I’ve been working on a rather arduous project… culling years and years worth of photos.  Back when I didn’t really know what I was doing and digital cameras were a ‘new’ thing, I kept every.single.photo taken… I think I thought that as long as I didn’t see a break in the number series I felt that I hadn’t lost my data.  But what I didn’t realize was that by keeping all those photos I not only took up valuable space with trash, I also made it next to impossible to find the photos I actually wanted to view.

So I’ve gone back to my old photos and started culling out the obvious ‘bad’ photos… blurry photos, what the heck did I photograph that for?, etc.  Meanwhile, I’m also renaming my photos to my current system (date_type_seq; type= NAT, PUP, FOOD, CELL, PER, etc.)… it’s a long process, but I know it needs to be done, and in the end I’m positive I’ll gain several GB of storage space back – thanks to my food blogging days when I wasn’t the best photo taker, and I would ‘spray and pray’ my subject in hopes that one would be blur-free and somewhat sharp in my badly lit kitchen.

I knew it would be arduous just because of the nature of it all… but the part that is most draining is looking at photos of my pups who have since passed away.  Yesterday, I was culling photos around the time of my last photos of my dog who passed away 8 years ago, and the photos of my other dog dealing with the loss (who passed away three years later).  After four hours of culling and nearly in tears, I had to put the project away for the day.

Sad, drained, and wanting to spend some time with my own thoughts, I turned to Zentangle.  I didn’t really know what I was going to draw, but I knew that the meditation would make me feel better.

I decided on a circular mandala type tangle, and started with these cute penguins… I wanted to think about the silliness of my pups lives and concentrate on the good times, not the sadness over missing them.  Then I added these puff-pillow-like designs that reminded me of butterflies, and of course some tentacles…. when I looked at it I then saw that it looked like I was looking inside an igloo, so I added some snowflakes.  I love that I had no idea what I was going to draw, but the meditation and the patterns turned out to be something else entirely, and I felt better.  Now when I look at these penguins I’ll think of my pups and their silliness, which is what I wanted.

I think it’s also neat that even though I purposely put one penguin upside-down, if you rotate the page, it looks like they are all right-side-up…

Here’s hoping your day is filled with silliness and love.

Until next time…
~nic