Creating In The Gaps

// January 25th, 2012 // 5 Comments » // Uncategorized

One of the things I’m struggling with lately is finding the time to create. I am most comfortable when I can take a decent amount of time to gradually immerse myself in a project and become totally absorbed in it.

 
I have much more difficulty working in short bursts. And because I’m minding the boys a lot of the time short bursts is about all I have to work with, especially as we just lost our babysitter which means a big chunk out of my working week.

 
One of the ways I’m trying to work with this is in making more art withour sons. Yesterday I pulled out some printer paper and some lego bases and we sat at the dining table making crayon rubbings of the patterns.

 
We spent about an hour or so on this, and even though I was talking with the boys and helping them to get the shapes underneath to come through without ripping the paper–I got completely absorbed in the project.

 
Finn got it straight away and declared his independence by banging out a few quick pictures on his own. Fred sat on my lap and got assistance in  holding his crayon as we both worked on the same sheet of paper.

 
I really enjoyed watching the shapes come up and experimented with blending different colors together and trying to harmonize my color choices with Fred’s. It was great to see how all three of us had our own style which came out even though the task was so simple and seemingly unvarying as rubbing a crayon over the paper.

 
I’m really enjoying playing with color and texture in my own art lately, and it was fun to have some pressure free playing around with these two aspects. It got me thinking of a few things to try in my paintings, too.

 
It turns out that while having a decent chunk of time is a great way for me to sink deeply into a project, experimenting with something I’m curious about, with no expectations on outcome, is another great doorway into that creative space.

Noticing Notes: Opening Out

// January 10th, 2012 // 2 Comments » // process, Uncategorized, writing ideas

Noticing Notes is a weekly event on this blog where I discuss my mindful writing practice of ‘noticing’ and encourage you to join in.

What’s noticing? Well, here’s the twitter version:

Comfy? Good. Start writing whatever you’re experiencing right now: sights/sounds/feelings/thoughts/etc. Stuck? Write ‘noticing …’ continue

And this post has a slightly longer version

*****

“I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen”

(Frederick Franck)

I’ve started incorporating small sketches into my noticing. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to it. One book that influences what I’m trying to do with noticing is Frederick Frank’s ‘The Zen Of Seeing’. It’s about developing a meditative drawing practice– noticing the world through drawing.

I sometimes through the book, find an idea that resonates, then see how I can transfer that to my writing practice.

I’m always drawing, but it’s been ages since I really applied Frederick Franks ideas to my art, consciously anyway.

At the end of last year I started thinking how I was going to pull together my art and my writing, they’ve both been chugging along as mostly separate pursuits. I started doing some writing about how my focus has changed over the last 12 months. It seems I’ve stumbled into the business of noticing things, about developing creative presence and when I looked at the blog through that filter going back to drawing as seeing, as noticing seemed like the no-brainer thing to do.

So now I’m shifting between noticing as writing practice and noticing as a drawing practice and they fit nicely together and complement each other.

There’s a list of things I want to play with here, especially finding ways to do this that don’t rely so much on drawing skills. One thing I’m trying is, through the act of drawing, to see one fresh thing about the object that I’m drawing.

In the picture up top the one thing I noticed while drawing the coke can was the way the shape of it narrows when it gets near the opening at the top. There was also a bit of written noticing, that focused on the taste of the drink, how unsatisfying it gets (to me) once I’m partway through and the initial novelty has worn off.

Since starting noticing as a regular practice I’ve enjoyed the way I’ll suddenly be somewhere and just start noticing things mentally, I like the way this practice has started to open out a little and influence life outside of my notebook. Combining the writing with the drawings will hopefully encourage that to happen a little bit more.

*****

How You Can Join In:

Everyone is encouraged to join in in whatever way you like.

You could hang out in the comments section and share your own experiences and ideas.

If you have a blog, you might like to do a little noticing experiment in a post, or write about your experience with noticing, and leave a link! I’d love to go and check it out and leave a comment.

Of course, you could check-in and read the posts and never comment, just hang out and play quietly with your own noticing practice. (I’ve always been a shy commenter, and that’s my preferred way of hanging out on a lot of blogs.)

Noticing notes are posted early each week–Mondays usually–and are there to capture any noticing, or ‘noticing noticings’ that might come up for you (or me!) throughout the week!

You could also post mini noticing sessions, or noticing excerpts on twitter or google+. (Use #noticingnotes hashtag)

Paper Planes And A River Of Stones

// January 3rd, 2012 // 4 Comments » // illustration, Uncategorized, writing ideas

Here we are in the new year and I’m taking a new direction in my Ephemeral Adventurer series of paintings. I’m experimenting with larger paintings on canvas and trying a few designs without the maps.

This one is called ‘Fly With Me’ and it’s the first of the new batch. I’m going to order some wooden boards as well so I can more easily get some maps collaged in there. The canvas I used has beautiful deep sides and I painted them black which looks really great.

I’m still doing the art cards and have started getting a few custom orders through my Etsy store, so I set up a button where you can purchase a custom paper plane, paper crane or paper boat flying over a map featuring the city of your choice.

***

Another way I’m kicking off the New Year is by participating in the ‘River Of Stones’ event over at ‘the Writing Our way Home blog. The challenge, well it’s more of an invitation than a chellenge, is to write a small stone evry day for the month of January.

Fiona and Kaspa run the website and have some wonderful courses and a blog as well as a great community forum. Fiona has been writing small stones for years,  and they were a strong influence on my current writing practice.

What’s a small stone? It’s a beautiful form of writing meditation and people  are posting their examples at Fiona and Kaspa’s blog and forming a collective ‘River Of Stones’. You can check out everyone’s contributions here. Have a look, and you might want to have a go at writing Small Stones while you’re there!

I’ll be writing Small Stones this month and posting some of them on the blog.

Here is my Small Stone for today:

morning chill

the Blue Jay seated on a bare branch

springs away and up

one… two … three … four

back and forward … back and forward

the branch bobs good-bye.

Noticing Mondays: The Word Count Is Not What Counts

// November 28th, 2011 // 5 Comments » // Uncategorized, writing, writing ideas

Noticing Mondays is a weekly event on this blog where I discuss my mindful writing practice of ‘noticing’ and encourage you to join in. What’s noticing? Well, here’s the twitter version:

Comfy? Good. Start writing whatever you’re experiencing right now: sights/sounds/feelings/thoughts/etc. Stuck? Write ‘noticing …’ continue

And this post has a slightly longer version

*****

I’ve tried different kinds of writing meditation practice before, and had trouble keeping them up as a regular thing. Partly because a lot of them have a goal like hitting a certain word count, or number of pages.

I decided early on with noticing that I wouldn’t do that to myself. Most of my noticings are actually quite short, a page or so in my smallish notebok, often less.

Sometimes they go on for a couple of pages, even hitting that magical three page mark recommended for morning pages. But it’s not like that days practice is any better, or deeper, for hitting that mark.

Each time I sit down and do some noticing I’m connecting with myself, through the act of writing what I’m experience in this moment. That’s what counts. When noticing where I am and what I’m feeling and thinking, the act of writing becomes the act of returning to myself.

So often, writing can be a way of shutting myself out, of ignoring my body and what I’m experiencing in order to think up and capture a stream of words from my thoughts alone.

That can be a useful way to write sometimes, but there’s a cost to it. When I write that way, the words can feel disconnected and lifeless. They count less and when it’s over, I’m glad to have finished but rarely interested in reading what I’ve just written.

When I write even a paragraph of noticing my life is there in the words as lived experience spilling onto the page, the details fresh and heightened so that when rereading it a day, a week, a month later, the warmth of the room, the feel of the carpet beneath my feet, light filtering through the room, all come back to me and I get a second, or third taste of that.

It doesn’t matter that I didn’t hit 750 or a thousand words, or use up two, three, four pages in my notebook. I have a small time capsule on the page mapping out where I was and what was going on in that moment. Through words, the world in that moment is folded up like a small origami figure, mine to unfold and refold over and over.

Here’s an excerpt from this morning’s noticing session:

“Noticing a soft, silvery light outside. From the lilac tree, colored Christmas lights glow like small specks against the mossy branches. Everything is still and wet outside. Noticing how, despite the grey and wet day, the yard seems light. The birch tree’s bark is peeling in places revealing tender pink patches of wood. Everything seems vulnerable and open.”

*****

How You Can Join In:

Everyone is welcome to join in in whatever way you like.

First of all if you haven’t done noticing, you can check out the brief instructions in this post.

Then … You could hang out in the comments section and share your own experiences and ideas.

If you have a blog, you might like to do a little noticing experiment in a post, or write about your experience with noticing, and leave a link! I’d love to go and check it out and leave a comment.

Of course, you could check-in and read the posts and never comment, just hang out and play quietly with your own noticing practice. (I’ve always been a shy commenter, and that’s my preferred way of hanging out on a lot of blogs.)

Even though posts are titled ‘Noticing Mondays’ they are there to capture any noticing, or ‘noticing noticings’ that might come up for you (or me!) throughout the week!

You could also post mini noticing sessions, or noticing exerpts on twitter or google+. (Use #noticing hashtag so I can respond!)

Indralaya, Invisible Whales, And The Singing Labyrinth

// September 15th, 2011 // 6 Comments » // Uncategorized

Over the weekend I got to spend three hours doing something I love–facilitating a labyrinth workshop. Outdoors, on  a cliff above the Puget Sound, in a labyrinth shaded by beautiful madrona trees.

It was at Indralaya, a Theosophical retreat center on Orcas, one of the San Juan islands in the Puget sound. It’s a beautiful property spread out over 80 acres with a meadow complete with deer, rabbits and apple orchard, an organic garden, lots of little cabins for guests, all ringed in a beautiful forest.

The presentation was part of a series of presentations for an event called Theosophest, an event designed to promote Theosophical principles, and also to give visitors a chance to check out the camp. (And, no, I’m not a Theosophist, but they are labyrinth friendly folks so I got to play for the weekend)

Initially, the presentations were to run for 45 minutes to an hour and would be repeated back to back. So I set about condensing the million or so things I’d like to say about labyrinths into a brief presentation. I came up with a four postcard presentation.

Basically I had four chunks of labyrinth information/concepts that I wanted to get across and generated images and text that would make four simple postcards. I used that as my workshop outline.

Thinking about the process in this way gave me two things:

1. It encouraged me to clarify my thoughts and get down the simplest, most essential presentation I could possibly give.

Which is now ready to go at a moment’s notice!

2. I now have a draft version of my four-postcard field guide to the labyrinth that I can play with, refine, and offer in my Etsy shop. Or here.

In the end we decided to simply have the labyrinth as a drop in location for people as they moved around the camp , so I got to hang out in the labyrinth and wait for people to show up.

As they arrived I basically had a conversation with them and worked out what they were wanting from the ir time with the labyrinth.

Some people wanted to chat and learn about labyrinths, or tell stories of their experience with labyrinths, some wanted to learn how to draw them, others wanted to walk the labyrinth.

It felt great to take a relaxed and informal approach to the whole thing, it felt organic and pressure-free,  and I trusted that whatever was meant to come up would come up.

Some things that came up:

Some soothing alone time with the labyrinth before the session started, I was able to play with the labyrinth do some energy work, and walk it alone for a while.

Lots of wonderful stories of other people’s experience in the labyrinths and how that affected them

Some beautiful artwork as people learned how to draw labyrinths and I was thrilled that some people had powerful experiences just drawing and ‘walking’ them with colored pencils.

I hid a toy egg in the center of the labyrinth in case any children came to give them something fun to look for. My boys were the only two children to show up during my session, so my oldest son found the egg!

As a group we came up with the idea of a beautiful singing labyrinth walk to close out the session. Four of us walked around singing a Sanskrit Mantra. The best thing about that was seeing the other walkers coming in and out of my peripheral vision as I walked, and hearing the Mantra bounce around the labyrinth as we all simultaneously walked away and towards each other beneath the shade of the spreading branch of an old Madrona tree.

*****

Some things I would have liked more of:

Mostly time, our family went up and I would have loved more time to explore the camp with them, and to just relax and take in some of the retreaty atmosphere of the place.

There was a Deep singing session at the campfire on the Saturday evening, but we had to leave early and we missed it.

Mandala workshop. another session I missed, but Tina and the boys spent their time there making lots of beautiful mandalas!

Whales! on the ferry ride home I was walking our our youngets son up and down the aisle looking out of the windows when we saw these weird waves that looked like something about to breach  about twenty yards off the side of the ferry. i immediately made the ridiculous assupmtion that they were Orca whales and went back to grab Finn (5 year old Orca-phile). But it was just stupid backwash coming off the islands. Dumb choppy water.

But I’m sure there were whales there, somewhere, they were just way down below conducting their own deep singing session.

Creative Walls. Kinda.

// April 6th, 2011 // 8 Comments » // creativity, curiosity, process, Uncategorized

Creative walls?

I’ve lost count of the the times I’ve been partway through a project, everything rolling along nicely, thinking; “This is going great!” And then … Bam! When that sense of stuck-ness descends it feels as solid and impenetrable as any wall.

I logged onto twitter last night and, looking at my stream, I noticed I’d only tweeted two times in the last month. Here? My last post was a month ago.

I’ve hit some sort of creative wall. But it feels a little different–I’m actually writing a lot at the moment, way more than usual. It’s just that nearly all of my writing is being done by hand, in journals and notebooks.

I’ve been working on a new thing: doing writing sessions with people. It’s a weird hybrid-y thing structured like a coaching session, but without the coaching–they’re just writing sessions, really. Two people writing together. I have this great metaphor and we build this small world, then sit in it and write.

There’s no agenda, except to build the most comfortable space possible to get some writing done. No judgement. No criticism. No expectations.

While preparing for these sessions I’ve been doing a whole lot of writing, trying out exercises, session plans, and ideas for guided meditations. It’s been a really creative time, and somehow I’ve made a switch from writing on the computer, to writing by hand.

So, when I put my note-books away, and turn to the computer, it’s hard to get started. It feels just like the standard Creative Wall that everyone knows: “Oh, no. I’m totally blank, I haven’t got one idea in my head.”

But I know it’s not that, because my head is almost too full of ideas right now.

And it feels like I’m creatively blocked–that same tightening in the chest when I sit down to write, the smarts all draining out of my brain at the moment I’m calling out to them, and the frustration at sitting there. Blank.

Even though all those familiar feelings are there, it seems more like a computer thing. I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing on a computer and back into the habit of writing by hand.

Which is great. Except I’m trying to build this whole online creativity blog thing and I don’t think posting slides of my notebooks is going to cut it. What would be great for me, right now, is to see if I can build a practice of moving from one to the other–maybe hand written drafts and then typing them in to the computer for the editing and posting parts.

That would be nice, because I’m finding that writing by hand and typing on a computer are two entirely different ways of experiencing writing, and they both have qualities that I really like.

Writing by hand is a much more organic and flowing process for me, and I seem to write in a more leisurely style. It’s more relaxing too, but my writing needs more editing later on.

Writing on a computer has a much more accelerated feel and I usually seem very focused and compelled to edit while writing. I love the speed of it, and always feel like I’m being super productive–if I’m actually writing, not feeling too blocked to start, that is.

I like that this problem has come up. It’s making me look at creative walls, or blocks, in a new way, like they’re a more subtle experience than I’d previously thought.

*****

If you are interested in the writing sessions you might want to sign up for my newsletter–there’s a form in the sidebar, there –>

You might also like Havi’s beautiful post describing the session we did together yesterday.