musindigo

These kinds of pages always throw me for a loop because I’m never quite sure what to say.

However, I really enjoy reading other folk’s ‘about me’ sections, so i thought maybe i should have one here.

So here are some basics -

who

Lori

what

Woman, mom, wife, creative maniac, knitting-designer, web-designer, artist, retired musician.

‘Musindigo’ is a derivative of ‘muse’ and ‘indigo’ [fairly apparent]. Indigo was my first ‘handle’ on the web, when i first landed on it 9 or so years ago. It’s stuck. It’s also a favourite colour of mine as well as a shamanic colour for me.

where

Small-town Ontario, Canada, near Ontario’s ‘west coast’; we’ve just returned to this area from BC which i miss, but i also missed this area and after much hemming and hawing and bumbling, we decided to park here instead of there.

how

I got here via many different routes.

Several years back it became very apparent that a change of careers was in order.  I was finally becoming too deaf to deal efficiently with many of the daily interactions most folks take forgranted.  I could still ‘hear’ but it was taking much more concentration and energy to process than I could really deal with.

I have always been designing something or other, but I just never really took it to the step of an ‘official’ biz. Now I have. :)

I love it.

I miss music (I was a professional musician/vocalist, among other things, for nearly 20 years before i finally retired).

Becoming aware at around age 6 that i was going to eventually lose my hearing I decided quite consciously back then I would ’show’ folks that i was more than just ‘that girl who couldn’t hear’ and decided not to ignore a desire to learn about music and perform musically on a professional level.

I have to thank my Dad for starting me off. When we first found out about my deafness, a specialist suggested I should attend the Robart school in London, Ontario ‘or she will never learn to speak properly.’ My dad told him in no uncertain terms was he going to sell everything to move to London, and that I would get along just fine. My mom piped up that ’she doesn’t shut up half the time now’.

I tinkered around with my grandmother’s piano on a regular basis, figuring out how to read the music in her hymnbook before I could read the words. When I was 8 I announced I thought piano lessons would be a good idea, and my parents obliged. I eventually earned Grade9 Conservatory and my dad was a bit miffed when I didn’t major in music at university. I went into fine arts, instead, indulging one of my other creative loves, art.

One of the exhausting things about dealing with deafness on a regular daily basis is its invisibility. For years I hoped no one noticed, and went to great lengths to try to insure as such.

Now I sometimes resent the invisiblility of deafness.  However, things are what they are.

I think deafness really adds to introspective creativity. I mean, when you can’t hear everything that’s going on around you, and you’re exhausted from listening and trying to pick out some semblance, you need to do something with your brain in the absence of regular noise stimulation to keep it from going mushy. I design, think, pay attention to thoughts and intuition, empathize and watch.  I am always grateful of this inclincation.  Otherwise, I’d probably be quite mad by now.

The major downside, of course, of deafness, is missing out on conversations and some of the energy in a room full of people, and not having those casual conversations off the front porch with folks across the street and also not being able to confidently market yourself and your items as you would like, in person, via voice.

However, adaptations are a part of everyone’s life, in some form or other.

Along this journey I earned my degree in Fine Arts, worked as a picture-framer, owned a restaurant, over-saw a large group of writers for a major online site and put in many many hours at retail locations.

why

During all of these 30+ years mentioned above, I’ve been knitting (I learned to knit before I learned to read) and fussing away with techniques and thinking, quite honestly, too much about knitting in general.  So I decided to put all of this fussing and fidgeting about knitting to good use and get things out there instead of filing it all away in my personal portfolio (my head).

Sometimes the math and technical expertise and attention to little things (stitches, commas, hair-line brush-strokes, etc.) gets on my nerves; but, all in all, I am very proud of the finished product, and this is what makes my world go round.

Thanks for reading.  :)