Previously…2.2 – Why Martial Arts
I love making stuff.
Since I’ve been a child, I’ve loved crafts. I’ve built up quite a repertoire of crafted stuff, equipment and books and have dabbled in just about everything you can think off. At one stage I don’t think all the projects I wanted to do would have fitted into this lifetime…and that is precisely the point!
When I started to think about why I’m interested in all these millions of things (with absolutely NO TIME to do them all!) I realised that I probably have done most of them already!
For example: A couple of years ago just after we moved to Worcester to start our own business, I got into making beads. Not just any beads, pottery beads.
I LOVE BEADS!!!
A friend of mine shoved a bag of pottery clay into my hands, told me she needed large pottery beads for table cloth weights, and please can I make her some…you know, seeing as I loved making beads and have made some out of plastic clay (FIMO) before.
Did I mention that I love beads?
Not stringing and working with them, but making them…and collecting them!
My friend was making papier-mâché bowls at that stage and selling them at a shop in the Red Shed at The V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, amongst other things. So she had organised with another friend to make and market African style table cloth weights in Europe…and couldn’t find big enough and heavy enough beads for the job!
So I designed, made and fired some beads from the clay, which she used to make samples for the marketing trip to Europe. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have been able to supply the quantities that would hopefully be needed eventually, so we started to think about an upliftment scheme, and I started training some disadvantaged women from Worcester to make pottery beads. The whole thing fell apart when the woman who went to Europe fell and broke a leg or something and had to come back early.
But I had found a love for working with clay and continued to dabble.
I also had an affinity for the Pueblo Indians and Anasazi people who built an entire city of adobe houses in a cave at Mesa Verde in Colorado. So one day I went looking for information, and found an article in a National Geographic about them. Guess what else they were famous for?
Pottery!
…and not just any pottery, they made the most amazing black pots you have ever seen!
When I saw the photograph of the pots it was as if something just went “click” in my head and heart and I knew…
Oh! I’ve made these! I was an Anasazi Potter!
…and the intense interest disappeared. Amazing!
I still love clay and pottery, but the compulsion to do has disappeared, it’s not such a driving force anymore. What I needed to resolve? No idea, except that whatever it was, it went!
I’ve also done painting on glass, screen printing, airbrushing, and LOTS of graphic design work, this is still a passion – I do all our in-house design work, as well as for friends and so on. I even did a graphic design course before I left my ex-husband and studied for about six months before I got a full-time job and had to quit, but it was great! It gave me the means to rebuild my self-confidence and rekindle my patience, as well as made me realise that there is something I’m good at!
I do the odd thing now and then when I need something for the house or business and have my own workroom with everything ready to go, but the compulsion has disappeared.
I now know that it has been.
It is a part of me.
I can draw on it any time I want.