I've just not been motivated...which led me to the realization today that yes, indeed, despite the unseasonably warm winter we've been having and a slightly higher-than-usual number of days with actual, real live sunshine, I'm still in my usual winter funk. It's not quite as bad this year as it's been in years past, which is why it took me awhile to catch onto it. Still, there it is. It has lumbered into my life and shoved everything else aside for a bit.
I learned long ago not to fight it. If I were to try to force myself to my sewing machine at the moment, likely I'd make a mess of it and get highly irritated to boot, and that's not the quilting Zen I like to achieve. So meanwhile, I'm taking advantage of the time to live out some of my slow quilting tenets--I'm playing with color, I'm petting my fabric, I'm spending time nose-deep in books (quilt design and otherwise), and I'm just riding out the quiet period.
I do actually think these quiet periods are a gestation of sorts. I could get all pastor-y about it and compare it to the ebbs and flows of spiritual experience, but I do believe I have another blog for that sort of thing now. For the purposes of this blog, suffice it to say that one shouldn't be afraid of the quiet periods. I don't worry that I've lost my quilting mojo by any means. I know that it's just gone into a short period of hibernation--a sleepy time necessary to regroup and allow the snoring subconscious to mull over all sorts of wonderful possibilities of color and setting.
My mojo will come back, presumably when it's about 5o degrees out and there's a break in the clouds. Well, since that doesn't happen until sometime in mid-March, hopefully it'll decide to poke its nose out of the cave sometime before that. Whenever. I'll be ready.
(Photo note: don't recall what critter that is sleeping in a cave in Disney's Animal Kingdom; surely not a hibernating kind. But he was the only thing close in my photo files so you'll need to allow me some mammalian metaphor license.)