Are you following your dreams, your passions?

The painting above was one my sisters both liked very much. June, my older sister, fell in love with it and had it in her house for a while. Gay has this one and most of my good  paintings.

Going into the painting class the first time, I was terrified. I had never attempted to use oil paint. But the once a week class became a passion that helped my self-esteem, helped me escape from real life, as I painted in class and painted at home, constantly improving until I could see my work was good.

In the 1970's I decided to take painting lessons with a lovely lady named Verna. Little did I know how much she would change my life. I was going through a rough time.

My mother and I had been closer than most mothers and daughters. I visited her almost every day and I could talk to her about everything. My mother had suffered a ruptured aneurysm in January 1975. We had recently moved into the house we always dreamed of building. Life was supposed to be good for us, but my mother needed me and I had vowed if she recovered from the cerebral hemorrhage that almost killed her, I would care for her the rest of her life. 

When she came home from the hospital after three months, she had no short term memory. She had to re-learn who her children were. It was a determined family that would not give up on her. Gay, my younger sister came and spent a month helping get Mother settled in at home. After my sister left, I became the one responsible for Mother's care. I was on call 24/7. I learned all I could about care giving, Mother's illness, diet and her medications. The weight of her care weighed heavily on my shoulders and on my mind.

Depressed and lonely, not working out of the home, I knew I needed to do something that would take me out of my everyday life. My husband's mother was an artist and we had a  number of her paintings in our new house. For a long time, I had thought about taking painting lessons. One day I called Verna and signed up for classes.

I used a little glassed in balcony in our new house high up in the trees as my painting studio. The north light was fabulous. I could leave my canvas on my easel and work on it as I had time. I  love oils for that reason. They take a long time to dry. 

My husband Barry loved my paintings. That pleased me, having grown up in a family where I seldom heard a compliment for anything. Verna asked me to help her judge an art show. I was  overjoyed with her confidence in my ability. It was a day I'll never forget. I still have a small gift I received that day. 

During the ten years of my Mother's illness and my life as a care giver, painting was my absolute passion. I donated a painting to a charity that held a sale at the  local mall. It sold for the price I put on it and, I heard, it was the only painting sold that day. 

Mother died in 1985. I was devastated. Grieving, I felt I had failed as her care giver. Also I was lost with no purpose for my daily life.  

I turned to my writing as  therapy, pouring out all my fears, my sadness, my memories. I stopped painting. It seemed I could not paint and write. This became a period of soul-searching, of deep introspection. My sorrow took over  my life.

In 1988, my father died. I was free to leave south Georgia and we did.

When I moved to our little house in the  mountains, I gave away most of my paintings.

I met and became part of an exciting writing community. I followed my other passion that I had nurtured all my life, writing.

Lately I have entertained ideas of painting again, twenty years after giving it up. I  never lost my eye for scenes I want to paint. I see them everywhere. I often try to capture them with a camera, but have not found the satisfaction I want. 

This is one of the my photographs that hangs on my wall.

My  woods in winter - taken from my deck

I hope we do get to live more than one life. It took me so long to get the courage to follow my dreams and do what I love to do. I think it would be so unfair if, just as I get to the place I can do all these things I love, I would have to leave.

Are you following your dreams, following your passions and doing what you most enjoy? Don't wait. Time flies so swiftly and before you know it, it is too late. I hope you are following your passion, your dream. 

Wildacres Retreat - Fall Gathering

Wildacres Retreat is a place I like  to go to find freedom from everyday responsibilities. This lovely place on top of a mountain in North Carolina has rustic bedrooms, no telephones or television sets. The quiet is only broken by the wind whistling through the giant oaks, maples and other hardwoods that provide the visitor with myriad leaf colors in fall.

My room mate and friend, Mary Mike hiked most of the trails around the campus and brought back a  bouquet of small limbs filled with leaves of gold, red, orange and magenta. She put them in a pitcher and sat on her bed and painted them with watercolors. I just enjoyed looking at them. 

Mealtimes are fun at Wildacres and the food is delicious. We sit about ten people to a round table and we are served a meat dish in a  large platter with a couple of side dishes. A salad  bar is set up in the center of the room. Dessert is placed beside each plate. It is good that we have to walk a ways to the dining room and back up a  hill after we eat hopefully using a  few of the calories we take in.

I love almost every person I have met at this retreat where I came for several years in the  past. Lots of hugging goes on when we see each other  again. This year I was very happy to see Sidney again. I met her the first time I went to Wildacres. It was  her first time as well. It was good to see how far she has come with her writing in the past five years. Her novel is almost complete.

One pleasure for me is visiting the studios of the painters and potters. Dorothy, from Asheville, is a potter. One day I'd like to try my hand with clay. I think the process would be most therapeutic, molding and creating with my hands. I think writing is creating with my mind, but I was once an oil painter and I remember the deep satisfaction I received from watching a scene develop on canvas. I remember the contentment that crept over me when I saw something I created with brushes and paint. 

Mike House, Director of Wildacres, is amazing the way he knows all the details about the place. One windy evening he called out to someone leaving a studio, "Be sure to close that door real good. It doesn't always latch, and the wind will blow it open and it will bang all night."

He is dearly loved by the guests and so is his family. His beautiful wife, Kathryn, is on staff and she played balaphone for us one night. Mike plays keyboard and usually entertains us on the last night of the Gathering. This year I requested Forever Young, a song he sang the first time I came to Wildacres, and he sang it for me that cold snowy evening before we left the next morning.

I kind of wish The Gathering was not so popular because now you have to register early or be put on a waiting list. I used to be able to get a private room but now we are told there are no private rooms available.

This year I had the opportunity to talk at great length with Jan Parker, writer from near Raleigh. She is on the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers' Network. I introduced her to NCWN West, our writing group here in the mountains. She gave me a copy of a book of poetry published by Main Street Rag. I gave her a copy of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, the anthology published by our group. We discussed her visiting us in the coming year.

Wildacres holds many events during the year and there are two gatherings where you are on your own to do what you love best. Check them out.  www.wildacres.org  

Back Home Again

We gather in the large lobby to listen to music

I am home from Wildacres, the wonderful retreat just off the Parkway near Little Switzerland. We gathered in the lobby each evening for readings and for music by some of the guys in the area. Even though being in a room with 80 people, most wearing some kind of chemical fragrance, dryer sheet toxins, perfumes and colognes, I was able to stay well most of the time. Thanks to a charcoal filter inside a mask I did not loose my voice before reading a couple of poems last night. I was thrilled at the reaction to my poems. 

Artist, Carole at Wildacres

The best part of going to Wildacres is seeing special people I met there three years ago. I’ll never forget that Fall Gathering, September after Barry died in July of 2009. I had never driven that far alone and never to go to a place where I did not know anyone.

Somehow, I knew this was what I needed to do. The first person I met was a lovely petite woman named Marsha. She saw me sitting in the lobby and came over to me. Little did I know that Marsha was a nurse and she was there with her darling mother, Nettie, and that Nettie had just lost her husband of many years. Marsha now says, she saw something in my face and felt she needed to come and take care of me. That's the kindness of good nurses, angels of mercy wherever they may be. Marsha happened to be the sister of Mike, the director of Wildacres, and their whole family was there in the lobby. Before I knew it, Marsha had brought me right into their family gathering. I met them all, right down to the giant standard poodle who I suspect really owns the whole place.

That week in 2009 I had time to reflect on who I was without Barry, to understand my choices and where I wanted to go with my life. I decided to open Writers Circle. Others played a part in my decisions, but I left Wildacres a changed person. It still took work, and I have had ups and downs, but I continued to go to this lovely retreat as often as I could. 

We have kept in touch through these years while Nettie mourned her husband, Marsha and the family mourned their father and I mourned my Barry. Perhaps it was the mutual loss we all shared at that moment that drew us together. Three years later we sat and visited and caught up on life. Marsha has retired after twenty plus years of nursing, and now she and her husband travel around in their RV seeing this beautiful country. 

Marsha is a very special woman, and I love her as a special friend. I found out that she reads my blogs. That makes her even more special.

Virginia from Clay County

When I turn into the drive at the Wildacres sign and slowly cruise up to the main buildings, a large weight lifts off my shoulders. I take several deep breaths and feel stress drift away into the cool high mountain air.

It was Wednesday before I saw some of my friends. I have to admit that I slept almost all day the first day and part of the second day. After a good rest, I was back to myself, writing and re-writing, blogging and journaling. 

 At dinner I see those lovely smiles of recognition, and choruses of “Glenda, I’m so glad you’re here. I hoped you’d be here this year.” And I know they are genuine expressions of caring. It is like a family reunion with cousins you only see once or twice a year.

Some of those I always look forward to seeing are Carole W. , a wonderful artist, who is so funny and caring, and my own neighbor from Clay County, Virginia, who seems to be the happiest person on earth. 

Some of the guests love to party at the end of the day. While I don’t participate in the late night parties, I enjoy the one on one chats with the artists. Potters, quilters, painters who work in various mediums, jewelry makers and many musicians get away from all responsibilities for a week of just plain joy and fellowship with like-minded people. No classes during the Gathering. We all work on our own, doing our particular art. 

I don’t know the dates for the Fall Gathering. I hope it works out for me to go, but if not, I’ll plan for next Spring.

Creativity, a Healing process

My father and mother when they were young and happy, never knowing what would happen in their senior years.

Today while exercising all alone in my "private pool" at Brasstown Resort, I thought about the lowest points in my life and how certain people appeared and showed me the way out of my despair. Both these people were creative women.

In 1975 my mother collapsed with a ruptured aneuryism that bled into her brain. Our family was decimated by this sudden event. After months in the hospital she recovered enough to come home. She knew none of us at first and thought my father was her Papa.
My family pulled together and worked out ways of sharing responsibility for the first six months. By then she had recovered but was left with no short term memory. My sisters had to go back to their families, my brothers had a business to run.
Over the next ten years I took care of her with the help of a good woman who came in half a day every day of the week. I deeply grieved for the mother who was gone, but loved the mother who was more like a daughter to me. That decade was exquisitely torturous. I adored the times I had with Mother telling me about her childhood, my father's young years, but I became depressed with all the responsibility and being on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I felt I'd had to give up my own life.
I was fortunate to find a wonderful art teacher who reached down and lifted me up from my despair. That was when I learned the healing power of creativity. In class I became absorbed in her teaching and my painting. Happiness settled over me like a warm and comforting blanket, and I left the studio every week smiling. Verna became a dear friend and shared her story of creativity healing.
When Verna's husband died, she was lost for a time, not knowing what she should do with her life. Trained as an artist, she decided to open an art studio for beginners, and through creating lesson plans and teaching others to paint, she became renewed. She healed herself. Her students adored her humor, her warmth and her caring way of teaching. I could never repay her for what she did for me.

My mother died in 1985 and once again I spiraled into despair. Verna had remarried and given up her studio. I seldom mustered the motivation to paint. I couldn't find anything I wanted to do that helped me with my grief. My husband saw my suffering and eventually he and my brother Hal made it possible for us to move to Clay County NC where Barry could continue with the company.
Once again a special person came into my life. Nancy Simpson, poet and teacher, called me one evening. Through her classes, I began writing on a regular basis and publishing my work. Because of her and Linda Smith, a fellow writer, I attended the Netwest critique groups, I signed up for writing classes at JCCFS and found that I loved learning in this non-threatening environment. Every chance I had I took a class, poetry, essay writing with Steve Harvey, memoir with Ruth Zefuss, classes with Carol Crawford, many poetry classes with Nancy Simpson and others. My creative juices poured out on the page and endorphins rushed to my brain and chased away the darkness.

Today I am happy although we have been fighting "The Beast" for months now. After a few months of losing the ability to focus on anything but my husband's illness, I am once again excited about creating poetry, essays, articles and now I'm learning photography.

I would advise anyone who is down in the dumps and can't seem to get back up, to take a class, learn something new, engage your passion in whatever you can do that is creative and will make the brain concentrate on building or making something new, something that is unique. Our self worth increases when we create anything that is of our on invention. People live longer who have hobbies or work that absorbs them in the process of doing. The hours fly by so fast you hardly know it when you get involved in a task or a project. Nothing makes me feel as good as a finished story or poem. Whether I mail it or put it away in a file, I am fulfilled.
Indulge your creativity and find a new life, a happy life and if you can share this with others, the joy grows more and more.