Writing had been an integral part of my life for many years before my parents died. I had written in a journal for longer than I’d known how to drive or cook. I was working on a degree in English so I was surrounded with words. Writing was how I thought. Writing was who I was.

But I stopped writing after my parents died. Full-stop, arrested, halt, “none shall pass” stopped. It was too hard. I didn’t have the words to process my grief. Every time I started to write, even something simple and not-journal-like such as an email, I started to cry with great wracking tears. The emotions overwhelmed me in huge waves and I didn’t know how to deal with them. I was drowning in grief, so I didn’t even want to go near the water.
Yet I still needed to create. I still needed to drink the life-giving water of creation. I think creating is essential to the human soul. I like Madeline L’Engle’s view in Walking on Water, her book about what it means to be an artist and a Christian. She says that to create is to be a co-creator with God. Essentially, we are created to be creators.

It doesn’t make sense now for me to have stopped writing. It was like another loss, another grief. I’d lost my parents, and then I lost my way of thinking, of understanding. I was untethered. My boat was unmoored. I had all these new, unpleasant and unfamiliar ideas and thoughts and I had no way to deal with them, no way to bring them back to a safe shore.

And then I remembered beads. I had started working with beads when I moved to Washington D.C. I’d made that first fateful foray into a bead store in Dupont Circle nearly half my life ago. I went with a student I’d met through the Cultural Consortium, a program that the Kennedy Center had to introduce inner-city kids to the arts in an active and participatory way. Thankfully for me, this student was kind enough to teach me a new way to be creative. That bead store trip was the beginning of a long-term love affair with all things bead, and a new way to think and communicate.

Beads have their own language and their own symmetry. I can say things in beads. I started to string beads together the same way I’d string words together to create a sentence or a paragraph. You can pick out a focal bead the same way you’d pick out a really cool word or a really interesting idea.

Recently I noticed that I had too many ideas. I was carrying around a notebook at work so I could keep up with all the ideas I wanted to write about. I was under the impression that ideas are like beads – when I come across them, I’d better collect them. I may never see them again. It was like I was on a bead-buying frenzy. After a while, it is time to sit down and start working with them.

Sometimes with beads I’ll start work on a project and not be sure where it is going. I’ll leave it in the saucer until I get some better clue as to what needs to happen next. Some saucers stay full. Some projects never get finished because I take apart the proto-necklace again and again until I realize that there is no way I can finish it. Maybe it wasn’t a viable project. Maybe it isn’t a project for me to finish. Maybe I don’t have the right kind of beads or the right mindset.

I now have “saucers” for my words. I’ve developed folders for note-seeds. I can return to them when I have time or inclination to work on/water them. I can revise/prune them later. I can add or subtract, just like with beads – but faster. If only beading had “copy and paste”!
Sometimes I have too many saucers, too many projects. This might be part of the nature of being creative, or the nature of being bipolar. Sometimes I think that the true essence of being an artist is knowing how to edit, and how to know when something is “done”. Sometimes I think another part is just being OK with the process and not worrying too much about what it is going to look like at the end until you get there.

Here are things I’ve “written about” in beads. When I learn how to post pictures I’ll update this post.

The Davinci code book.
The Griffin and Sabine series
A trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama.
What it is like to do water aerobics in the pool at the Y.
The history of the church, from Byzantine to Catholic/Orthodox to Protestant to now.