A New Chapter?

In this somehow challenging period of my life - I lost my job a big international company after going in maternity leave - I now constantly try to reinvent myself, not only professionally. I think I found an excellent hint on decor8 (thank you!!) and ordered Lisa Sonora Beam's amazing book. It arrived a few days ago and I am sooo happy about it! Here I found exactly what I needed: Step-by step instructions how to put together my scattered business ideas, how to improve them, and everything in a creative, humorous and feminine way. I already had attended highly complex workshops on entrepreneurship before I started to work as a freelancer translator, but with all the excellent explanations I got I ould not overcome my fears - of not being able to do this on myself (after all I have no economic formation at all being maybe an excellent scholar, but not a businesswoman), fear of not being qualified to do exactly this because my academic degree of Classical Studies is of no help if I interpret a court case or a police questioning, fear of exposing myself trying to get noticed on the market, fear of getting stuck, because I work from home with all the family around me, and so on. But this book provides a lot of extreme useful hints how to manage these "weak points" people generally have if they enter business world from another direction, and, most important of all, I gained the comforting insight that I am not the only one batteling the monsters of new challenges!
And, last not least, I gained something else, too, which maybe is even more important than anything else: I retrieved a part of myself that has been buried for a long time - the joy of painting, of creating moods with colours and to experiment with forms. I used to do this a lot in my teens (alas, it's almost 20 years!), it was a sacred activity then for me, but somehow I got trapped between too many books and lost the key to it. Following a sudden impetus I unearthed a box that had survived miraculously half a dozen relocations:

Look what I found! Water colours, calligraphy ink from red to sepia, pens in all sizes and shapes, charcoal crayons, gold and silver finish a a set of tempera colours and paint brushes from Prague - I had lmost forgotten this strange trip with my first boy friend only 2-3 years after the collapse of the iron curtain, where there was nothing to buy except from musical notes (for him) and art supplies (for me). It were times when I used to get deeply immersed into painting, experiencing wonderful bliss while trying to capture this fugacious beauty I felt watching a landscape or visualizing images from books I had read.
I had almost tears in my eyes from the emotions that arose in me and I was really exited when I decided to try using them again - would there still be usable colour in the tubes? Would I still be able to hold a brush? Would the result communicate anything at all to me? What a flurry in my head and my heart!
On the pic there is also an old novel from Soviet times - I chose it as the raw material for my new journal I want to keep from now on because of it's "oriental" content...
Yes, the path is steep, icy and slippery - but the light I'm following is so beatyful and encouraging!