On Forging New Beginnings…
…and nurturing dormant skills
Beginning to blossom
For me it has been a BIG new beginning - the start of a new life on a new island - Mallorca - and a new home that I got the keys to on January 1st.
The gestation period had lasted since September, when the long-discussed plan finally shifted from intention to actuality, and had several phases - the packing up that lasted about a month, then six weeks enjoying rural tranquillity on Son Barrina Permaculture Finca and Art Gallery here in Mallorca where I received a truly warm welcome and made several new friends. That was followed by an unexpected and opportune invitation to spend another four weeks cat sitting, which gave me the time to finally get all my possessions and art studio over from Ibiza and begin to create my new home in Sa Pobla, here in the north of the island.
Sa Pobla isn’t the prettiest of places, but what its architecture lacks in beauty, its people make up for in friendliness. The Sunday fruit and vegetable market in the main square is a feast for your eyes if you like fresh food and a lively environment but, though you might speak Spanish you are definitely not an insider if you don’t speak Catalan. So starting to learn Catalan is high on my list of Things To Do in 2023. The day I actually moved in to my flat just happened to be the day that they have one the biggest annual events in the town - the feast of Sant Antoni, patron saint of animals and vanquisher of the devil’s temptations. The devils were out in force that night and I actually wrote a piece about it that you can find here.
Another of my priorities this year will be establishing connections and links with other artists on the island as well as cafes and galleries that exhibit artists’ works. For the time being all that is on hold while we are bunkered up trying to keep warm during this BIG FREEZE - the coldest winter weather since a decade - with snow and minus temperatures in the Tramuntana mountains, and thermometers that are only registering around 11*C at midday anywhere else.
There’s a light and spacious room in my new flat that I have set up as a studio now, and it is good to have everything here under one roof, but I have yet to settle down to making any art again. Part of the procrastination is the result of not actually doing anything for so long, and the cold weather has given me a good excuse to procrastinate for a bit longer - I don’t do too well when my fingers are white with cold - but in the meantime my creative energies have focussed more on writing lately. For one thing it is a more portable art, but what I have been writing will, I think, have some relevance to my next creative project - a visual exploration of the Family Tree, which I will eventually write more about, once I have something to write about.
In the meantime we are making steady progress with organising the printing of the book Souls and Trees. It turns out that finding a self-publishing an illustrated book is a lot more complicated than one that is straightforward text. The biggest problem has been finding a printer who can do a good job at an affordable price. We are now attempting a fourth proof run, but even the duff copies that we are showing to people have evoked a lot of positive responses both in terms of the look of the thing and the content. That, at least, has kept us from losing heart.
On the other hand it was a strange but lovely experience to hold the physical evidence of months of ephemeral effort in your hands when Angela Walker (@feedyourselfsmarter) gifted me a hard copy of El Tronco Argentino, the book that she commissioned me to write a couple of years ago, It is a family biography that turns out to have exonerated a long-misunderstood man, a hero whose traumatic past wrought havoc and shame on his family for too long. A war may end, but its effects ripple on down many of the generations that follow. The book is available on Amazon as a Kindle edition and its FREE at the moment.
Scouring Facebook I discovered the Writers and Readers in the Balearics who kindly opened their welcoming arms to accept me into the group. The regular meet-ups with many talented writers and authors, many of whom have a strong track record of being published or performed internationally are always well-attended, lively, stimulating, inspiring and supportive.
It is good to be in a place where a newbie can make meaningful connections with like-minded people, even better when those connections lead one down a new and previously unexplored path. It was in one of those group meetings that someone mentioned a weekly Zoom event called Imaginative Storm. Intrigued, I followed up and find that I have landed myself in yet another creative community, albeit a virtual one this time, but one that poses us some very interesting writing challenges. People’s imaginativeness, when it has been evoked by a single prompt and a short ten minutes of writing, is quite prodigious. I do wonder, though, whether writers are a breed apart because this too is a warm and welcoming community of highly talented people where support and encouragement rule supreme.
Which brings me to the perfect place to end today, with a link to a piece of writing that Imaginative Storm offered as an option to try, One Last Lunch. Working on this one took longer than ten minutes, but it was a transformative thing to do and one that I highly recommend doing, even if you don’t think you can write.
Until the next time.
