Me and My Obsession

Every single person on this earth is not the shell that others see. We are all made up of a conglomerate of other things. Feelings, thoughts, ideas, dreams and flowing through it all are our emotions. There is also our subconscious which I will not even delve into. I think I would need a whole blog just to talk about it.

Even though I know when this photo was taken I do not know where
 I found it on the Internet. If anybody does knows please contact me.

I believe that every single thing that we do, say, surround ourselves with, create, build and destroy are an outward expression of what we are within. The way we decorate our homes, the car we drive, the friends we have, the clothes we wear, the things we say and things we do not. Even the state of your house. Is it cleaned within an inch of its life or is it so cluttered you can not find the TV remote for love or money. Or is just right? Comphey a place you look forward to coming home to.They all reflect who we are and what we think about ourselves at any given point in our lives. Like a thread running though our whole life they follow, direct, maneuver their way into everything we do. That is what makes every single person on this earth unique, special, with their very own talents. I could go on about what I think of such things but that is not the purpose of this blog.

Within, these pages a small section of who I am is revealed. Why! Why reveal them you mean. Good question. In my writing group Angela Sunde, author of Pond Magic, who was giving a talk on how to create blogs, asked us all to make one for ourselves. So I have.

The problem is of course, that I have never seemed to able to do things small, contained, less. Anyway this is my blog about how I have used gourds and re-cycled materials to build a miniature village. I thought people might be interested to know about some of the things I have done in my life and what I am still doing. Is that not what a lot of people are doing these days telling complete strangers things about themselves. Talking to people we would ordinarily NEVER in our whole lives ever get to meet or talk to if it wasn't for the Internet. Don't misunderstand me I happen to think it is a good thing.

Archibald cleaning his General Store

Every single thing I have ever done seems to be used as ingredients to create a dream I've had for more than forty years. It is to build a miniature village. Not just an ordinary one, THIS is to be bigger than Ben Hur (as I keep on saying.)   It is to be built so big that people could walk around in it and eventually totally forget that there is another world outside of the walls that would contain it. It is a dream that started as a dream. Something to hide in, wander around in when life got to tough but life kept on being tough and the tougher it got the more I kept the dream. Now life is good and I can walk in and out of my dream with ease. Thankful that I had a place to hide when it was needed.

This is the answer to a problem I had
in one of my stories. My characters need
a drink and this tree limb is covered in plants
that hold water. The problem is is
that there is something inside each pool that
wants to eat them.

I decided that it would be a good thing to build my dream in such a way that other people could come a sit and rest from the crushing realities of the real world. They could sit under the Silver Lunaria trees and listen to the music of the Loo Tunes that is if they bothered to stop and 'listen'. it is only the people who stop and breath for a while that can hear them. They could wonder through the mossy valley stumbling across the Keeper of the Gate who is too busy to look up while he reads the mountain of books at his feet. They could look up into the canopy and spy, what! Numbers of things actually. They might even get to see the Poreen Colony glide in and out of the leaves. Maybe people would like to come and have tea and scones in the dinning room of Pebble Cottage?

For obvious reasons I have only included in this blog the images and information of the models that I made many many years ago and that have been on display at many shows and have been photographed thousands of time. My other models are kept safe.

It is of course a dream that is a bit silly in some respects and in others not. It definitely is a dream that could come true, if I happen to have a spare $650 million in my back pocket that is but as I don't I have brought my dream down to a do-able thing. Something that one person could complete in a life time, even though half of that life is over. I spent it wondering who I was, where I fit in, why I am the person that I am. Living a life I thought I wanted but in the end, and what an end, found out I didn't. By that time 20 years had gone by and I am still trying to get them back. Impossible I know but I'm working on it. But now that is sorted NOW I can get on with things. A bit late some may say, true, maybe. It depends on how much I want it I suppose and if I do happen to raise such an amount then I can employ other people to come and build it for me and wouldn't that be an amazing thing! Even so if I am the only one to ever see it so be it.

The Kitchen of Pebble Cottage. Believe it or not this model is 20 years old.

I am a plodder ( its the Taurus in me) and I will just keep on plodding away towards my dream, even if it never gets were I want it to. I'm also a creative person, as if you couldn't tell. Since the age of three so my mum says. There have only been two times in my life that I have sub-consciously stopped making things. Once, for three months, when I realised that my marriage was never going to work. The second time was more serious. I stopped for two and a half years when I had a nervous breakdown (or do they call it a break through?). I was on the wrong road of life and I had to get off. In the end it was the best thing that ever happened to me but during it, it was not good. Not good at all. There are people out there that will NEVER understand what I was going through. Some may even hate me for what I did or said, most of it I can not even remember. Go back and tell them you say. Um! No! I don't want to go back. I lived in the past for over 35 years. It stopped me from moving forward into the future. I wasted soo much time. Suffered so much pain. No I don't want to go back.

But things are fine now. Now I have a great man in my life. I know who I am and what I want and I know I shall spend the rest of my days on this earth trying to achieve it.

I consider life to be like an empty bowel. Is it really empty you say. Is there not something in it already? All the thoughts and emotions and the genetic information that comes with us when we are born. True that is how I see it as well, but for arguments sake let's say we start off with an empty bowl. I believe it is up to us what we put in it. When you look through these pages you will see some of what I have in my bowl. What do you have in yours?

This is Archibald's General Store. He is a lovable echidna.