Karen Henstra

With Covid lockdown looming, and my husband busily setting up office upstairs, the prospect of having none of life’s usual obligations to distract me from endless blissful hours of doing what I love to do most in life, it felt really exciting to stock up with the few necessities to turn the dining room table into my creative vessel-making space. Heavy-duty plastic and canvas to protect the table surface and lots of bags of clay. Box of tools at the ready. All set – bring on the isolation!

However, as days became weeks, and those became months, the bags of clay remained untouched.

The creator had gone into hiding, and in her place, arrived a woman fully preoccupied with turning garden and home into the world’s greatest shrine of orderliness.

Why, oh why, was this happening?

I could not find my center. Or my center could not find me!! I had been set adrift.

I had to dig deep to make sense of it, and then I had to make peace with it too.

This Season Between did not allow me the creative expectations I’d envisioned, however, it was generous in many other ways. Productive even, in many, many other ways. It just didn’t involve bags of clay!