Last weekend, I just couldn’t eat another standard breakfast so I whipped up something a little different… fruity pancakes!

I started by bringing a frying pan to medium heat, adding a teaspoon or so of butter, and then another of coconut. Once it’d melted, I added roughly 2 cups of water, brought it to a boil, and dropped in a handful of cranberries and a squirt of liquid honey (1-2 tbsp?).

fruity pancakes with cranberries

While it boiled, I diced and added two apples,  a sprinkle of cinnamon, and a touch of orange zest (1/4 tsp?). Meantime, I whipped up a few pancakes (from a boxed mix), and kept stirring the fruit mix until it’d reduced to about 2/3 volume and the fruit was soft.

apples, cranberries and honey

Just before the fruit was done, I took about a teaspoon of cornstarch, added just enough water to it to mix it into a thin paste, and added it to the fruit along with about 2 more tablespoons of honey.

orange zest

With the fruit coated in a sweet paste, I poured it over the pancakes and topped everything with a sprinkle of walnuts and a drizzle of maple syrup.

pancakes frying

Truth is, I have no clue how ‘fattening’ or ‘healthy’ a breakfast it made, but I can say that it tasted great and was a nice change from eggs and toast <| : )

pancakes with fruit and nut topping

You know, I’m still giggling over how shocked my buddy, ‘the Dog’, is about my being able to draw. ‘Three years and you never mention you do this…?!’ he asked, but the truth is that I had. He just didn’t take me seriously.

Since I started drawing again a few weeks ago, though, he’s become something of a fan and constantly compliments, critiques, and challenges me, which is nice ’cause it reminds me of my teen years when friends used to bug me to draw this or that while we hung out. Unfortunately, that usually leads to The Dog telling me how talented I am and that I should do something with it, and that makes me really… really… uncomfortable.

You see, what ‘The Dog’ doesn’t know is that I’ve been there, done that.

I’ve already been told that I have talent. I’ve been told I should go to school and make a career of it. At 47 years old, though, I am not about to go into debt for an education or career that I won’t have the time to make ‘pay off’. Starving artist…? No thanks!

The other thing that The Dog doesn’t ‘get’ is that it’s been 25 freakin’ years since I’ve put any serious effort or time into drawing so its almost like starting all over. Hell! I didn’t even know if I could draw any more! Now that I am trying, though, it seems that I am a little more capable than I figured and its surprising me on a regular. So, it would be cool to take a little time and find out what else I can do before I start thinking about making money at it.

The biggest reason I’m not letting anything go to my head, though, is that I had very personal reasons for learning to draw, giving it up, and for starting again, and what I haven’t admitted to anyone is that I have very personal reasons for worrying about what drawing again may do to my life. That means that I may also have reason to give it up again, so its not something I’d want to go nuts on and learn too late that it was a mistake.

Anyways, got no one to talk to about this so had to spill my guts. Will have to think this through more..

Hung out with the boys last night and did a little sketching. The Dog challenged me to draw some things which was cool ’cause buddies used to do that when I was a teenager and it gave me something to ‘play’ with. Then, my BF and them started hassling me because I never finnish a sketch. Of course ‘finnish’ is a relative term but they didn’t want to hear that so I stuck with one longer than I normally would have and it turned out okay.

sketch: male, south american?

Of course, the proportion, postion, shading, etc. aren’t great, but I’ve only been drawing for a few weeks so I can’t let that get to me. More importantly, I found that when I ‘tried’ to draw things they often didn’t work out very well, but when I turned my hand loose and just let it do its thing, it’d suddenly get better. The botom right portion of this sketch, for example, was drawn with conscious effort, while the bottom left was my hand playing with shading…

detail of native looking man

I think the feathers turned out much better, and I really liked the way their edges turned out. May have to play with that some more : )

Years ago, a virtual stranger gave me a book so old and cheesy looking that all I could think was ‘why?!’ This month, when I finally gave it a shot, though, I discovered that the book, ‘Psycho-Cybernetics’, was written by plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz, who condensed what his career taught him of people, self image, and success, into this self-help guide to  ‘happiness’. Of course, I was miffed with myself for not having read it sooner, but suspect that I wouldn’t have ‘gotten it’ the same if I had.

When I read, for example, that Maltz believed an ‘unrealistic’ self image was what drove each and every one of his clients to seek his help, I’d normally have doubted such a ‘blanket statement’. Instead, I asked myself how realistic mine was, and was surprised when my mind showed me a page torn from a colouring book with a black and white line drawing of ‘me’, replete with ‘escaped convict’ hair, a ‘pig’ nose’, ‘tree trunk’ legs, and a host of other defects.

‘Is that, really, how I see myself?!’ I recoiled from the image, but knew without question that I’d been taught to identify with these defects just as early, and surely, as I’d been taught to colour.

I know because I caught my reflection in the mirror one night about a year ago and was genuinely surprised and confused by what I saw. The woman in the mirror, you see, looked far too good to have any connection to me.

‘She’ was perhaps 5 foot 7 or eight inches tall, looked to weigh about 120-130 pounds, and appeared to be in her mid 30’s.  She had shoulder length auburn hair that waived around an oval face, highlighted by full, bowed lips and bright blue eyes and wore a sleeveless black sheath dress that revealed strong, toned arms, a narrow waist, and flaring hips. In it, she looked as though she’d be as comfortable and confident on a red carpet as she was on a bath mat.

Of course, I knew that ‘she’ and I were one, but even as I accepted the unfiltered input from my eyes, my brain tried over-laying my reflection with the defects that supposedly defined ‘me’. It was then that I consciously realized how unrealistic and limiting my self image is, and when I became determined to learn to be habitually conscious of that fact.

Now, I’m glad I hung on to this book because I can’t, really, talk to anyone about this stuff but books like Psycho Cybernetics give me the chance to get advice from ‘experts’ like Maltz. I just wish I could thank the fellow who gave it to me because it seems he was right after all.

A couple of weekends ago I tried drawing for the first time in years and got a bit of a surprise.

Of course, I was rusty – the pen felt as awkward in hand as my doodles looked on paper – and it wasn’t long before I was tempted to quit. Too curious to do so easily, though, I tried a trick my father taught me when I was a kid, instead.

With my eyes closed, I drew a simple scribble, and checked it from all angles for any likenesses or associations it might evoke. Once I’d decided what it looked like to me, I then used some of its lines, and added to them, to make the ‘scribble’ into an easily recognizable ‘sketch’ of that thing.

Then, I scribble, check, sketched until I was racing like I used to as a child.

Still, the pen felt awkward enough that I, eventually, ground to a halt and found myself simply staring at it.

Had I lost what little ability I might have had…(?) I wondered, but knowing that thinking… or more aptly ‘over-thinking’… had caused me to give drawing up in the first place, I hit the break on that mental train before it could build up a good head of steam.

‘Steam… train… mechanics… ‘basic mechanics’…!’ I spun, flipped, and fiddled the pen between fingers… one after the other… feeling for what I couldn’t see. Then, something in me ‘clicked’, I froze, and keeping hand and pen in exactly that position, I tried another scribble.

As different as it was from my usual grip, and despite conflicting information from mind and body, things finally felt ‘right’, and I ripped through another half dozen scribble-sketches to give myself time to get comfortable with it. Rather than encouraging me, however, my drawings only seemed to cause a growing unease.

I drew one last scribble… a rough circle… cleared my head and, on a whim, let my hand do its thing.

Its first few strokes were short… hesitant.. and only made a mess. But, I stayed out of it and my oblivious hand picked up strength and speed until it was laying lines down haphazardly. A nose appeared… an eye… the strange creeping feeling grew stronger… and then I was looking at the head and shoulders of a masculine looking creature much like the orks in fantasy movies.

drawing of an ‘ork’

Decent, I thought, but it felt like I was looking at something a stranger had drawn, and that’s when it finally hit me…

Of course, it’d look like a stranger had drawn it because I wasn’t the same person I’d been 25 years ago when I last seriously tried to draw. Too much life… too much change… and, even as I thought that, an excited curiosity grew within me.

What would I see if I kept drawing? How would all that change affect my art? What could I learn about myself?

Unfortunately, I got interrupted and had to set my drawing aside, but I feel like this is something I need to pursue if for no other reason than to satisfy the curiosity that’s been gnawing at me all these years.

Years ago when I chose the witchypoo.com domain name, it was as much to poke fun at myself as to suit my esoteric interests. Once Witchypoo became the only name by which some people knew me, though, I kept it year to year and host to host for the sake of convenience and sentimentality.
Last week, when I realized it’d been ages since I’d bothered to post anything to my site, though, I wondered if it might be time for a change. My interests and life style had changed many times in the decade or so I’d been Witchypoo, as had the ways people used the net.
No sooner had I thought it, though, than I discovered my domain name registration had expired (ding, dong, the witch was dead!) and I needed to choose a new one. ‘But, which one…?’ I wondered.
As I mulled it over, two thoughts stuck out from all the rest.
The first was that, despite my intent to share some of myself through my site, I’d seldom if ever posted an unguarded word. The second was that, while I have to share almost every moment and aspect of my life with others, this was the one place I could do what I wanted… the one place that was truly ‘mine’.
So, with the help of the amazing staff at A Small Orange, I chose ‘Just Lynn.com’ as my new domain name, and will be working to rebuild my site to better reflect who I am now. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but hope that – in the long run – it’ll be worth it.
Enjoy!
Lynn