From Here to There

September's theme on The Documented Life Project 2015 will be Journalling with Photos. This week's art challenge is: photo transfer and our journalling prompt: From here to there. I haven't stuck to it very exactly but went off on a tangent. The background is a mixture of acrylic paints and stencils (using a stencil from Stencilgirl Club August 2015 as well as their Curvy Stems stencil). To that, pieces of a flowery paper napkin were added and then I added tape transfers of flower images out of a vintage book about nature.

The focal point is a Polaroid picture taken with a digital Polaroid camera which really I should use more often. For the journalling prompt I thought about words I had just been reading in Tara Brach's book True Refuge: finding peace and freedom in your own awakened heart (see also sidebar). The adjusted quotation reads:
"It is not about getting from here to there. It is about bringing a full presence to here, to the life of this moment". 

 And I must say I was definitely present in the moment during the past few days, dealing with a utility company, in this case Scottish Power. After the huge power cut on Sunday I went through my complaints log and discovered that we had our power interrupted 14 times last year, and 4 times this year. All this after our line was "upgraded". During that upgrade new poles were installed, two of which have now gone up in flames. Quite an explosive upgrade that was!  I pointed out to their "Customer Services" that the laws of cause and effect alone proved that something had clearly gone wrong somewhere along the line!  Sadly you can win every single battle with such companies but you will never win the war. We must now await our next outage as the pole that exploded Sunday will have to be completely renewed. Oh joys.

There were times on Sunday that I wished I wasn't present at all, at least not here. But on the plus side I did get to make this page entirely uninterrupted by phone, e-mail or any other means of communication and making it didn't require any electrical equipment. I used a Dymo writer (with batteries!) for the text.

And I'm not sure if it is connected  (so sorry about all those puns) but we also lost our broadband (through the phone) for most of yesterday As a result I have been rather absent from my online existence. This is not necessarily a bad thing (I'm trying to convince myself of this) but I do feel guilty about my lack of response on various online forums. Hopefully we are now over the worst!