I am living in abeyance right now. Abeyance: the dictionary definition of the word is “a state of temporary disuse or unattended dormancy.” In other words, a state of suspension. Yep. That’s pretty much where I am, and for someone as goal directed and generally industrious as I, this is a very strange place for me to be.

     I’ve been trying to determine what factors have led me here. The first contributor that most immediately comes to mind, of course, is the weather. It is so god-awful hot and dry here, and has been for almost two months now, that you can hardly breathe when you go outside. Our days are 103° to 107° every single day; by noon we are already at 100° and the height of the day isn’t reached until five or six in the afternoon. You run out to the grocery store or do a few errands for an hour or two and then you have to come home and lie down. Needless to say, everyone you meet is grumpy and out of sorts. 

     With record-setting temperatures comes severe drought, and drought comes with severe watering restrictions. We are allowed to water with an in-ground sprinkler system only a few hours a week on one assigned day. It isn’t enough. The lawn browns, flowers and shrubs shrivel, and trees begin to droop and lose their leaves. We can water by hand any day, but you better get outside with that garden hose early to do it since it is already approaching 90° by 9 a.m. It is so depressing to watch everything you’ve cultivated with care and pride just whither and die.

      Okay, so I shouldn’t complain. After all, I was raised in Texas and knew what I was getting into when we retired here. But somehow, conditions seem to be getting worse each year, not just here, but everywhere. How many records have been broken this year alone for wildfires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, glacial melts and extreme heat all around the world.  “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” as the old saying goes, but these days no one even wants to talk about the bigger issue of climate change. No one wants to poke the bears of  big oil, fossil fuels, and over-development; it’s easier, and safer politically, to simply put that issue “in abeyance.”

     It is perhaps the lethargy of a long, hot summer that has put me into an unattended dormancy where personal chores and professional projects are concerned. I have a list of things to do that aren’t much fun, but necessary: things like updating my website, dealing with some bookkeeping issues, handling some financial matters, and making some long-overdue phone calls. Not only do I have to gather all the pertinent information to tackle these various chores, but I have to have the presence of mind, and the patience, to do it. I just don’t right now, so I have put them all into abeyance — where I’m ashamed to admit that they have been already residing for quite some time.

     This lackadaisical attitude has also affected my fabric art. While I had intended to take several months off in the spring to re-evaluate my stylistic direction and to design a group of works in a unified series, I now realize that fully eight months of the year are gone and I haven’t actually done any new art quilt projects at all. I have thought about it, and read and studied up on  techniques, and made sketches, but I think I have fallen into what a friend of mine accurately identifies as “paralysis by analysis.” Yet, in spite of my over-thinking, I have come up with a unified idea at last, but now I am increasingly indecisive about elements of the plan and distracted by so many fabric choices and techniques at my disposal. I keep starting and stopping, putting momentary decisions into abeyance for later. 

     But there is no later — not in art, not in writing, not in anything really. You either do it, or you don’t. Abeyance is an excuse that leads, at best, to endless postponements and, at worst, to nowhere else.