DAY 590: I HAVE A PLAN
🙌🏻
Yesterday, even the sound of a chair scraping, a phone ringing or an engine backfiring had me shrinking in on myself. Today, my nerves are subject to invisible things. I feel like a sponge with no power to affect what contaminates me. My dog’s anxiety permeates. My partner’s frustration burns. I can sense and feel my neighbours. I hide on the other side of a door – mattress beneath my back, pillow behind my head, shutters closed and candles burning – trying to imagine I am the woman in the mirror and not the woman on the bed. It’s not peace, but it’s quiet, and that’s a step. 🙌🏻
I return to my thyroid – filling it in, padding it out, adding running stitch ripples and satin stitch leaves. It looks a bit like an elaborate dream catcher or a bespoke chime, and is at once both ocean and sky. I try to send love to my actual thyroid, offering her support and care, and even though I don’t feel that great, I’m ok because I have a plan. 🙌🏻
#1yearofstitches #oneyearofstitches #365daysofstitches #astitchaday #embroidery #sewing #lifethreads #lemonrosepetals #myinsideout #embroideredtruths #needleandthread #mylittlestitchery #mallorca #mallorcacreativity #mallorcaembroidery #palmademallorca #balearicart #1yearofstitches2017 #1yearofstitches2018 #thyroidhealing #epsteinbarrvirus #medicalmedium28daydetox 🥒🍋(ps. we should complain because there’s no emoji celery) #medicalmedium #anthonywilliams
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If you would like to learn 👩🏻🏫 how to sew like I do, using the thread to tell a story, reveal a secret, share a truth, heal a wound so deep you can’t physically reach it: contact me at myinsideout@me.com for details and to arrange a time ⌚️. I offer 1-2-1 👯♀️and Skype/FaceTime👩🏻💻tuition in 1 + 2 hour slots, competitively priced 💸.
DAY 588: SOYA, SALT AND COFFEE
🥒
It’s been an odd kind of week. I’m on a detox, doing some intense personal cleaning, working on improving the health of all inner bits, eliminating things like heavy metals, toxins, parasites and pathogens. It’s not a fast: it’s a cleanse, so you can live on it, and the idea is that it lasts as long as it lasts. It’s basically lots of juices, powders and living foods. And there’s a long list of NO foods, like gluten, wheat and dairy. I’m mostly clean, but I will miss my soya, salt and coffee. 🥦
In light of that, I decide to dedicate my sewing to housekeeping – tidying up loose ends, finishing off abandoned bits, joining dots... In one way, it’s deeply satisfying: bringing it all together; harmonising and balancing disenfranchised elements. In another, it’s hollow, flat and vacuous. I much prefer diving deep into an idea, couching an object, stitching a word.
🍏
Afterwards, I allow myself to sew a thyroid – beautiful, blue and butterfly-shaped. It adds to the documentation of my journey and is my way of sending love and healing intention to this gland. In other ways, at home, I lie on my bed and envision white light, call upon angels, channel energy through my hands, practice self-hypnosis and meditate. Every little helps, and I like to believe I’m helping quite a bit. 🍋
#1yearofstitches #oneyearofstitches #1yearstitchathon #365daysofstitches #astitchaday #embroidery #sewing #lifethreads #lemonrosepetals #myinsideout #embroideredtruths #pinsandneedles #februarystitching #needleandthread #mylittlestitchery #mallorca #mallorcacreativity
#mallorcaembroidery #palmademallorca #1yearofstitches2017 #1yearofstitches2018 ——————————
If you would like to learn 👩🏻🏫 how to sew like I do, using the thread to tell a story, reveal a secret, share a truth, heal a wound so deep you can’t physically reach it: contact me at myinsideout@me.com for details and to arrange a time ⌚️. I offer 1-2-1 👯♀️and Skype/FaceTime👩🏻💻tuition in 1 + 2 hour slots, competitively priced 💸.
DAY 586: EVERYTHING I’VE EXPERIENCED
🌞
We are still experiencing a heatwave and it’s super hot. After wishing for summer for so many months, I’m almost eager for autumn. My feet are permanent puddles and I’ve taken to keeping an ice pack against my back and having cold baths and showers. There was a rumour yesterday of a thunder storm to hit, but when it came it only spat and then vanished. Too hot to go out, I stay inside and drink water with ice, which works well enough to cool my hands but not for anything else. 🍶
With my blue restocked, I finish off the half-done sequins and add another one for luck, then stitch some ripples and something loosely resembling an anchor. I also begin a word, "swimming", to remind me of what I was attempting to detail here. 🍃
Below, on top of the words "Epstein Barr", I add some leaves... because when dealing with difficult things like illness, it’s important to appreciate their beauty. I’m not saying I’ve mastered this yet or that I’m able to do it consistently, but I’m definitely doing my best. I think I’ll turn it into a garden to show it just how much love I have, just how much I want to heal it, and at the end, when we’re done, however long that takes, there will be a precious memento of everything I’ve experienced. 💐
DAY 584: THE DANCE WE DID
💃🏻
Today I am stuck with green because I ran out of blue yesterday and forgot that I needed to replace it. Not all that practical when you are trying to depict water, but I make do by allowing. 🕺🏻
Returning to the sea bit, I add another sequin and couch it in green and then sew some more weed. I was worried it was becoming overcrowded and at one point missed the simplicity of what was there before, but now I’m glad I persevered. I love the colours and the emotion the shape evokes, reminiscent of movement and rocking right-way / wrong-way up, reminding me of the dance we did. 💃🏻
Afterwards, I add another condition, because I am doing lots of studying and trying to figure out my health and this seems to be at the root of it. I think, because this piece is a healing journey, it all needs to be there: aches, pains, ailments, conditions, symptoms, diagnosis, false starts, wrong turns, side effects. I feel I’m getting closer, even if I there is a long way still to go and I don’t like what I hear.
#1yearofstitches #oneyearofstitches #1yearstitchathon #365daysofstitches #astitchaday #embroidery #sewing #lifethreads #lemonrosepetals #myinsideout #embroideredtruths #pinsandneedles #februarystitching #needleandthread #mylittlestitchery #mallorca #mallorcacreativity
#mallorcaembroidery #palmademallorca #1yearofstitches2017 #1yearofstitches2018 ——————————
If you would like to learn 👩🏻🏫 how to sew like I do, using the thread to tell a story, reveal a secret, share a truth, heal a wound so deep you can’t physically reach it: contact me at myinsideout@me.com for details and to arrange a time ⌚️. I offer 1-2-1 👯♀️and Skype/FaceTime👩🏻💻tuition in 1 + 2 hour slots, competitively priced 💸.
DAY 582: ON SOLID GROUND
🏊🏼♀️
So I swam in the sea, as promised, and I felt pretty brave, both because I went with a friend and I don’t usually do that and because it was our first adventure together outside of my house. We had to walk down a rickety path and descend a steep cliff face. I felt like a crab; all limbs akimbo, clattering and skittering. And then, everyone was either naked or topless, including my friend, and there was I in my costume, every bit the Brit. 🦀
But it wasn’t that that struck me or stuck with me the most. It the motion sickness I experienced upon entering the water, how strong and brutal the current was, how salty it tasted when I accidentally swallowed it and how it stung when it splashed my eyes. I felt accosted by its battering, attacked by its irregularity and permanently fearful of getting out of my depth. After half an hour, I was like a rung-out rag, and, as I tried to exit, the stones under foot and the sand sucking and sinking all felt like predators on the attack. 🏝
24 hours later and I’ve only just stopped swooshing, my energy finally settling to near still. I think perhaps I will leave the sea to stronger folks and stick to the peace of the pool. I should have known that someone who is sensitive to movement, who gets shaken around by buses, trains, cars, planes and boats... would respond poorly to so much force. But I guess I secretly harboured the hope that it might actually be healing, flushing out and waking up all that is stuck. There go my dreams of living on a boat and my illusions of two week cruises. There go my aspirations of being a mermaid and catching a sailor. Despite my aversion to being bodily grounded, my love of the weightlessness of water and my preference for living in my head: I think perhaps I am supposed to stay on soil. ⚓️
DAY 575: AN EGGSHELL COCOON
🐣
Every year since I’ve been living abroad I say I’m going to swim in the sea. And every year I block myself and let fear and doubt stop me. Partly, it’s resistance to the unknown. I find it hard to inhabit strange spaces, break out of old habits and do new things. And partly, because it’s just easier to swim in a pool: to rock up with my swimming costume and have towels, robes, slippers, water, showers and changing rooms provided. There’s no need to wash things afterwards. No having to go home with sand in private places, salt on my skin and hair. This year, however, I am determined to be different; mostly, I think, because I feel the need to blow things up, and doing something unknown and scary is a short term cure for that.
🐣
I blame it on the pneumonia. Being faced with my own mortality woke something up and now I feel this desperate need to change my life: move countries, break friendships, leave behind the old in an attempt to create something new and, perhaps, hopefully... more meaningful. Yet I am faced a dilemma, because I want to do all this while clinging to my roots, while travelling with my cake and they, it are not so able or keen to do so. 🐣
And so I wait... and another year goes by.
🐣
How do we align our wants, needs and desires to those of other people? How do we pair and parallel our thirst? How do we come together in a way that doesn’t feel like too much of a compromise, too much of a loss to hopes and dreams and inside pictures of where, what and how we think we are supposed to be? 🐣
More and more lately I have been hearing a calling, prompting me to get up, move, change and travel. I want to stay in a tree house, sleep on a boat, visit archeological and ancient sites, listen to, share in, learn from and follow all of my various mentors. I want to rise excited, set satisfied and feel like I’m making a difference somehow. Or if not that, then at least making the most of it... and I want to matter to more than just my other half and my dog.
🐣
Maybe it’s the full moon and what’s going on with the planets? 🐣
Maybe it’s the heat? 🐣
(Cont in comments...)
DAY 574: A BEACON TO GUIDE ME TO BETTER DAYS
🦑
I wanted to do something different today to express myself, like on those days when you want to colour your hair or get a tattoo or a new stud just to change things up. And while I never go further than dying my hair, usually the same colour, a little darker but pretty much the same shade as it’s always been and is supposed to be: I feel able to be braver here. After all, once I’m done, if I don’t like it, I can just slip it in it’s cotton sheath and shove it in my bag. I don’t have to do the walk of shame. It’s not there on my body.
🦐
Starting with a pin, because who doesn’t like a pin, I fix it jaw down, mouth up, thinking to create a spine to illustrate the frustrations in my back. But then I don’t have any grey thread and I quickly run out of white and somehow that pink is calling and before I know what I’ve done it’s this jolly little thing that kind of reminds me of a sweet and kind of reminds me of a foetus or a jelly fish or even perhaps a prawn. And then I’m not sure what to do because I don’t know what it is and it seems to have taken on a life of it’s own, which is ironic, really, when my aim was to express my true self. 🌸
So maybe it’s the virus I’m fighting somewhere in my gut, or the parasite that’s set up house in my liver, or the bacteria in my belly that might look pretty under the microscope but in reality is anything but, or part of my brain that is growing and turning into something else so that the stuff that happened and that haunts me will let me go and go away, or a beautiful strange flower that’s taken root and is there as a beacon to guide me to better days?
