CHOOSE

 Back from Venice with hundreds of photographs to turn into a scrapbook, but the first thing I turned to was my journal...  This page began when I found this pencil sketch online, and it seems to me to illustrate the half full/half empty thing.  The background and the sun are done with Caran d'Ache crayons, and the grey bottle is pasted onto the page.

This is a bit of a soapbox of mine, so forgive me if I've bored you with this before, but I find that I can (and indeed MUST) make this choice daily, if not hourly!  It would be so easy to get dragged down by my illness, and to have a relentlessly negative outlook on life ... and I do have someone in my extended family who is like that, and nobody wants to be near them.  A good lesson to try and see the positive and celebrate your blessings, rather than endlessly rehearsing your woes and complaints!

But there are days when my inner Pollyanna goes on strike, and I WANT to feel sorry for myself, in fact I feel positively entitled.  But its not just me, there are countless people who could with perfect justification complain about the hand life has dealt them, and the poor quality of their life, but if they do .... they make themselves extremely unpopular.  Its not that a positive attitude changes anything, because it doesn't - the facts remain the same, but what can and does change is how you view it, and therefore deal with it.

So even when its difficult to do so I try to remember to count my blessings, and celebrate all that is good in my life, rather than focusing on the negatives.  It really works - and journalling helps! That alone makes me feel lucky!

GRATEFUL

Many of you will know that paint doesn't seem to be my natural medium, but I do keep trying to learn to love it, so that's what was happening here.  It may be purely a matter of laziness, in that I want to dive straight into a page and not have to gesso it first etc etc., but whatever I had some fun splodging paint about here.  I did a background of quite diluted paint (these are acrylics let down with water) and then used a baby wipe among other things to add more layers.

 Then because it was one of those times when I was just making a background and seeing where it led, I dug about in my collage materials and added a few images.  Although I forgot to photograph it at that stage, I used a technique I often resort to of asking myself what's the one word I want to put on this page?  This time it was "grateful" and so I wrote it in the middle - having learned the hard way that it rarely works to stick it at the top.

After that the creative juices just started to flow ... and although I do know that my writings here sound very Pollyanna-ish I am unapologetic about that!  It seems really important to me to regularly engage in the Count Your Blessings exercise - and all the more so when you're a bit down and dejected.  Its frighteningly easy to lock into a downward spiral in which you can only see negatives, but I find when you look for them that there are ALWAYS good things to celebrate and give thanks for.

You may notice that this is a page I made back in March ... when we were still hoping for a summer!  I haven't been doing a lot of journalling lately - it goes like that with me, I'll work all day every day in my journals for a while, and then I end up needing a change of activity.  I've got a sewing project on the go at the moment, but in a few days I'll return to my journal with renewed enthusiasm.

Sometimes I wish I was the sort of person who could concentrate on just doing one thing well - like sewing or making cards etc., or stick to just one medium, but I seem to be somebody who needs diversity and lots of different materials to play with.  Maybe you're the same?