Sometimes I feel like a glue stick, keeping my own life and that of my boys together.
I fix things, I solve problems, I help and support.
I am the glue.
I am different than that glue stick though, as I care about what I glue. I am attached to where I leave my glue and what the outcome of my sticky help looks like.
I have yet to learn to unstick myself from that and become that glue stick: leaving a piece of yourself each time, without attachment.
The glue stick on my desk has a happy, smiling character on its round body and I wonder what my face looks like when I glue pieces of life together. Sometimes it’s a worried face, often an annoyed one, seldom a brightly grinning one.
Do I not like to glue?
Is it a chore? An interruption?
Is that why I like to collage in my art journal so much?
Because it helps me to put the pieces I don’t understand together, to make sense of my life?
Because it helps me calm my heart of guilt, anger, annoyance with others and myself?
Because I can glue myself together, piece by piece?
I have been much more selective with my dispensing of glue these past years. Much of the glue was needed to keep me whole, to keep me from falling apart, to hold it all together.
There was no glue left for much else, so I became very mindful of where I used it.
The glue stick on my desk is red, a red I do not often use in art or have in my wardrobe as it doesn’t fit in my colour palette. That red seems alert, urgent and present. That red seems to say: I’m here in case you need me. A first aid kit kind of red.
And so it has seemed these past few years: fixing the emergencies, putting together what emerged. I did not always like what emerged, but emerge it did.
And the glue stick was there, sticking down images, words, emotions, creating the story of my life, piece by piece.
In the end, what was left, was a big fat art journal full of paper, paint and glue.
Each page pieces of me.
Each page a story, a thought, a lesson I didn’t yet know I had to learn.
I will never look at that glue stick in the same way again. I might even give it name. What do you think about Gluey? :-)
Prompted by a lesson in SPRING LIGHT by