When I say the word "office", I use the term loosely. I have a room. With stuff in it.
I use my office to email, surf the net, write my blog, and make neat piles of paperwork (they don't seem to serve a purpose, they just seem to grow freely in my room and then I spend time neatening them), when I should be doing other things.
Basically, it's a computer room. A desk, if you will. Surrounded by piles of junk mail, a bag of Christmas presents I didn't get round to delivering to cousins last year (I am a bad woman), piles of books to read, shelves of books I've already read, piles of books I'm planning on reading next, books I can't part with, books I have half read and never finished but won't part with.
I also have an eclectic mix of wooden puppets, holistic therapy bits and bobs, and drawers of art paper, ribbons, paints, pens, beads, wire, tools and creative bits and pieces collected over the years. As well as files of collages and children's stories I created while I was teaching, and used with the children.
Usually, I come into the room, ignore the detritus around me, trip over the cat, slide on a magazine, and sit down relatively unharmed at my laptop. I then spend several minutes trying to remove the cat from the computer keyboard. He flops across it and purrs. Dribbles on the keys. Emits a little gas. Before head-bonking me in a bid for attention.
He has worked out how to flip the letters off the keys by using a well placed claw. I recently spent quite some time looking for the letter "E". He was completely underwhelmed with my high pitched expressions of frustration at being cat-botaged.
I'm then forced to fuss him a while until he is prepared to take himself and his noxious gases to a furr-bally corner, and have a well-earned snooze.
I'm not a house-cleaning slattern per-se. It's just that this room has a tendency to become the glory hole for all the bits and pieces I don't know where else to put, so that the rest of the house can stay clutter free.
And I don't like hoovering.
A few days ago I decided to take action and turn this disorganised room into a creative haven.
I'm a big believer in Feng Shui. I know I feel differently in different rooms depending on what's in the room and how it's arranged. So, in order for me to want to sit in my office and get creative, I needed to change a few things!
A sigh of relief...
The piles of paperwork have been cleared, and organised into rubbish and recyclables. The books are on the book shelves. I have dusted, vacuumed, and aired the room. I have burned essential oils to give it a welcoming "perfume". I've de-cluttered. And I've designated different areas for different things so that I know where everything is. The energy in the room has completely changed and I feel drawn to spending time here. I even have a wee place to lie down just in case my new creative space causes me to have so many new creative ideas, my head explodes...
Here are some of my favourite things in my creative haven:
The first Christmas my significant Other and I were together, he took me to Prague. We celebrated Christmas together drinking mulled wine, eating gorgeous food and exploring the city. He bought me this puppet while we were there. She's one of my treasures:
I saw this puppet in the same shop and couldn't leave her behind!
I love notebooks and journals. These are my current notebooks/journals. They contain inspirational quotes, notes from books I've read that I wanted to remember, sketches and designs of jewellery pieces I'm going to make "one day", notes on holistic therapy techniques, and ideas for short stories and poems I get in the middle of the night (that never seem like such good ideas when I read them back in the cold light of day). Somehow over time I've managed to collect a few notebook journals...
A friend recently had an Hawaiian themed birthday party. We wore these garlands for the party. They hang from the end of my curtain pole. It was a great party, and I had lots of fun drinking cocktails with paper umbrellas in, chatting to friends, and eating (hey, there was a buffet, it would have been rude not to). I spent time in Hawaii when I was on my round world trip alone in 1996. I had an adventure there that involved swimming at night in shark feeding waters (I had no idea), and visiting Magnum P.I.'s home (who wouldn't?) When I look at these garlands they remind me of good times.
Do you have a space that is just yours?
Yes, of course, THE Puppet is one of your treasures.
ReplyDeleteYou let us, your readers, visibly see some of your favorite things in your creative haven. Will you let us visibly see the creative haven--as a whole?
Thank you, Caffeinated Globe, for stopping by, reading, and leaving lovely comments. They are very much appreciated. I had originally planned to show my creative haven as a whole, and took some pictures. But, very surprisingly, when it came to including them it felt difficult to do. I think because this journey has become so important for me and feels so personal, the space where I now spend so much time being creative feels very precious to me, if that makes sense. Leave it with me for a few days... When I published the post and read it back, I actually felt a bit cheated myself that there were no pictures of the room!
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