I can hardly believe that next Saturday is the Summer Solstice. Where has the year gone? I don't mean that in an absent-minded way; I really want to know. It seems as if five and a half months have passed in the blink of an eye.
I am enjoying my life on the whole, but sometimes in the last few weeks I have felt that I am running downhill with the wind behind me and my legs can barely keep up.
My body certainly can't. I'm just not fit enough to work hard and play hard anymore. I'm exhausted. I feel bone-weary. My creative juices have almost dried up, and I feel like the only way to get them flowing again is to... actually, I don't know how to get them flowing again. A change of job? A change of living environment? All of the above requires effort and energy.
What I am managing to do at the moment is to brew. Not the full-blown, creative pottering, but micro-brewing. Snatching a session here or there, but not really getting much more out of it than a sense of continuity.
The Midsummer Night's Dream soap in the picture sums this up. It's pretty, but it lacks substance. It ticks all the right boxes - herbal, seasonal, original (to an extent) - but its research credentials are lacking. What have I learned from making this soap? How has it deepened my connection to this sabbat? The answer: it hasn't.
The reason I started making sabbat soaps was to distill something of the season into each bar. What Bex and I make are soaps with intent - it should be possible to actually feel something of my intent in the soap. It has been suggested to me (by someone important to me we shall call "R"), that since I alternate sabbats with Bex, I should spend a full three months researching each new recipe.
What a beautiful luxury that would be.
But I feel at the moment that I don't have the creative space. That's not to say that I want to become a recluse and to spend my days alone thinking only of soap - far from it. What I want is the headspace to come up with new ideas, and the free time to research and experiment. In the past this space was part of my day job. Lately however, my working day is crammed full of work (how dare they!) and my evenings and weekends are crammed full of feeling and experiencing rather than thinking or pondering.
Do I want anything to change? Well maybe not right now. I wouldn't want to swap the experiences for creative solitude. I like the experiences and the company too much. I think what I want to change is the working day. I feel like I am working myself into the ground in a job I no longer love and it is sapping my physical strength and mental reserves. I want a job that is intellectually challenging (and not just because I am thinking of ways to reinvent the wheel), one that gets me off my chair and away from my desk, and one that values space for thought.
So where do I find one of those?
***
And my micro-brewing (recipe slave that I have become!)
(l to r) Sloe gin, orange syrup, mint liquid soap (quite exciting to make but a boring creative choice for colour and scent) and elderflower cordial.
Hand-stitched bags. No purpose in mind, but it was at least fun to vary the designs (drawstring vs self-tie).
(below) Tansy dyed silks. Again exciting to make but without a purpose in mind it becomes mechanical.
