Noticing Mondays

// October 31st, 2011 // 5 Comments » // writing ideas

 

Today is the first appearance of a new feature on this blog: Noticing Mondays

For most of this year I have been working with a mindful writing practice I call  ’noticing’ . It’s a simple and gentle practice that has transformed the way I write.

 

This is how it works:

 

Start by writing the word ‘noticing’ at the top of your page, and begin to write whatever comes into your awareness in this moment. Anything counts, if your pen is moving you are doing well.

 
There is no quality requirement here, we just record what’s happening in the moment, even that is just a starting point, if you veer away that’s fine, too.

 
Whenever you get stuck, or need a moment to regather, or simply want to follow a new train of thought write the word ‘noticing’ again keep the pen moving:

 
Noticing the boys walking outside my window, chatting away. The sound of geese? ducks? the light is low and I see grey through the window. The room is warm. Noticing tension in my head. At my temples. I’m tired and flat. Noticing the light falling on the page, how my hand casts a shadow over the tip of my pen and each word is written in shadow then moves into the light as my hand moves across

 
The repetition of the word noticing does a few things. First of all, even before I come up with my first word, ink has already met the paper: no blank page.

 
The word noticing helps to focus the writing, there is one clear simple action to perform that keeps me from spinning my wheels. I also like the rhythm of the word: ‘no-ti-cing. I often write it out a few times when I’m stuck and just enjoy that rhythm, and what it draws out from me:

 

noticing noticing noticing … a plane flying overhead, the small of my back is tight, I’m leaning forward in my chair, now shifting a little, my back has eased slightly , still tight. the window just brightened, the sun is out and there’s a mess of garden hose all lit up on the ground outside.

No grammar check, no spell check, no checking anything here. The exercise is all about getting the pen moving, and touching base with your present moment experience.

 
Noticing is for everybody, the great thing about this exercise is that you can’t get it wrong because you’re just recording what is coming into your field of attention as it happens. And also, you can’t get it right, because no matter how fast you write you can’t possibly capture with pen and hand all the things that are you are noticing in any given moment.

 
Ideas of right and wrong become completely irrelevant. Take that inner critic!

 

 

*******

 

 

Over time noticing has become a daily practice for me and I’ve been wanting to make a space on my blog to explore noticing-related experiences, ideas, and progress. Mine and yours. I’d like to encourage anyone who is interesed to join in the fun.

 

I use the noticing exercise to calm my nerves before writing blog posts, or emails, taking phone calls, and as a warm up exercise before writing.

 

Noticing helps me take advantage of the few small chunks of writing time that come up for me during the day. Over time I’ve come to appreciate this simple practice for it’s own sake, not just as a precursor to ‘real’ writing. It’s a beautiful practice that helps to ground me, and give me the opportunity to check in with myself throughout the day.

 

 

I’ve seen my ‘noticing’ responses shift and expand over time and developed a few little adjustments that have proved useful if I get a bit stale, or stuck and I look forward to sharing those over time in each mondays post.

 

 

Each week I’m going to write a brief post on one aspect of noticing and encourage anyone interested to try their hand at it and let us know how it goes.

 

 

How You Can Join In:

 

Everyone is welcome 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 promise I’d love 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.

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog

// August 9th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // poetry

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog

 

Let’s go back to the lazy dog, afternoon sun

lingering on his tail, the warmth of that

disturbed by a fox shadow. Quick, the fox,

and brown, a showoff too by all reports.

What’s so great about a leap over–not

moon, not line of fourteen buses–just one

lazy dog. And the dog, all dreamy and warm

in the buttery sun at the back end of another

day, content, and not at all quick to leap,

cast shadows, or impress, just resting,

being, in that spot on the verandah, post-lunch

with his tail all laid out: now the occasional

twitch of a hunting dream, now the dark

of a shadow-fox crossing over. Yes, the fox

gets to business and the lazy dog naps

while the farmer is fetching his gun.

 

 

Whole Life Creativity: The Art of Noticing

// July 18th, 2011 // 9 Comments » // writing ideas

How do you feel when you face a blank page?

Some days it’s not a big deal for me, some days it’s difficult.

When it’s good, writing and creating is like something fresh and vivid pouring itself onto the paper.

Then there’s the not-good times. The block shows up first in my body–as heat, as tension–it’s like I’m a thermometer and the red mercury of dread is rising up through me.

That feeling reminds me of exams I’ve taken where I sat, pen in hand, mortified as every drop of knowledge  evaporates, leaving me stuck on a hard seat staring at the sheet of paper demanding answers from me.

Most of my experience of writer’s block is somehow related to false expectations. Set by me, or a someone else, as if I’m being examined and about to be ‘found out’ as lacking something.

I’ve developed a practice that helps me with all of these things, that is changing my relationship to writing, it’s called ‘noticing’.

Noticing is my way of dissolving false expectations, and tapping into what lies underneath all of that anxiety. It’s a way of claiming a small victory for myself. the small victory of starting. Which often leads to a snowballing effect–once I’ve pierced the crust of my anxiety I’m free to mine all the good that lies beneath it.

This is how it works:

Start by writing the word ‘noticing’ at the top of your page, and begin to write whatever comes into your awareness, in this moment. Anything counts, if the pen is moving, this is working. There is no quality requirement here, we just record what’s happening in the moment, even that is just a starting point, if you veer away that’s fine, too.

Whenever you get stuck, or need a moment to regather, or simply want to follow a new train of thought write the word ‘noticing’ again keep the pen moving:

Noticing the boys walking outside my window, chatting away. The sound of geese? ducks? the light is low and I see grey through the window. The room is warm. Noticing tension in my head. At my temples. I’m tired and flat. Noticing the light falling on the page, how my hand casts a shadow over the tip of my pen and each word is written in shadow then moves into the light as my hand moves across

The repetition of the word noticing does a few things. First of all, even before I come up with my first word, ink has already met the paper: no blank page. It sounds insignificant, but with writer’s block there are no insignificant victories. There’s writing, and there’s not writing.

The word noticing also gives me a focus, I have a clear simple action to perform, that keeps me from spinning my wheels.
I also like the rhythm of the word: ‘no-ti-cing. I often write it out a few times when I’m stuck and just enjoy that rhythm, and what it draws out from me:

noticing noticing noticing … a plane flying overhead, the small of my back is tight, I’m leaning forward in my chair, now shifting a little, my back has eased slightly , still tight. the window just brightened, the sun is out and there’s a mess of garden hose all lit up on the ground outside.

No grammar check, no spell check, no checking anything here. The exercise is all about getting the pen moving, and touching base with your present moment experience.

Noticing is for everybody, the great thing about this exercise is that you can’t get it wrong because you’re just recording what is coming into your field of attention as it happens. And also, you can’t get it right, because no matter how fast you write you can’t possibly capture with pen and hand all the things that are you are noticing in any given moment.

Ideas of right and wrong become completely irrelevant. Take that inner critic!

It’s a great practice to begin a writing session–that’s my favourite use. I also find it calming, and will often ‘notice’ for a few minutes before writing an email, or filling out a form I’ve been stressed about, or even if I just want to sit and do some journalling (I never know what to journal about, so noticing is really helpful there. )

I’ll sometimes take a pen and paper out into the garden when I’m supervising my son’s play, too. It’s nice to sit out there with a cup of tea, do a bit of noticing, run around with the boys for a while, do some more noticing. It’s a great way to check in and touch base.

You can go as lightly or deeply as you choose to with this. Sometimes,I’ll start off noticing and hit an idea or a felling that really draws me in and the noticing becomes something else entirely– a blog post, a starting point for a poem, or a painting.

Anything can happen.

Give it a try and let me know how you go with it.

*****

Noticing is one of the exercises we cover in my Tea House Writing sessions, you can read about them here if you’re interested.

 

I was also interviewed this week about writing and creativity by Fiona over at ‘Writing Our Way Home’ . While you’re there you might want to check out their great writing community.

Whole Life Creativity: Rituals and Doors

// July 12th, 2011 // 6 Comments » // creativity

I was reading a book on creativity the other day and one of the artists being interviewed for the book stated that, while she didn’t have any creative rituals, she did like to start each day’s work with a hot cup of tea.

Nice ritual!

Rituals are a huge part of my creative process, I enjoy using them and creating them too.

I can see where some people might balk at using them though. Rituals can come across as esoteric and unrelated to daily life.

I went to religious schools and was exposed to lots of ritual that was bewildering at best, and at worst, creeped me out. I didn’t feel a connection to any of it.

Which makes sense because every last bit of ritual I was exposed to was imposed on me, not once was my opinion sought or input asked for.

It’s a shame they ran things that way because rituals can be very powerful, and helpful, and fun too. Especially as part of a creative practice. They are helping as a tool for building a creative space and encourage our artistic or writerly sides to show up.

When I hear the word ritual these days I try to think of small actions that help me to stop, and remember, and help me to drop into a responsive state that settles my mind.

Some things I know about rituals:

 

Rituals are useless when there is no connection or relevant meaning to them.

They only need to be relevant to the person performing the ritual.

Rituals can be real or pretend.

They can be serious, or playful, or both.

These days I think of rituals as doorways into more creative ways of responding to the world.

Thinking of rituals in this ways helps because doors are an everyday object, I’m in relation to them all the time, I know how they work.

Some things shared by doors and rituals:

They are for walking through. Both doors and rituals are entry points from one realm to another. Performing a ritual is like crossing a threshold.

Doors can shelter things and keep them safe, so can rituals.

Rituals and doors can be both functional and decorative.

Doors and rituals can be intricate and mysterious or nothing special (like a bedsheet slung across a doorway, or a cup of tea brewed before sitting down to paint).

They both require mindfulness — you don’t want to run into a door or get your fingers caught or lock your keys inside, and not being mindful while performing a ritual makes it, well , not really a ritual.

Rituals and doors are both designed for opening and closing, beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures.

Perhaps …

 

Lighting a candle and reciting sutras or prayers may be your ritual for beginning the day.

Greeting your children grandly at the door could be your ritual for moving from work time to family time.

Sitting in the garden for a few moments might be the ritual that prepares you for going  back to work after lunch

Sharpening a handful of pencils could be a nice transition from putting the kids to bed to beginning your evening art practice.

Some rituals which I have embraced/ borrowed/made up:

 

‘Noticing’ (a form of mindful meditation, but with pen and paper) is my ritual for moving from the blank page and into a writing session.

Making morning coffee is my waking up ritual.

Burning incense before meditation.

Putting music on (Pandora radio or playing with Omm Dana depending on my mood) whenever I write a blog post.

Lighting a candle before coaching or doing a Tea House writing session.

Do you have any creative rituals (or other kinds) I’d love to hear about them and how they work for you!

 

Whole Life Creativity: Blue Thing

// July 1st, 2011 // 8 Comments » // creativity

I used to live in the bush just outside of Sydney. Our house backed onto National Park and one day as I headed out for a bush walk I spotted a Bower Bird nest just a few metres away from our back fence.The male bower bird builds a bower and then goes off searching for blue trinkets to attract mating partners.

 

I remember looking in at the nest and seeing the  weirdest assortment of things: blue clothes pegs, milk bottle tops, pens, plastic strapping–as long as an object was blue, the bower bird would be interested.

 
This common thread tying the bird’s bower decorating aesthetic together was amazing to me. It’s one thing for a bird to make a nest filled with junk, it’s another to fill it with only blue coloured junk. The choice implied an intelligence that I wouldn’t normally assume of a bird.  And that intention lifted what should have been a nest filled with plastic into a mini art exhibit in the middle of the bush.

 
I’m noticing this blog is turning into a bower of its own. I’m compelled to keep gathering, not objects, but processes and creative activities and bringing them here. My interests shift from writing poems, to the Tea House writing sessions, my art work moves from cartooning, to illustration, to painting and then back. Labyrinth walking, yoga, meditation and Shiva Nata all swing by for a while and disappear to be replaced by something else.

 
Once I’ve latched onto something, though, it does get incorporated into the cycle.

 
Labyrinth walking will swing away for a while and be replaced by Shiva Nata, or writing might take a second seat as I get the urge to paint more. The thing is, they have all been given a place in the bower. The bower being my creative practice.

 
It might seem random to someone walking by, but for me, like the bower bird, there is an underlying order to all of this. Each of the activities that I take on and decide to keep are ones that help me to relate more deeply with the world, and also give me some way to express that relationship.

 
My blue objects are the things that help me respond more fully to the world.

 
The first (and only) time I saw a painting of mine hanging in an art gallery I felt the thrill of accomplishment. I had the same thrill when I first saw my writing  published in a magazine. But after blogging for a while, and being able to publish my own art and writing, I’ve noticed that sort of thrill isn’t the primary thing I’m after.

 

 

What I’m really interested in is building a kind of creativity that infuses my whole life.

 
I’m starting to think in terms of practising a whole life creativity, rather than trying to become a particular sort of artist.
A whole life creativity is more about being conscious and present in the world, and less about impressing people. A whole life creativity is less about becoming a master at one thing, and more about including the whole of my life and responding as creatively as I can.

 
I still play with all the artsy things like writing and painting, labyrinths and Shiva Nata, but the organizing idea, my blue object, is that the focus of these activities is based on my relationship to life. A whole life creativity might involve art and writing , but also folds in family and work, ordinary daily actions and reflection.

 
I think that organizing principle has always been there, but this idea has been slowly coming into conscious focus over the last six months or so as I noticed the shifting nature of my interests and how random it all seemed, but how it also made perfect sense to me, too.

 
I’ve signed up for the Ultimate Blog Challenge for the month of July, that involves committing to posting 31 posts in 31 days. I thought I might make a lot of those posts an exploration of whole life creativity and what that means to me.

 
I’d love to know what you think of the idea of a whole life creativity and if you have your own ‘Blue Thing’ .