November 22, 2011

the critter self: finding your natural rhythm

print by lucysnowephotography – click image for more info

This time last year I felt guilty. Wrong. Like I should be doing things differently.

For the past few years I’ve had a difficult time when we “fall back” off of daylight savings. For whatever reason, when it’s gets dark outside, my instinctual critter self wants to be snugged up in my nest. At home. That means that once the time changes, I basically don’t want to go anywhere or do anything after about 5:30 pm.

Well, guess what? Much to my dismay, the rest of the world still bustles outside their nests after 5:30. They have workshops and meeting and dinners and parties. People show up to these things energized, and not in their pajamas.

So for several years I tried to play along. I would haul my carcass 30 minutes across town for a 7 pm workshop, suffer through an evening movie with friends, and fall asleep during any nighttime play I saw, no matter how engaging it was.

Because it’s what people do, right? Why couldn’t I just do like they do? What was wrong with me?

This year I had a radical idea: What if I did what my critter self wanted to do? What if I followed my own natural rhythm?

Hot dog, I am onto something now. So last year, guilt. This year, I go to bed as early as I want. 8 or 9 pm. I get up without an alarm when I’m ready, which has been consistently around 5:15. I start my workday then, and am up when the sun comes up, so I’m getting maximum daylight hours. I exercise, have breakfast, and get ready for the day around 8 am, and then have the rest of the day until my critter self will want to hibernate when the sun goes down.

I’m turning down evening events. I’m not a total shut-in, I did go to dinner and a play with some friends last week (I fell asleep).

But I am honoring my natural seasonal rhythms.

I’m working with myself instead of against myself.

I know that when we go back on daylight savings my rhythm will change again, and I’ll stay active later in the day when we have the sunlight.

But for now, when the big warm light slides behind the ocean, you’ll find me curled, still, and warm in my wintertime nest.

What are the natural rhythms of your critter self, and how do you make them work for you? Share with us in the comments.

Gathering light,

Filed Under: creating action, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , , 15 Comments
November 21, 2011

Memento Vita: Remembrances and Gratitude

My very first post here on Scoutie Girl asked the age old question, “What is Art?” It started an interesting conversation in the comments. In the seven or so months since, I am still exploring that question, or rather a derivative of it.

What is art good for?

I carry a moleskine or the like wherever I go to jot down ideas, or take notes on what I see and hear. Last week when I was going through some I found notes I’d written in response to a Renoir show at the Philadelphia Art Museum over a year ago. I have never been a huge fan of Renoir. His work all looks alike to me and is somehow too pretty. What I learned at the exhibit surprised me and helped me understand why he worked as he did, and why I was not in love with it.

Renoir began drawing and painting as a child working in a porcelain factory, creating decorative china. Discovering a talent for painting, he went on to become a painter of great acclaim, but he never lost the idea of art as decoration.

The purpose of painting is to enliven the walls.

Now I am not sure all his contemporaries would agree, but it is true that he lived in a time when art had become something for the privileged, and held an elitist place in society. Renoir was determined not to intellectualize art, but I believe he was unusual in that.

My art history is rusty, but I believe this began during the mid to late Renaissance and continues to this day. What is interesting to me is that for the larger part of history, art had a purpose in function and informing. The earliest art we know of – that of cave dwellers – had a purpose that is uncertain, but certainly a purpose beyond decoration.

The purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known. The evidence suggests that they were not merely decorations of living areas, since the caves in which they have been found do not have signs of ongoing habitation. Also, they are often in areas of caves that are not easily accessed. Some theories hold that they may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe to them a religious or ceremonial purpose.

Later, in Egyptian art, we see great luxury going into decorative arts, but also there was purpose to much of it, and so it goes until around the 1500s. Even during the Middle Ages, when some great cathedrals were built, the elaborate decoration was representative of the Glory of God. Stained glass scenes were illustrations of Bible stories to teach the illiterate.

So, what does all this mean you might ask? We live in a time where some art still has a place in high esteem and intellectual theory, and where more people than ever are creating some kind of art. Supplies are available and affordable, and digital photography has opened that field to the masses.

I think that indicates it is time to bring some function back to the arts.

Much of my searching and writing here has been about how to do that.

The past month gifted me with an opportunity to try an idea out and I think I am on to something. I had been thinking about offering personalized images for significant events or celebrations. A woman I know had asked me to personalize one of my tree pieces with names and date for a wedding gift. This made me think about how to take it further and actually create a piece with images that would mean something to the recipient.

My dear friend John lost his uncle last month. They had been really close and he was pretty torn up about it. He sent me some photos he’d taken in fall which he and his uncle both loved. He also told me he was working on a poem to honor his uncle and wondered if I could somehow do something with this. What a coincidence, I have been thinking about doing this exactly!

The result is what you see above, and my new service is called Memento Vita, Remember Life, because even at a memorial service I believe we should celebrate a life rather than mourn a death.

In my never ending concern for the life of the planet, I created this awareness piece yesterday. I plan to do a series with crows as I have an inexplicable fondness for them.

Art with a purpose. What do you think? How else might we create art to have a function at a time when we desperately need change?

Filed Under: Conversation Starters Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 18 Comments
November 10, 2011

Creative Call to Action: Expand and Contract

Creative call copy

Last spring I took a series of yoga classes that were both amazing and deeply challenging. Usually about twenty minutes in, I would be ready to fall on my mat in a teary, muscle-trembling heap. But my pride would never let me collapse, or leave. I kept going to classes, and I’m glad I did. My downward dog got better, and my creative life got one of its biggest boosts ever.

Each yoga class had a theme. One week the instructor told us we would spend the hour expanding and contracting. One pose would open us, the next would pull us closed like a flower at night.

“There are times to expand, and times to contract,” she told us. “In life you can’t do one or the other all the time, you need both.”

Expand and contract? I almost fell off my mat!

Expansion has never been my problem. My go-to state in life is, well, go. But in that moment on the mat something clicked in me. A willingness, an attraction to this idea. Expand and contract. Open and close. Okay, I’m game.

I started looking for small ways to expand and contract in my life, started noticing when I felt the need to move one way or another. At one point I even took a hiatus from my creative work entirely, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I rested, played, explored other facets of my life, and returned utterly focused and inspired.

I’m not suggesting you drop everything in an instant. I think the notion of expansion and contraction is just as relevant to our day-to-day creative work. We get down on ourselves when we are not brimming with ideas, we feel stuck. But maybe we just need a little down time, a little contracting. Maybe our blocks are just a self-imposed break.

Breaks are vital to our creativity.

In yoga, at the end of every class, we do something called ‘corpse pose’. We lay on our backs on our mats and just let our bodies sink into the floor. We relax, we contract, we expand internally. If you looked in on a class during corpse pose, it would probably look like nap time for grown-ups. But it’s actually the most important moment of the whole hour. According to yoga, the rest in corpse pose is what allows our bodies to assimilate all the benefits of the hard physical work we have just done.

All that work is lost without rest.

Creative rest resets us, allows us to fill the deep well that we draw from whenever we make something. Engagement with our daily lives keeps us fresh, gives us space for new ideas.

Expansion and contraction. Our lungs do it. The tides do it. The seasons come and go.

Expansion and contraction. I’ve even heard the universe does it. So why wouldn’t we?

So here’s my Creative Call to Action for you: expand and contract.

Maybe one of these states is more comfortable for you. So try the other. Remember to take action, or remember to rest.

Maybe you are trying to create perfect balance in every moment.

But balance really is just a moment, a split second between yoga poses, a brief pause between rest and action in our lives.

So just go for it. Expand deeply, really stretch yourself when it’s time to act. Make that deadline. Burn those candles. Check off that impossible to do list when it really counts. Dig deep. Go mad with new ideas. Turn your life into a short-term creative retreat.

On the flipside, make your rest truly restful. Turn off everything that has an off switch. Take a bath. Read a novel. Put all your work away to be present with yourself and those around you. Do small things that bring you joy.

Expand and contract. Like an inhale and exhale, you can’t have one without the other. Expansion is your opportunity to make the work you love, to turn your dreams into reality. It’s a harvest. Contraction is the space you need for more inspiration to take root.

Now I’d love to hear from you!

What’s your go-to state? What are you craving right now, more expansion or contraction? What’s your next step?

Filed Under: Creative Call to Action, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , 13 Comments
November 8, 2011

are you where you want to be with your creative work? keep working


Are you where you want to be with your creative work? Have you started working on a project or an idea and realised that what you are making and what you envision making are not on the same level? Is the vision in your mind so much better that the result right now? Are you disappointed? Wanting to chuck the idea?

Whether you are starting out on your journey as a creator, or are anywhere along your path, you will hit spots where what you’re creating might not live up to the grand idea that sprung forth fully-formed from your brain. I am going to step out on the high wire 10 stories above the pavement here, and say:

I think everyone who embarks on a journey or a life of creating has experienced those moments where their creations are not living up to their expectations and hopes. Everyone.

The not-so-secret answer? Keep going.

Make lots of work. Keep working on your craft. Create a body of work. Create a large body of work. Create an even larger body of work. Keep practicing. Accept that this is your path, and embrace it. Keep working on your ideas, keep inspiring yourself with more ideas.

There are so many things about this life, this creative life, that people don’t tell you, maybe we don’t think to tell each other. I don’t think it’s that anyone is keeping secrets, I think we stumble upon our own answers as we go. We wade through a few streams, and climb a few hills, stumble and fall a few times, and if we’re lucky we have some breakthroughs, and we keep going.

There are many times in my my life where I have wished for a training manual or at the very least one of those picture-based directional pamphlets, like you get when you purchase furniture from Ikea. But as I write that, I also realise that if someone had told me all the things I wished I had known, would I have listened? Probably not. At least not to all of them. You? Perhaps the same?

What I have learned (some of it kicking and screaming along the way) is that the only secret to getting to where I want to go is to just keep going. Your ideas may change. Your vision may shift and grow. Keep going. Your ability to express your creative idea, in whatever form, will only get better. Keep going. This is an ever changing landscape, this creating thing, and since we know that one of the few constants in life is change, accept it in your creative work, too.

Oh, and the second part of that not-so-secret answer? Don’t give up.

Think about the work that you’ve given up on in the past. I have a short to medium list myself. Think about how even after you gave up on the idea or the project, it still comes back and visits you. In dreams. In thoughts. Remember the great idea that you were so excited about but you couldn’t execute just the way you saw it in your mind’s eye, so you stopped? Yeah, that one. If it keeps returning to you, you might want to look at it again.

To get where you want to go with your creative work, to get closer to the vision that you see with your mind’s eye, you just have to work and keep working. It’s that simple.

So the work is not quite the way you want it to look, read, or be heard. Keep working. So you didn’t get the response you wanted from your partner, best friend, studio mate. Keep working. It’s going to take time, it’s going to take practice, and it’s going to take – yup, you got it – work.

This whole topic – how to get where I am going with my art work – is often on my mind. I’ve written many pieces for myself in my creative journal, and then I started working on this piece for Scoutie Girl about 10 days ago. Yesterday, when I was working on edits, a friend sent me a video with words from Ira Glass on just this topic. It’s a lovely bit of synchronicity, and Ira Glass says it all so very well.

So have a listen. Feel his words.
And then go back to your work.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Where is your vision lining up with your executions? Where is it not? Tell us your stories about how you’ve kept working.

Video from David Shyang Liu

Filed Under: creating action, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , 9 Comments
November 7, 2011

conjuring the possibility of perpetuating connections and creating collaborations

Murmuration of Starlings

It’s fall back day here in the states when we gain an hour of sleep and lose our afternoon light. This makes me SAD. Literally, as in seasonal affective disorder SAD, but I have a special light to help me with that which makes me grateful. It is also November which has for many become gratitude month in the spirit of Thanksgiving. Not the concocted Pilgrims and Indians Thanksgiving, but the coming together to share and be grateful of a bountiful harvest. Many bloggers post a gratitude a day and some do it on Facebook. I am just here to do it once and remind myself that every day is a day for thanksgiving.

Sometimes I wonder why I am writing here at Scoutie Girl. Mine is not a tale of great success and six figure income. I don’t have any unique trade secrets or tips for how to run an online art business. I have many crafty ideas and am not compelled to write about them often. Mostly I just share my struggles and insights as I try to figure it all out for myself. I have been asked to start conversations with my writing and that has happened, and you keep coming back to read, so it must be doing some good and for that I am most grateful.

This post is a bit different for me and came about from some very unconnected bits and pieces the past few days. I have a lot on my plate at the moment and the end of the year will be as busy as it gets for me. I am – thanks to Danielle LaPorte for pointing this out – Whelmed. Whelmed, but not stressed, at least not most days. It has taken a solid two years but I do believe my proverbial ship is coming in. Which brings me to my title. Two years ago I chose the word possibility as my focus word for 2010.Possibility because I was unsure where this new road would take me. I kept my mind and eyes open and soaked in all I could. I learned how I should market and brand myself and I didn’t do most of it. I made a lot of art and sold a little. I learned that I yearned for more than that transaction, nice as it is.

In 2011 I began with the focus word “perpetuate.” Last December I wrote these words:

Embracing possibility has allowed me to be reborn as an artist not only as a creator of images, but a creator of a well lived life that matters. Possibility will always remain at the fore but I think next years word is perpetuate.

  1. To cause to continue indefinitely; make perpetual.
  2. To prolong the existence of; cause to be remembered

Now that I am clear on my mission (as clear as an entrepreneur can be) I will perpetuate my ideas and work as well as those of my virtual and personal tribe. There are far more of us than I imagined!

The funny thing is I was so NOT clear on what the next six months would bring. I did not know that the environmental issues based on human consumption would overwhelm me. I did not know that I would take a misguided foray into environmental art, or that I would remake my mission not once, but twice in that space of six months. I definitely did not know that attending the World Domination Summit would crack open wide my possibility mission, or that I would return to find my hands tied to take much action due to living nowhere  and having no transportation. I just didn’t know, and for that I am grateful.

I am grateful because not knowing allowed me to be open to my next two focus words: Connection and Collaboration.

I’ve written plenty about the World Domination Summit here and here and a few other here’s I won’t bother with, and my point is the event opened my ideas about connection. “Connection,” my word for the summit, was about not realizing my potential to connect on and off the internet.

I was elated! I was going to have so many new friends and connections and take over the world for sure.

If you haven’t gotten the trend, I am easily excited, and for this I am oh so grateful. My error this time was in that most of the connecting I really want to do is more local. I want to focus on the problems in my own back yard before taking on the world. I’ll leave the world to those younger than I.

So, after 10 long months without my own transportation we bought me a very green, literally, car and I am off to the races again. I am involved in too many new things to post here and they are all so perfect for my meandering mission.

What I realized most recently is I am unique. I have not adapted to the prescribed marketing, etc. because my goals are different.

I want to sell art, but more than that I want to help people navigate a time of great change with the help of art.

Art, in my opinion, is a lost language and one with great healing and transformative power. I want to teach people how to see and use that, which brings me to my latest word, COLLABORATION. Thanks to Tara for a timely post on the exact same topic to save me typing and give you a better description than I could (please read for clarification!).

What I realize is, collaboration is also the way of a New Economy, and a way of living.

We need connection first and then we need to weave our unique talents into a collaborative frame work for intentional new ways.

We need to learn to ride in the goat rodeo where chaos is rampant, order is uncertain, and still things work out. We need to flow together like a murmuration of starlings that inconceivably don’t collide!

The murmuration I have seen as posted above, but I just learned what it is thanks to my friend Emma, for whom I am grateful. I have many ideas I will be revealing in the coming months, but for now…

How do you see collaboration and art making as new ways of being in a new economy?

Lastly I am grateful for this community allowing me to fumble my way onward and giving a darn. THANK YOU!

 

 

Filed Under: Conversation Starters Tagged With: , , , , 18 Comments