French, Strength Training & Marcus Aurelius

My sister-in-law sent this to me this morning and I was so moved by it, particularly given all that is happening in our world, especially here in the United States, that I thought I’d share it with all of you.

I’ve mentioned before that my husband and I start our day reading from the The Daily Stoic.  Often it’s a quote from Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or Epictetus, but it’s always thought provoking and interesting.  We then discuss, each taking turns to share our thoughts and intentions for the coming day.  It’s a really beautiful way to connect and begin the day.

The thing is I’m an early riser so I am often up several hours earlier than him and that’s when I practice my french, do a workout (yes, I’m still working out on my FitOn App, which I love and now do anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes of strength training, cardio and whatever else I can manage! I even have dumb bells that I use! Gasp!  I know, I know, but at my age I really cannot let this slide…)

So when I went to answer emails this morning, while waiting for my husband to arise, I loved seeing this link to Peace Train.  I teared up within the first few seconds, it is so beautiful.  And I kept thinking about something we read the other day from The Daily Stoic about how it’s just as easy to be kind as it is to not be and takes just as little time.  Added plus, kindness is a gift to everyone who receives it, regardless if they’re able to return it. The return isn’t the point.  It’s the practice of it, the commitment to it, the act of doing it on a daily basis, that’s really the point.  At least that’s the case for me.

Yesterday I did a livestream over on Patreon for my patrons, celebrating my 1st goal met, 100 Patrons!  How amazing is that?  I live-streamed from my summer studio. It was a lot of fun.  During that livestream, I had the idea that I might start doing a prompt in my Facebook group: Ariane Zurcher Stitching Circle  And  then, as I was saying that, I thought it would be really fun to make an even more detailed prompt for all my Patrons over on Patreon.  So I’m going to be thinking about that today and seeing what I come up with.  But I already have some ideas that I think could be really fun.

There are 5 spots left in my upcoming Finding Your Voice Workshop.  I did a short video explaining how that workshop came into being, a very short pictorial history of some of my other work when I was a fashion designer and jewelry designer and then came to stitching and how improvisational stitching was a major turning point and then going to the artist’s residency in France this spring was the next major turning point and what the workshop is all about.  You can watch it, if you like, below.

And finally there are still spaces open in the Dorset Button Stitch Along and just 6 spaces left in The Basics Workshop, which I will NOT be teaching again for awhile, so if you’re new to all of this, please sign up now!

Have a peaceful day!

❤️

Home, The Artist’s Residency and A Look Back

Home, The Artist’s Residency and A Look Back

I’m back home.

And in the middle of teaching a workshop this week, but thought I’d grab these few free minutes that I have to write a post. First off, if you haven’t seen my other videos and posts about my artist’s residency, it was AMAZING!  Truly beyond anything I had imagined.  Being immersed in art, living with a group of artists for two weeks was just incredible.  I had no distractions other than self imposed deadlines, and the occasional load of laundry, but otherwise I was free to explore, create, learn and be inspired by everything and everyone around me.  It was magical.  And added plus, in a group of 16 artists, there wasn’t a single prima donna!  Not a one.  Everyone was beyond lovely.

I’ve been home now for just over a week and already it’s all beginning to fade into the background.  In many ways it feels as though I was just there, as in yesterday, and in other ways it feels as though it was all a dream and never happened at all or if it did, it was years ago.  Time is strange like that.  Still I have both Paris and Orquevaux on my weather app, so everyday I look to see what the weather is like over there. It’s a tenuous thread that still attaches me to that magical place and time.  One of these days I’ll remove them both, but for now, it’s a bit like listening to an old phone message from my mother.  I know she’s gone, but I can’t bare to delete it.

The piece I created while at the residency is pinned precariously to a large foam board and propped up on a desk until I can put together a more permanent solution for it.  I started referring to it as The Beast until someone suggested I use the french word for beast, which is La Bête, and they’re right it does sound better, a bit less jarring, a little softer.  Still, there’s something about the forcefulness of “The Beast” that I rather like, so I alternate between the two depending on my mood.  My friends in Paris suggested I call it Genesis, particularly since I’m doing a series.  I’ve bookmarked that idea for now.

Once this workshop that I’m teaching is over, I’ll get back to it, but for now, it waits for me patiently.

While at the artist’s residency I interviewed a few of the other artists and then ran out of time and so was only able to interview six of them.  If you’d like to see what some of the other artists were doing while at the residency, you can watch those interviews on my youtube channel.  They are all under the Interviews! playlist.

I also had time to create a number of videos on the process or more accurately my process.  Here are a couple of those videos:

Going Down the Organizing Rabbit Hole

Going Down the Organizing Rabbit Hole

There are diversions and then there are DIVERSIONS!  Organizing can be one of those.  I finished the BIG piece I’ve been working on and instead of leaping into something new, I got sidetracked with organizing.  Organizing my work space, it’s pretty small so it takes some doing to spend more than a few hours on this one, organizing my threads, I’ve got a LOT of thread, so this one is easy to lose oneself for a day or two or week or month, and organizing my materials, again there’s a lot of stuff, some of which I use often, others not so much, still it’s a sink hole.

It all began with a YouTube video, doesn’t it always, though?

See that huge bag filled with thread winders?  That’s only some of them.  I did another video for my Patrons over on Patreon and had a little give-away.  Five lucky patrons are receiving a nice package of those thread winders from me. I haven’t sent them yet, because I keep finding cleverly hidden stashes of OH, so that’s where those were! threads that I then rewind onto those large cardboard bobbins and put in those 16″ long plastic refrigerator shelves.  It makes my life so much easier when I can see everything easily and quickly.

But now I’m nearing the end of my reorganization efforts, not that one is ever really done organizing, it’s like laundry, AND I have a lengthy to-do list that is calling to me as well, but the nagging thought that I need to start a new piece has been buzzing around making life feel a bit more fraught than usual.  A friend of mine used to say that she was both the team of horses pulling the carriage AND was also the driver with the whip beating those horses on.  It’s all a bit like that.  Still there’s good that comes from it.  Organizing makes me breathe easier, having a to-do list calms that voice that screams at me, and knowing I will not feel calmer until I begin a new project, propels me on.

It’s all good, as they say.

The stoics suggest that each day is best lived as though it were your last.  But if I did that, I wouldn’t get all that much done, because I’d just spend every moment that they’d allow with my children and husband and cat.  So yeah, there’s that.

Now I have some fabric kits for one of my upcoming workshops to pull together…  did I mention those?

No?

Oh well…

 

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Showing up For Work

Showing up For Work

I’m not feeling great.  I should probably just end this post right here.  But, no, I’ll soldier on. Not because this post is important, it’s not, but because it represents all the things on my to do list and so much that is just life. No one needs to hear my laundry list of “woes”, we’ve all got them.  More to the point is that I’m struggling.  My mom’s death feels like an endless, bottomless pit of emotions.  I know I’ll get through it.  I know work-arounds that help me get through those days when things are really bad and “getting through the day” feels impossible.  That’s when the put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other method of coping gets enacted.

Grieving is a luxury. Some days require putting all of that to the side so that other things can be dealt with in a timely fashion and because life moves along, it doesn’t wait for those of us who are grieving.  And I also know I can’t leap frog my way beyond the grief.  It will be there waiting for me on the other side.  It’s always there.  Some days I’m luckier than others, the grief stays on the edge, other days it moves front and center.  Those are the days when every step feels like I’m dragging a fifty pound weight.  Those are the days when showing up feels like a monumental task.  But I know from designing, from creating, from every day that I work on a piece, that even when I don’t “feel like it” showing up for the work is one of the most important things I can do.  And, counter-intuitively, it is what ends up making me feel better in the long run.

All of this reminds me of something Michael Crichton once said.  It was decades ago when I was the Director of the Aspen Writer’s Conference and had reached out to him to kick off the conference.  He was game and gave an amazing talk in the Paepcke Auditorium at the Aspen Institute.  I will have to paraphrase as there is no transcript of his presentation.  He was talking about writing. Imagine, he said, if you were a commercial airline pilot with a full schedule of flights and woke up one morning and said, You know, I don’t really feel like flying today.  I think I’ll go back to sleep for a few hours. Writing (any of the arts) is the only “profession” where people talk themselves out of getting up and putting in the hours.  Everyone in the audience was quiet.  But it doesn’t work that way, he continued.  If you’re a writer/artist then you get up and you put in your hours, whether it’s flying a commercial airline or writing a book, or in my case, working on a new piece, writing up a new workshop, filming a new Youtube video or any of the other things I’ve got on my list of things that I need to do because this is the life and profession I’ve chosen for myself.

How does grief fit into all of this?  It doesn’t.  It’s just there.  All the time.  And as a result, it is I that must make the necessary adjustments in my life to accommodate these new feelings and emotions, while continuing to show up for the work.

 

Pain, Grief and Showing up Anyway

Pain, Grief and Showing up Anyway

So here’s the thing…  I feel a whole lot better when I show up even when I feel awful, even when I feel things are rough and I’m tired, even when I don’t want to.  I’ve also learned that showing up anyway is the single best remedy for not continuing to feel that way. Except that it’s also really hard to do.  That’s the thing.  It’s really, really hard and sometimes… sometimes it feels impossible.  I know it technically isn’t, but it sure feels that way.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about pain a great deal.  And in his writings about it he consistently focusses on choice and responding, rather than reacting.  I’m a huge fan of Marcus Aurelius, not just because he was wise, but because this guy was one of the most powerful men in the world and yet he continued to do his best to remain humble, to avoid arrogance, to nurture self awareness and to treat others with respect and kindness.

So yeah, showing up anyway.  Easier said than done, so I have found ways to do so that aren’t quite so laden, that make it a tiny bit easier.  I call it setting myself up to succeed.

Here’s what I do:

  • Thread up a whole bunch of needles with different types and weights of thread.  I use both Chenille needles and Milliners Needles.
  • Grab a needle, any needle, it doesn’t matter which one, and begin stitching.  I have a couple of mindless go-to stitches that don’t require any thought.  They are the meditative stitches like french knots, bullion knots, colonial knots, seed stitch, chain stitch, fly stitch, straight stitch and then I riff on them, which means I start exploring every aspect of that stitch.  How many wraps can I make on a french knot before the whole thing begins to fall apart?  (It turns out a lot more than you might think!). What ways can I stitch a straight stitch to create different patterns?
  • Exploration
  • Investigation
  • And before you know it, I’m playing!

Stitching, more than anything, changes everything, even grief, even pain.

If you’re curious to know how I did this, I made a video about it and you can watch it here: