age defines

You know how when you disappear down a rabbit hole you don't see that the lights have just gone out till much later?  Well......it's taken me quite a while to find the light swtich. 50's have been and gone and now it's the 60's; my 60's that is, not yours!

As a way of trying to see inside my head (yes, I want to!) I've chosen collage as a way of visual thinking, of articulating what I can't say out loud........and it works, I think, for me, at any rate.

I spent my dreaded birthday week in the studio 'doing' collage; making, writing, reflecting, more writing, more reflecting....................you get the idea. I created 5 'visual' insights that week and then began to untangle the mesh of what I thought I was seeing. Several weeks down the line, I'm still unravelling. Therapy might be less tortuous but this is what I've chosen to do, I'm not complaining.

 I devised various strategies or 'voices' of interpretation, not all of them worked in that I seemed to be writing the same things but in a slightly different way, over and over. I tried interviewing myself, making videos of myself, I even wrote a 12 ft long scroll as part of my self analysis. This is what happens when you try to be too clever, to outsmart yourself. Your hair curls.

And then I began to make, rather than to write, to think through my fingers, literally:

Much better!

Sometimes we forget who we are are we struggle to look for ourselves.
There's a line by Jane Hirschfield as she watches herself from a distance, wondering what she would say to herself, now, would she be angry, reproachful, compassionate?:

                                       'I whose choices made her what she will be'.

I'm doing that now with these collages, it's driving me nuts but I can't stop.
So what am I saying here, what's the point of this ramble?
Well, maybe nothing more than to remind myself that I'm still here, despite it all. I'll keep going.