refocusing (a manifesto of sorts)

the more to come:

It's mid-September and a lovely season.  I'm a month away from taking my GRE and need to do some serious focusing to be ready for the exam.  I know that many other things will be relevant to getting in and maybe getting a graduate assistantship, but I want to get a good score.  I want to succeed.  Perhaps it's just a bit of competition in me--I married someone with a better GPA than mine four-point-o GPA--and I've just got to get in on the success! Or perhaps it's the simple desire to make a difference in the future.

I love creating.  I love crafting.  But lately, as I've been toying with the idea of trying to start actually producing goods and maybe having a tiny little itty bitty (and any other miniscule adjective you care to insert) business doing so, I've realized that my heart just isn't in it that way.  I remember a girl in my archways (precollege backpacking trip) team talking about how much she loves art, but how she could never do it for a living--that any time she produced art for sale, it wasn't the same experience.

I won't pretend that my little sewing dabblings and papercrafts are art in any high manner, but they serve the same expressive function.  For me, I have decided, that is enough.  Things I made fill our home and sit on my friends' bulletin boards.  They're captured in my wedding photos.  They're set up here.

The work I could do in writing and teaching, however, that's something that is expressive, but in an entirely different way.  I helped a girl with a paper last week.  She's studying to do good in the world in a way I don't think I could.  She'll be taking on challenging and sad cases someday in the future and I know I couldn't do that.  But I can help her write a paper that will help her pass a class that will help her graduate and do something active to change the world--or at least little sections of it in the bluegrass state.

So about that title, refocusing...I don't think much that you see here will change.  I'll keep Etsy open because of the wonderful necklaces for rapha house.  But I guess my reasons for crafting are altered. I want to return to making things for the fun of it and for the pleasure of seeing my loved ones smile when they receive something I've made and something I've made well.  I made a few cards yesterday and instead of photographing them and trying to come up with a design I could reproduce economically, I think I'm going to return to making cards for the sole purpose of sending them.  Perhaps I'll revive a bit of snail mail, if I ever remember to send a thing or two that's sitting on my bookshelf.  Maybe someone will ask me to make something for them sometime.  Maybe not.  Maybe they'll pay me.  Maybe not.

The whole plan, in creating and in my academic life and in my beginning career, is to to do things purposefully.

And that, my friends, is why this is called refocusing.