CelticTangle: Breaking Things Down into Managable Steps
I feel lucky! Not only because I am living a life I dreamed of years ago, but also because of the people who have walked this path with me, some for a short while and others longer. One such person is a very talented artist, teacher, mentor and dear friend. She is a marvel who is a constant inspiration to me. In addition to teaching and weaving wonderful blankets she also is a passionate draftswoman and turned me on to Celtic Line Drawing years ago. At one point she took on wood turning and after a few classes she went big with a massive wood workshop where she hosted other woodturners in summer workshops. Then the winds changed for her and she wound up in Victoria and joined the local wood turners guild.
I had just started teaching Zentangle and paid a visit to her in her new home where she was surrounded by beautiful art peices she has been given and collected over the years. She was showing me how she was drawing celtic designs on wooden bowls with a micron pen and was trying to convince the other wood turners in her guild to draw and not to burn designs into wood but wasn't having much luck. When I showed her my Zentangle designs I could see in her face that the wheels where grinding away...perhaps struggling with "this isn't the way I was taught to draw formally in art school versus....hmmm there might be something to this". I left our visit knowing that she fully supported what I was doing, but I was not quite sure she was convinced if it was for her.
Several weeks later she contacted me saying that she had tried to teach members of the wood turners guild (where they proclaim to make two types of product....round stuff and flat stuff) to draw celtic line designs and it was just frustrating them to no end. Would I please come to Victoria and teach them Zentangle as she thought it would be easier. So the next time I was there visiting family, a class was formed; complete with gentle teasing and laughter between the men who attended, plus a bonus of coffee and butter tarts for after class. Some continued on as they had before with no drawn designs but a few really caught the bug and added it to their wooden bowls with beautiful results. Here's a link to the guild where you can see their flat and round stuff
http://www.islandwoodturners.ca/
Not too long after that class I got a message from one of the wood turners, that my friend had had a very severe stroke and was in hospital with limited speech, little use of her legs and most sadly the loss of the use of her dominant right hand. My heart sank.
My husband and I visited her after she was just out of the hospital and found her at home with her family working on drawing and writing the alphabet with her left hand as she was determined to return to her normal life. Over time, she began weaving again with her left hand and eventually regained the use of her right hand through hard work and determination. In a visit to see her months later, she had regained most of the mobility in the right hand, was back to driving, and was mad as H-E- double- hockey -sticks that she couldn't read because the words were out of order in her brain. So she then devised a method to teach herself. She had the local librarians all trained to save her books where there was also an audio edition and she would read along in the book while listening to the audio download of the same book on her Iphone. Curiously, this worked best if she placed the Iphone on her lower back.
When I saw her last year, she was reading without difficulty and was doing a little work on the computer......her next challange! Her speech has improved greatly and she gets around just fine in her little electric car! She accomplished much in a relatively short time and keeps on going.
Some times when we are faced with a challenge, large or small, we get overwhelmed by the big picture. Often when we just see the big daunting picture we can't imagine overcoing the obstacles to create something beautiful like Zentangle, Celtic Drawing or even recovering from a stroke. My friend overcame these life challenges partly because she took things incrementally and tackled each obstacle one at a time. Zentangle and Celtic Line Drawing are the same in that each is done one line at a time. Anything is possible if you break it down into managable steps. Then that is a lesson that these art forms teach us in a safe way...to break things down into managable steps or goals and not to give up. So that when life deals us a greater challenge we know we can get there if we break things down into baby steps which in turns builds confidence to strive even further.
On March 24th I am teaching class designed to combine Celtic Line Drawing and Zentangle in a fun, gentle and easy step by step method. I hope you will join me then. You can sign up on the classes page. See you there!
