Gum on My Shoe

I’m not going to lie, my favourite knitting jokes are just the explanations for how frogging and tinking got their names. — nnaoam on Reddit This post was inspired by a video I came across on social media. Lateral with Tom Scott is a comedy quiz podcast in which three people attempt to unravel a cryptic question or challenge posed by the fourth member of the team. In this episode the question was as follows. Sarah is spending a relaxing evening at home. After a while, she sighs, and decides she needs to tink. After tinking for a while, she sighs again and decides she needs to frog. What is causing her to tink and frog? If you’d like to watch the episode before I let the frog out of the bag, you’ll find the video here . Assuming you’re ready to proceed, I can reveal that tinking and frogging are terms used in knitting. The description that follows is from an article by Pam MacKenzie at My Central Jersey. (Disappointingly, My Central Jersey is a news outlet serving Centra...

In this post I’ll explore how daily creativity can benefit our mental health, self-confidence, and sense of connection to others. I’ll focus on the work of four photographers (Clark James Mishler, Brandon Stanton, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Ellis Ducharme) and one artist (Devon Rodriguez). I’ll also draw on my experiences with daily photography and writing. Engagement This post was inspired by a recent conversation with Fran in which she mentioned a photographer in Alaska who took one photograph a day. The photographer is Clark James Mishler , a documentary portrait photographer based in Calistoga, California. He relocated to Anchorage in the early 1980s where he spent four decades as Alaska’s premier environmental portrait photographer. There’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes video of Mishler at work on the Frontier Scientists YouTube channel. His approach to street portraiture (“Would you guys mind participating in a photo shoot?”) impresses and terrifies me — the lat...

... at the beginning where I was doing it every day like clockwork, it entirely carried me out of that low spot, and I believe that it saved my life. — Ellis Ducharme Fran and I recently shared our experiences visiting the Portland Museum of Art and the Laing Art Gallery here in Newcastle upon Tyne. Continuing the Art of Friendship theme, we’re delighted to showcase photographer and videographer Ellis Ducharme, whose exhibition Six Feet Above showed through June at the Peaks Island library in Maine. The website described Six Feet Above as “a collection of thirty-six photos from a personal project to fight depression and raise awareness of mental health. Ocean themes and many cityscapes focus on finding beauty in places most deem undesirable and ugly.” Fran lived on Peaks Island for many years. Although I’ve never visited in person, I feel a great affection for the island as Fran’s shared so much of it with me. She still visits regularly and attended several of this year’...

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide. (Donald Woods Winnicott) The above quotation describes a dynamic I know well. Publishing a new blog post every Wednesday means each week I need to identify a topic and then write a piece I’m happy to present to the world. Some are more personal than others, but whatever the topic there’s a balance to be struck between wanting to communicate and respecting my vulnerability. The Desire to Communicate As I’ve written previously , I can’t imagine a time when I’m not expressing myself creatively in some way. That’s taken many different forms over the years, including clay modeling, painting, woodwork, and photography. Mostly, though, I’ve sought to communicate through my writing. These days that’s primarily through this blog, but in the past it’s included poetry, factual articles, short stories, and books. Friends have described me as having a passion for writing, or it being ...

Cause lately I don’t even know what page you’re on. (Taylor Swift. “The Story of Us.”) I spent a few hours last weekend with my friend and fellow mental health blogger Aimee Wilson. We had a good catch-up (hard to shut either of us up when we get talking!), watched a movie, and ordered takeout. Best of all, we journaled: Aimee in her scrapbook and me in my beloved Passport Traveler’s Notebook. We’re close friends but we have very different life experiences and approach things from different perspectives. Difference can be divisive. People can become so estranged they’re not only not on the same page, they’re scarcely in the same library! But as we chatted away and decorated our journals it came to me that difference isn’t something to be feared, skirted around, or avoided. Difference can be positive, complementary, and creative. My notebook pages are far smaller than those in Aimee’s scrapbook, giving me much less real estate in which to work. She sources images and quotation...

I’ve been experiencing a good deal of stress lately one way or another, and I thought it might help to focus on what’s been going well , and things I am grateful for. This blog post is the result and, yes, it did help. Creative Focus Fran and I recently announced we’re working on a new edition of our second book, No One Is Too Far Away: Notes From a Transatlantic Friendship , as the first edition is now out of print. The project has been a useful distraction from other things which have not been going so well. Last week I finished the Kindle conversion of the book and ordered a proof copy of the printed version which came the other day. My friend and fellow blogger Aimee Wilson asked if I was as excited about seeing it as I was with High Tide, Low Tide . I hadn’t really thought about it, but yes, I really was! There’s nothing quite like seeing your book in physical form and holding it in your hands for the first time. Memes When I’m struggling I tend to pull back from social...

I rarely feel the need to record my self-care habits, but from time to time I find it helpful to monitor things a little more closely. For the past ten days Fran has been staying with a friend in Arizona, after which she will visit another friend in Florida. Apart from a few days in between, she will be away from home for almost six weeks. Although we stay in touch, vacations inevitably mean we are less in contact than usual, which can be hard on us both. I’ve also had a few things going on in my personal life that have affected me deeply. At such times it’s is all too easy to slip into feeling low, so based on my Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) I decided to use a wellness tracker to keep me in touch with healthy practices and activities. My Wellness Tracker Spreadsheet I first tried this back in 2013 when Fran took an extended trip around Europe. On that occasion I used a Google Docs spreadsheet and recorded brief notes about what was happening each day, how much exercis...

I met up recently with fellow blogger Aimee Wilson and we got talking about poetry and mental health. She showed me the blackout poem she’d created at a writing class run by Northumberland Council . Watch it permission rather I would demanded tolerance was not to be tested increasingly restricted reality reliving   particularly happy distracting not dared to return approved of given up hope Poetry is a new avenue for Aimee but she writes prolifically for her blog I’m NOT Disordered . As she says, “I find writing so beneficial for my mental health.” We agreed there can be a close relationship between mental health and creativity. I shared with her how Fran had never written or been interested in poetry until she met me in May 2011. At the time, she was highly manic. Our early emails and online chat conversations were full of wordplay and had a free-flowing stream of consciousness quality that I found intoxicating. Sparked by that, and my own poetry whi...