The Whirling Dervish

In response to my post about freelancing, missprune asked what about weaving? because I've been raving about that recently, too. The answer is, "I probably can't write without weaving."

Few books have influenced me more than Carol Lloyd's Creating a Life Worth Living: A practical course in career design for artists, innovators, and others aspiring to a creative life. In the chapter on goals, she talks about the way different people organize creative goals in their lives. She suggests different career styles: the Monocled Monk, the Project Nomad, the Disciplinarian, the Tightrope Walker, the Whirling Dervish and the Wood Nymph. The one that most reflects my approach is the Whirling Dervish:

This model was created by one of my students who sought to show how her three different careers—visual art, teaching, and documentary film—together led her toward her ultimate political and spiritual goals. In creating this model, Meg realized that she needed to do her three kinds of work in a specific order. For a few months of the year, she painted. This work not only fulfilled her solitary yearnings, it provided her with ideas she used as an art teacher in public schools. In turn, working with teeanagers from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds gave her ideas for her political documentaries about education, youth, and race relations. Finally, exhaused from the extroverted, multileveled work of filmmaking, she would again retire to her studio to paint watercolor landscapes . . . and so, the cycle began again. The whirling dervish has turned out to be a popular model for many of my students who cannot imagine focusing on less than three full careers at a time. What is important about the whirling dervish is that the three careers are interdependent on one another. They don't pull you in three different directions, they spin you inward.

I don't think I can happily function without this multi-faceted approach. For me, I don't see the changes happening over the seasons, but over the course of a day. At this time I have three particular paths that compel me:

• pursuing opportunities for income from freelance writing
• the newly-discovered (for me) adventure of writing interactive fiction
• weaving, from which I can also imagine deriving some income

I can use writing interactive fiction in the evenings as incentive to guide me through the hard work of freelance writing, and take breaks to weave, which is colourful, earthy, rhythmic and tactile, a meditative release from the cognitive challenge of writing.

Some additional themes must fit into the mix somehow: nature, gardening and cooking, for example. A more responsible, sustainable way of living on Earth. These interests will inform the content of what I do. Over time, I expect to see additional spin-offs.

Colour geekery!

The colour gamp kit arrived! It's a birthday present from Danny. It's for making one of these, sampling the way different colours interact in woven fabric. Yum! This will go on the loom as soon as the current scarf project is finished.