more involved in the community. And then my dad passed away in July.  And then there's all the other chaos in the world. Before all this I had gotten back to creating in my sewing room. I had my antique Izannah Walker doll 3D scanned and printed and am making reproduction works from that. But I haven't been back in there since my dad passed away, other than to put something in there. My dad would say, "Come on, get going!" 

So decluttering is my first creative step. I need room to work and create again. I'm reading Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K. White. This is an easy read and is very helpful! Here is her blog: A Slob Comes Clean. She's a kindred spirit, too, because she also could see the possibilities in everything. If you're an artist of any sort, you have to see the possibilities. But sometimes it means you collect too much stuff and it clogs the creative arteries. There is definitely a balance - enough stuff to create with but not so much that you trip over stuff!

The stuff I'm getting rid of is "something I tried and decided not to do" rather than failure. As I'm looking at things, I'm asking myself, "Have I just been moving this around? Would the space it creates by getting rid of this make it easier to live and create?"  

Dana White writes about letting your "container" be the limit for what you keep. You can only keep what reasonably fits into the container.  My time is a container. I have to make some better choices in what actually fits in it. My heart is a container, too. I can choose to let some things go.