For a quite while, I’ve been feeling lost.
Since early 20s, I was always hoping to make something that could impress people, to win a prize to prove myself especially to my parents. The goal of finishing the Queen of Hearts drove me forward in the past few years. I was imagining a happy ending. However, unfortunately, the relationship was dead already before I could achieve any of this. And even the Queen of Hearts was beyond my expectations, after the ‘show’, people continue their own lives. I was still here, nothing changed, but only I am in my middle 30s. So I started to ask myself, “Does it worth? What’s the meaning of all this?”. Though I still have a lot of new ideas to offer, I lost my motivation. It just feels like climbing on a hill and finding that the view was the same on the ground, then do I need take more efforts to climb another one?
However, no matter how confused and discouraged I felt, I knew I should not stop. (I have three cats counting on me.XD) Therefore, I decided to work on a smaller project before I regain enough passion for another Alice project. Smaller it is though, I still wanted it has some individual features of mine. So I searched inspiration in my daily life. A photo of clouds I took in a summer morning caught my attention. The color was so beautiful that I want to catch this short moment in my work.
I wrote down,
“She is the fragrance of the morning dew, the rainbow of the dawn, the vanished ephemerality, the solidified eternity. ”
At first, I wanted a gown with bright vivid color just like the inspiration picture, but soon, I realized my choice of fabric, the silk tulle made in Italy which I got with the help of a friend, was not fit for the design. I wanted to use it anyway, so I designed a second gown.
I added Petunias because they also reminded me of summer morning. They bloomer in the morning and fade in the even, beautiful but short lived. And technically, I didn’t see others made tiny fabric Petunias before, so it’s also an interesting challenge.
While making the Petunias, suddenly I realized that we like to pity for those short moments might be a respond to our own limited lives. There must have been millions and billions of beautiful summer mornings passed, and there still will be million and billions Petunias bloom in the future, but being a human, I only have decades to experience and appreciate. To the vast universe, all the happiness, all the sorrow, even our existence are meaningless, but to us with limited time, every second matters. That’s why we write, we paint, we sing, we record.
Then I realized, it’s ok to feel lost at the moment. It’s a normal reaction when a small being facing such a big world. I might still keep feeling lost in the future, but I am not as anxious as I was. I know I should keep going, maybe there is a fresh new view on a different mountain waiting for me. Hm….What if there isn’t? Well, at least I made myself enjoy the journey, like Tagore said, “Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.”
Expensive Garbage 