do I have to do everything myself?!

I hand-painted and preserved (from crispy potato chip-like pressed leaves to more durable matte medium-coated and acrylic-painted things) all four seasons of the main set landscape trees that surround the lighting scaffold around the Answer Tree.

And then I took several days to build small flowers for the picket fence, and larger flowers for the new bug party set pieces to make the bug puppets look smaller.

I also finished a huge batch of handmade, garden-grown/preserved/ironed, and/or hand-painted blades of grass in all the set scale sizes. These will handle the close-up spots, but I'll still need a faster way to cover the ground with less detail for the 240 square foot main set remaining.

Do I have to do everything myself? Short answer, yes.

I've had several people come regularly to lend their time and talents here over the years. They were all remarkable people. Many of the things they created are still here, poised to be featured in the scenes, making the film better for having them.

But with the COVID-19 outbreak, my own psychological restrictions (I found I would get wiped out and crashed after work days here with other people), and with my working out of my House of Recluse, after numerous high hopes for major help mystically showing up, I seem to be left to roll this boulder up the hill alone.

I can easily get overwhelmed by the tasks STILL ahead, but shutting out the mental noise about that allows me to dig in more happily and accomplish more than I could have thought I could by myself. Breaking the boulder down into smaller chunks seems to help.

Looking at finishing the main set, still looks INSANE! In every way. Actually, far too much to do on my own. Impossible. Hair-pulling level too much. I've tried to figure out alternatives like chucking the entire project, living life without stop motion, being a different person, hiring people (wasn't mentally/physically good for me), delegating portions out to other people (shockingly, everyone declined). Nope, it seems as though it's all on me. It's yours, Shelley. You made it. Now do it. It's for you to do, no one else's responsibility to work on it. You made your own frickin bed; now lie on it.

Ok, let's ramp UP the anxiety, shall we? Death. I just turned 63 years old on September 3rd. I hear of people dying as senior citizens at 58 years old, and people saying, Well, at least she wasn't young. Um, yea. So, looking around the rooms here, I feel a low-level terror over dying before I can get these simple shots in the can. 

Being 97% done with a project that has spanned 32 years carries a deep pressure. It could be much, much worse. No one knows when their time to pass away will come; every second of living counts. My circumstances are absurdly advantaged now. I don't have debilitating physical conditions like I used to, which would wipe me out half of every month. All is very well at the moment. These are the things I tell myself.