Just doing what I feel

- Tess summed up my mood this evening.
Bob's Marley's Could You Be Loved was playing on the iPod and she grabbed her recorder and joined in.
She's not had any formal learning or proper instruction yet (you can tell if you look closely that she's playing an unofficial note), but I taught her how to hold it and tongue the notes a few weeks ago, and she's doing the rest on her own for now. She has a great ear and perfect sense of rhythm and timing and has worked out tunes for herself. Getting her a recorder was one of my more sensible decisions of late.
I guess I'm treating her as a bit of an experiment, because I learnt to read music at an incredibly young age and therefore never needed to learn anything off by heart or use my ears as much as I should.
I found myself saying to Tess that joining in and just doing what you feel is the proper way to be a musician. It's a bloody good start anyway.

I spent the day away from lists, expectations, rules, and just did what I was capable of. I played it by ear too - just doing what I felt. That ended up meaning I sorted through 5 kitchen cupboards and cleared the surfaces of anything that's getting in the way and not being used. I can be distracted and disturbed by clutter, and my instincts were telling me to get rid.

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." said William Morris

Sometimes I feel that means chucking me out too!

It's good for me to not plan too much. I set myself up for disappointment if I expect too much of myself, but if I fly by the seat of my pants I find I feel as if I've achieved a lot.

Behind Tess is our new bee identification poster to the left and a cheap, wobbly old corner shelf that I got out of the garage and cleaned up and filled with things. It may be cheap and crappy but I find it to be both useful and beautiful.

I made bread and flapjacks today - neither were particularly beautiful but both are really useful!

Not as low as yesterday, but still incredibly tired and clumsy. Falling apart flapjacks so very nearly tipped me over the edge.

I stayed up late to fill in my blipfoto entry for Sunday because it felt like an overly indulgent, late night secret entry of misery and self-hate. Posted it at 2am because I knew everyone would be in bed.

It's strange writing down my inner thoughts and feelings - not only because I know other people might read them, but for so many years I kept absolutely everything to myself and it's forcing me to make sense of things by writing them down. It's a place to be self-indulgent in a world where you're supposed to bottle things up.