New Stories

It's been a while again.

I know I haven't been the most consistent or prolific blogger, but, even for me, four months is a long time. It's not that I haven't had plenty of adventures, or that I don't have long, rambling stories to tell. In fact, I've had a wonderful summer, filled with travel and gardening and family and friends. I even sat down to write several times, but I stopped.

Why?

You see, when I started this blog, I wanted to write about my journey as a fibre artist. To show off finished objects. To share my travels and adventures at fibre events. To teach and inform. This was, to me, a place for fibre and art and ideas. I know I strayed a bit here and there, but my focus always returned to my true love, the fibre stories.

Over the past year, my stories started to change. They were no longer stories of fibre and spinning and making things. As I tried to write this past year, so many of the stories changed into stories of pain, of frustration, or of anger. There was no longer spinning to share, or finished objects to show.

So, I stopped telling stories. I stopped sending out proposals to magazines, I stopped working on the book, I neglected this blog. I had no story to tell. Not anymore.

But this past month I have realized that I do have stories. Just not the ones I am used to telling. New stories. Scary stories. Stories of despair and hope and redemption. Stories of recovery and reclamation. Stories of set-backs and defeats. Stories far more interesting and revealing than those simple stories about making yarn and knitting sweaters.

I had put my stories in a box. They were safe stories. Stories about things outside of me. It's time now to set my stories free. There will be stories of spinning and pain and knitting and adaptation and growth and learning.

I am slowly weaving the threads of my old life through those of my new one. This is no longer just a blog about my journey as a fibre artist. This is a blog about my journey as a fibre artist with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

This is a blog about me, as I learn to bring my two worlds together. That old world of fibre and teaching and travel and my new world of disease and doctors. Each world has its stories, and I am the place where those stories intersect.