Full Circle

School is out here in East TN, and in anticipation of a fun and tangle-y summer, I am jumping back into the blogosphere with my response to this week's Diva Challenge.

Tangles, from the inside out: cruffle (by Sandy Hunter, CZT),
meer, bales, onamato, and sraith (by Denise Rudd, CZT),
with a bit of tipple.

Circles are the theme of this week's challenge: we are to draw circles to use as our string. I chose to create a composition of circles inside each other, each one clinging to one side or the other of the previous circle. I drew these using a flat compass and pencil. I was working on my lap, not a desk or table, so my lines were not the best, but I just ignored the fact that I let the compass move at one point, and just tangled away on top of the wonky lines.

I think of years as circles, and the school year has come full circle; the 2013-14 academic year is merely a memory now.  For us, school gets out before Memorial Day, but starts up again in early-mid-August. Thus, it has now been a full year since I gave up my teaching job, a full year that I have been free! Well not exactly; I spent most of last summer trying to pack up my "stuff" from the classroom I was leaving, so I wasn't really "free" at this time last year, even though my teaching days were over. Being the enthusiastic collector that I am, there was a LOT to haul out of there. Books, posters, books, examples, books, personal tools and supplies, books, files of my lesson plans, books, display items, and more books. I was still moving stuff out in July, if I remember correctly.

So it has been a full year that I have missed having a classroom full of kids to teach and encourage in their creative journey. I have really missed teaching. But I have truly appreciated my freedom, and have been very relieved not to have been involved in the stressful professional climate of the local pubic school system. It's been a rough year for my former colleagues.

For the past year I have just been a mom. A stay-at-home mom, juggling laundry, dentist and orthodontist appointments, sports and activities schedules, and occasionally making time for art. It's a good life! I have really neglected my Tanglefish blog not because I decided to, but because life kept being "full" and I just didn't sit down at any point and say "I'm going to blog today!" Well, that's not entirely true; I did post a few entries to the Zentangle for Kidz blog.

It's not that I had nothing to blog about; I have had plenty of interesting experiences that I would have happily blogged about. I just...didn't. Zentangle continues to be a daily influence in my life, as it always will. But it was rather nice to simply enjoy my experiences without putting pressure on myself to format them into a blog post.

But just as I missed teaching, I have missed blogging, too. So here I am. :-)