Back to the Beginnings...Again

Elfworks - Back to the beginnings ...again.

And so, here I am again. Many years ago, I tried to start a blog here. I found that I had nothing to say that I thought anyone wanted to hear. I wanted to keep my blog clearly business oriented and use it only as a place to post the things that were happening with Elfworks.

Clearly, I didn't much understand the nature of blogs. Just as clearly, I didn't understand, or didn't want to own up to the nature of Elfworks. I am Elfworks, and it is me. That makes it personal.

Once upon a time I used to write...a lot. I got out of the habit. Over the last few years I feel I'm being called back to it. Perhaps this is a good place to start exercising those muscles again. And maybe, just maybe I have some things to say that might be of value to people out there who are thinking of taking similar steps on their walk through life, business and the Universe. Even if their only value is for them to be read and dismissed...or perhaps they need not even be read. Perhaps the value is in the writing.

Elfworks originated, and is still run mostly as a catch-all for the overflow things I do to feed my soul and help support my living. Not all the things I do under the banner of Elfworks feed my soul...but those that don't feed my soul put food in my belly, and no one should underestimate the importance of that. A full soul and a starved body don't produce much – not for very long, anyway, except maybe really amazing dreams.

It seems that I am finally learning the things I needed to understand long ago to be better at my business. Or, beginning to learn, at the very least. Not surprisingly, I am learning through failure. And failure is generally what is needed to learn. In many of the things I've done I've had some moderate success seemingly right off the bat. Not great success, but I've managed to make things turn out, more or less, the way I had hoped they would. And when they didn't turn out the way I'd hoped, they were still not bad, just different. This has always felt like “beginners luck” to me – maybe that is why I don't produce much...trying to keep the streak of luck going...unconsciously of course.

There are always the excuses, masquerading as “reasons” and as real as they are, they are still excuses. Lacking in time, energy, money, inspiration...all real things. All real things that can be gotten around, sometimes. I kept trying to redesign my life to make more of any or all of those things, and something would always get in the way.

And the idea of settling down to one discipline has always failed me...I keep gathering skills like weavers and spinners gather wool, (and knitters, lets not forget knitters)...but I rarely sit down and put those skills to use. I don't spend enough time refining and repeating until they are truly skills and not just knowledge.

Now, this might not be the wisest thing to state in a blog about my business...but it is a true thing. It is not that I don't have the skills, but am I really as proficient with them as I ought to be? No, not yet. I am getting there, slowly – so slowly that it is sometimes painful (which becomes another excuse...I'm just no good at that”...) The only way to get good at it is to do it. Over and over. And sometimes, you fail. Sometimes things just don't turn out. Sometimes you've run out of beginners luck.

So, if you are interested, (but more for the sake of exercising muscles and using my blog space and learning how to write a blog), I will tell you some of the stories that have shaped Elfworks, and myself over the past number of years. The events of a life, an ordinary life – but the life of someone who runs a sole-proprietorship business. That makes the events of the life very much a part of the events of the business. And as much as I believe that there is more to the artist than the art, more to the worker than the work, that does not negate their close relationship and their intertwined nature. That very nature is what can make them so hard to separate so that you can be defined by more than what you produce.