Curious…

It did nothing but rain in Wales for six days. Even when it stopped it didn’t, a fine mist taking over from the stair rods that had been steadily falling on the cottage.

Of course inside it was dry, so we hardly went out and I began to feel like a bear hunkered down for the winter.

The central heating packed in, so my bed was heaped with duvets so heavily that it was a struggle to power-lift my way out of bed to go to the loo and the tapping of the rain on the roof, which is where the bedrooms are, was both incessant and very safe in its enclosing.

I’d like to say it was miserable, but it wasn’t, it was really quite comforting, heating (or lack of it) and all. Of course we could keep warm with our back-up heating and there’s an electric immersion heater for water, but it did make me realise how coddled we are in this world of instant everything. It was a reduced reality, or as close to it as I’ve been and I wonder what it would be like to live even more simply.

I’m no Bear Grills, but of course there’s an upside to what I consider to be stepping back into what could be viewed as discomfort by some. I watched a murder of crows fly across the fields one wet morning, black on the stark deep grey of the rainy sky. It made me feel peaceful in a way that contact with people can’t. There was no need for interaction, no expectations, but even so I felt that I was part of the world that those crows moved in. It seemed that I was living for a few days in small episodes and this was one of them. There were others, maybe driven by the slightest of inconveniences and challenges, and it made me feel more real as I drifted on a sea of ‘no matter’.

Time to do nothing is a great thing if you can allow yourself to do it. I stayed in bed and read until almost ten some mornings, drifted aimlessness from place to place for no other reason that I could and wanted to, doodled for hours and hours creating worlds within worlds on paper and canvas, lost in a perfect moment with no past or future just the scribbling of the pen. It left me wondering why I’m compelled to pick up the pen in the first place and hoping that there’s there a reason for it, a purpose yet to be revealed other than therapy.

Anyway, all that cooped up led me to take my doodles a little further. It was a curious time (isn’t curious a lovely word) and I was curious to see what would happen if I added colour to my doodles; so I did and changed from paper to canvas. This is acrylic on canvas, quite pleasing but I am beginning to wonder where am I going with this and is it still a doodle? Perhaps I'm taking this doodling thing too far.