Cooling off

Feet up, not a care in the world? Well, yes as a matter of fact! It's my birthday today, so I think I'm entitled to some guilt-free self indulgence today! Actually, summer has at last arrived in Geneva after weeks and weeks of miserable rain and now it's so hot, it's hard to work up the energy to do anything other than cool off in the pool.















Yesterday morning I looked out and saw a hedgehog had fallen in the pool again! I don't think it was trying to cool off though...
















Fortunately it didn't look as exhausted as the first two that fell in a couple of years ago, so maybe it hadn't had to swim for too long. I fished it out with a net and put it under the hedge. After a few minutes it toodled off.

I've taken a break from drawing and blogging as they were becoming a bit of chore, something of an obligation. I felt it coming for quite a while - spending too long reading other people's opinions, even when they are informative and well meaning, can leave little room for your own thoughts to develop naturally. I'm sure I was more disciplined and more productive before computers came along and I'd like to get some of that back.

This is a quote from Carol Lloyd's book, Creating a Life Worth Living, from the writer Mary Gaitskill, on asked to give advice to beginners (but I think is necessary to think about often) -

"Basically not to listen too much to what other people say about your work, or make yourself too open to what other people's ideas are. There's a certain kind of purity of perception that everybody has, but I think it gets occluded in many people's lives very early, because we get so many ideas about what things are supposed to be like, what we're supposed to think and feel, or what things are. We often don't see things just through our own eyes. And that's the most important thing, to be able to see things through your own eyes and be able to say what you see without worrying about what other people have to say about it. I think first you have to have that base of knowing what you think and feel. Later you can learn from taking in other people's ideas. But first the base has to be there. That sounds less complicated than it is, though, because it's very hard to do that, more so than you think."

Even when you have that base, the constant, relentless bombardment of news, opinions and information can knock you off it, so something pro-active has to be done. So, like a recovering alcholic, I'm taking it one day at a time!