Art Can Save You

“Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.”

― Nikki Rowe

Blog by rootsandsproutsdesigns.com non-toxic, handcrafted, artisan jewelry

She summarizes art therapy so well, and it is through this idea that I write my first post. This art as therapy is one of the many reasons RootsandSprouts Designs came to exist. A friend I made during my travels to Thailand two decades ago, shared a raw post recently that woke me from a deep sleep. She shared how she had been struggling and how the suicide hotline she decided to call one day had saved her life, and how art in fact had revived her soul after that call from the brink. "Art Can Save You" she had written on a few posts while sharing about her journey using art and movement as a way back towards finding herself and her health. I remembered her and our brief time together, how we'd randomly met on this island at Ton Sai Beach, Thailand. She was from Seattle and had travelled there for a month and rented a sweet bungalow off the beach for a soul trip away. My partner and I had just taken a boat out to Ton Sai as well, travelling out there for a month to check out a climbing crag. We planned to spend the month climbing then ship back our gear and tour the rest of SE Asia on our own soul journey of sorts. Our random life trips overlapped for a few short weeks. She had a passion for photography and art but was stuck doing a tech job partly because her father believed that was the only right way to make a living. There was this tug between the two worlds: the left brain world of practicality, science and technology and the soul's tug for the right brain world of art, spirituality and creativity. We connected. She had done competitive gymnastics, so had I, we both had fractured families, strict computer type fathers that were quite different from ourselves and we both loved photography, design and art.

After our short time together we said our good-byes, and like what happens in travel encounters, we never planned to see each other again. Fast forward a couple years and I found myself moving to Seattle for grad school. I had her email address in my trip journal and reached out to see if she was still in the area. She was. We met a few times with our cameras and took photos of beautiful flower blooms along the cute row of houses by the market and of some of the crazy sights at the Fremont Fair. We shared some more about photography and art and life. It was a brief re-connection. She still longed and dreamed to do photography for a living but was stuck in a path someone else had set for her. I soon started grad school and we didn't see each other much after that, then my path sent us abruptly out of Seattle to Ashland where we eventually lost regular contact. Over a decade went by when I suddenly noticed her facebook post about 'art will save you'. I think I must have needed to hear it that day or remember something about our time together or her story. The pandemic was crushing us all: lockdowns, homeschool, masks. I discovered she since had married an architect, had a child, and started doing photography as a profession and making and selling art. She followed her dream when her squelched soul brought her to the place where she had to remember who she was, not who someone told her to be. She was coming back to life and was shifting the dial towards not just living but thriving. I think I needed to remember myself too, who I was, and how I had gotten lost amidst motherhood and the crazy road my life had taken from grad school, to Ashland and the birth of our 2 children.

I began thinking about copper again, making patinas, designing jewelry and starting to tinker with it. I pulled out my dusty cri-cut machine that had sat in a box for the previous 4 years since we'd moved. My son developed long covid and I abruptly put my box away again. I saw her continued posts about her art and it nudged me every so often to keep going, to take out the box. I tried. I took breaks, almost a year went by. My friend in AZ would ask how my jewelry was coming and I would say, "I still haven't made anything more yet". I couldn't get inspired. Time kept passing. When my husband's division closed in the fall, I guess I was finally ready. I needed to do this for me, just to survive all of the crazy of the world really, to shut off the world in the right brain bliss of silence. I needed to start something that we could have for us, that could go with us. No more corporate layoffs and corporate downsizing dictating where we live. I wanted to build something meaningful that someone else couldn't just take away in an instant. So here we are. Here I am. RootsandSprouts Designs has been a thought for some time, lots of blips of thought, lots of random ideas, with some steps now of moving forward. In the process, my soul is being filled with something new too. And I don't know what it will turn into yet. The act of creating stops and stills time, and allows us to breathe. It brings the buried and silent things to the surface. I made a necklace yesterday, for instance, and I don't know where it came from. I didn't sit down with any idea really, just started playing around. It kind of came alive and created itself. Making art, like music, connects us with something deeper that we can't put into words, and it is healing. It brings us places we couldn't go otherwise, the place without words, just feeling, and we all need to find a small piece of that in our lives. So go dust off the guitar that is in the corner of your room or take out that old pottery wheel in the back of the garage or finally re-design that kitchen. Creativity always brings a return.

#handcrafted artisan jewelry #rustic handmade jewelry #sterling silver copper bronze jewelry #natural stone artisan jewelry #rustic wedding jewelry #www.rootsandsproutsdesigns.com