perfectionism + false starts + soul stirrings

The retrogrades are retrograding and so I’ve found myself looking back, awash in nostalgia and remembering. And lessons that have shown up before are showing up again.

Six months after moving to Sacramento, I found myself wandering through the rose garden. This photo is from that day. It was early July. Many of the blooms were past their prime. And those were the most beautiful ones to me.

It felt like such a lesson, that beauty lies in the imperfections. And truly, I am an admirer of the distressed, the weathered, the frayed. I love me a wabi sabi moment.

AND. I struggle hard with perfectionism. And it doesn’t matter how many epiphanies I have gazing into imperfect blooms, it feels like lifelong work for me.

And the way it shows up morphs and transmutes and does its strange trickster dance.

Here’s how it’s showing up now. My soul has been calling for creative expression. And not just in jewelry and altars and the things that have become, over time, easy and comfortable.

She wants to play out on the edges. Where things are not so known and not so comfortable and feel a little dangerous. She wants to play with textiles and collages and mixed media.

It’s not a new calling. She’s played there before. And every now and again, we do a little and we decide we’re not really that good at it. And no one will ever want to buy it. And because we're a beginner, we don’t really love the outcome and even the process is uncomfortable, to suck at something new.

And perfectionism convinces us that this is a waste of time. That this is going nowhere. A distraction.

And so we pack our supplies away and we turn back to our beads, our comfort, our safe space. And for awhile, it feels like enough. Until the soul starts its stirring again. Until we see someone else doing the thing we know we should be doing.

And so. I signed up for a thing. Soon I’ll be dusting off those supplies, and trying once again. Will it lead somewhere new this time? Who knows.

But I do know, that everything I’ve done in the past that has been worth doing, was not accomplished in one go. There were false starts and failed attempts long before the thing took.

So, onward we go.