Searching For Ithaka

Before diving into today’s post, I want to take a moment to welcome all the new subscribers. Many of you found your way here through my Fibre Arts Take Two Friday Feature Artist interview, for which I am honored and grateful.

I share my life on this blog as an artist, a writer, and a human, from an authentic and vulnerable perspective. You may find my life to be something of an enigma, but there are underlying themes that many relate to, regardless of the difference in our circumstances.

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Oh, Guiding Night; 10” x 10” x 2.5” Mixed Media Collage by Crystal Marie

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A little background info on the content of today’s post. I am in the midst of a restructuring year in an attempt to create a life for which I don’t need to escape in order to avoid burnout, a topic I first wrote about in October of last year: https://crystalmarie.substack.com/p/how-do-we-create-a-life-from-which

You can read about why I chose the word Restructure as my 2024 word of the year in this post: https://crystalmarie.substack.com/p/my-2024-word-restructure

Read this post for more details on the why behind the word. To be honest, I need to keep rereading this one myself: https://crystalmarie.substack.com/p/the-shift-a-rebuilding-year

Also this one, which elaborates a bit more on the necessity of moving from the home I lived in for the past five years: https://crystalmarie.substack.com/p/the-underlying-undertow-of-existence

And if you were occupied elsewhere, or hadn’t yet subscribed, when last months post went out, you can read how the necessity of moving out of said previous home left me in currently unhoused circumstances here: https://crystalmarie.substack.com/p/when-plan-b-becomes-plan-a

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Hello dear friends,

I’m writing from Kansas City, Missouri—nearly a days drive from what was my home, and from my kids and grandkids— staying over the summer months at a friends home, with the generous offering of a place to lay my head and studio space to work, after the necessity of vacating my previous home.

This week has found me hitting a wall of what I can only describe as melancholy, so this post may not be the most uplifting thing I’ve ever written—fair warning. But it is the realist thing I can offer in the moment. An entry in the ongoing sharing of my life as an artist and human; with the understanding that I cannot teach and write about the internalized messages that form the blocks we encounter in the studio and in life, if I gloss over my own experiences.

We are a third of the way through July, and though summer only officially began a few weeks ago according to the calendar, the Fourth of July holiday has traditionally been a marker for the halfway point of the season to me. It doesn’t matter that the kids are grown, I seem to orient myself around the school year, in perpetuity .

I made a whole heckuva lot of people mad recently (my sincerest apologies if you were one of them). I made the decision to close my website, Canary Rising, and sent an announcement asking everyone to download their courses by July 31st, if they wished to keep them.

It was a decision I hadn’t expected to make when I chose Restructure as my 2024 word of the year. It was supposed to be about restructuring my life—to allow me to find my way through to a life I didn’t need to escape to avoid burnout. It wasn’t supposed to mean restructuring my business, but then how did I miss the memo of my own teaching; that as it is in life, it is in the studio?

As an artist, my business and life are intrinsically connected and looking back, I can see a clear path from opening that website to the place I am today. But I still twisted myself into knots trying to avoid taking this step, pushing myself harder to find a way to make it work. In survival mode, the creative problem solving part of the brain simply shuts down. I guess it took the reality of what I’m going through to force me to really look at it with a bit of perspective.

Had I known then what I know in hindsight, of course there would be a different end to this story. Isn’t that the thing we all want to believe? It is the plot line for many works of fiction, where the protagonist is offered the chance to go back in time and do it over again. What would you change if you could go back and have a do over? So many things.

When I sent the announcement I was clear on the purpose for closing. Clear on what it has cost me personally to try to hold onto it. The host platform is expensive, post-pandemic sales across the board have declined, and I was stuck in an untenable cycle, creating more and more courses in effort to survive.

There was no time for growth marketing, no additional finances to hire help or advertise properly. No time to tend to my gallery relationships, no time to make art for said galleries, no time to take care of my health or tend to my own life outside of that hamster wheel.

I wrote what I thought was a clear explanation without going into too many personal details and was anticipating requests for assistance from participants as they began to download course videos. But I was not anticipating the backlash of vitriol and blame I received from many of the respondents.

One day I may write more about the hight cost to individual artists who teach online, when the industry standards have been set by commercial platforms and teachers who are better resourced, or have partnerships, and assistants. Talking about money is taboo in our culture. We are supposed to keep these things behind closed doors and put on an air of respectability. Yet so many of us are struggling to make ends meet regardless of occupation.

My biggest hindsight error in judgement was, in that comparison trap sort of way, attempting to offer all the bells and whistles of a professional website, especially in offering lifetime access for customers to stream without downloading. This meant I continued to cover the steep subscription fees to maintain the site with diminishing returns on the investment.

All I can say is I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

The unexpected heat in the responses I received left me feeling that I needed to further explain myself. Thinking I must have given the impression that I made this decision on a whim without regard for anyone else but me, I sent out a follow up that included a more personal explanation of why I needed to close.

What I discovered is what deep down I already knew—the vast majority of people who’ve taken my courses are kind, compassionate, and empathetic humans who did not need further clarification about my reasons. I received a flood of warm, beautiful, encouraging emails telling me just how much what I teach and do as an artist meant to them. Even now, just writing that sentence, tears spring to my eyes for the kindnesses and sincerity shown me in those responses.

Sadly, those who had been the most heated and demanding, didn’t need further explanation either. And a few have continued to write letting me know just what a terrible person I am for having failed to provide lifetime access through streaming online.

But sending that follow up and sharing on a more vulnerable level was as much for me as it was for anyone who might have lingering questions. It served to help me shift away from my own internalized messages of shame for feeling like a failure, back to the truth of knowing who I am and what I do have to offer as an artist and a human. Back to what I would tell any of you, dear readers—it wasn’t a failure, it was experience.

With that experience under my belt, I can begin to look forward. It’s not all smooth sailing from here and I’m still trying to find my way, but ideas are beginning to form around the hows and whats and whys of what I do. And I am remembering my own voice. The thing that is at the heart of my teaching, writing, living message: how easy it is to not trust our own voice, and how very much it matters.

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“Home isn’t a place. Home is where that longing is, and you don’t feel good until you’re there.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

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Release; Searching for Ithaka series; by Crystal Marie

A Journey to Belonging

My current series, Searching for Ithaka, was inspired by the words of the poem below. It is filled with metaphor that could be interpreted through the lens of what we do as artists and humans; how the journey is the point, how in the end we find that the place of comfort and belonging we seek was something we've carried within us all along.

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

My own introduction to the poem, came through the September 14th, 2023 issue of author Susan Cain’s newsletter titled How to Take Your Life’s Journey. In it Susan shared her own interpretation of the poem with these words:

“Early in Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, we meet Ulysses, weeping on a beach, longing for home (Ithaka).

And the reader understands that it’s this very homesickness that sets his journey in motion; and that this longing for Ithaka represents the spiritual longing we all feel (whether we’re atheists, believers, or somewhere in between) to return to the perfect and beautiful world from whence we came.”

Reading this made me think of the journey as the quest to return to that place inside each of us, our own purest, most authentic self, underneath all of the scar tissue of life—our own voice.

But my attention was caught by the words longing for home (Ithaka). I’ve been contemplating this as the theme of a body of work that’s been coming together organically in my studio over the years and which I know will continue to be the focus of my current work, the longing for home part, as a metaphor. So I did a quick search for it online and these are the first words that came up:

Ithaka is a metaphor for the human journey through life, and all the goals and ideals that humans strive for. It can also represent the inner self quest for rediscovering who you really are and what you really want from your life. Some say that Ithaca is your "dreams" or "goals.

Ithaca symbolizes the end of a journey and home, and reminds us that sometimes we have to fight for the things that we value the most.

Each of the works in the series represent my own quest to find both a physical home, and a metaphorical place of belonging. They are interior landscapes inspired by the decay of old buildings, the physical land, and dreamscapes in abstract form.

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With love and gratitude,
Crystal Marie