November 21, 2012

Overflowing Thankfulness

Wheat Field

Wheat Field by Lauren Tucker Photography (on Flickr) – Click for info

I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir. – Vincent van Gogh

Tomorrow in the United States we are celebrating Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Food, food, and more food for starters. That’s already sounding pretty good, don’t you think?

Then there’s family, friends, and the open table. There isn’t a holiday more open to inviting a new person, a close friend, or a long lost relative around your table.

And then there’s its purpose: being thankful.

Being thankful is important in itself. Studies have shown that being conscious about the things you are grateful for positively affects your well being, mental health, and quality of life. Being thankful is good for body, for mind, and for spirit. Gratitude, positive outlook, thankful prayers — they can change us and give us more fulfilling lives.

But what do we do with our thankfulness? Does it just sit there?

This season we could each allow our thankfulness to be a force that overflows more gratitude into other people’s lives.

What could you offer to others out of your thankfulness?

  • Are you grateful for a comfortable home? How can you use your home this holiday season to truly help someone else feel at home?
  • Are you grateful for your creativity? Could you give a work of art to a charity you hold dear for them to hang in their lobby?
  • Are you grateful for your children or your nieces/nephews/grandchildren? Could you offer a creative service to a child for free for 6 months – a sewing lesson, a creative writing course, an introduction to martial arts class?
  • Are you thankful for your health? How could you brighten the life of someone who is not as healthy; maybe a person that is home-bound.

What are you thankful for, and how will you overflow with that thankfulness so that it pours out to others?

Happy Thanksgiving!

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May 16, 2012

Piece by piece

At the Edge of the Unknown

Making art and making a living. Lots of folks here on Scoutie Girl and elsewhere have plenty of goodness to share on the topic.

My angle: I agree with Lewis Hyde – author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World – that artists (and other folks with gifts to give to the world) have always put food on the table in a few different ways. Looking at this historically can help us creatives remember that we are part of a long lineage of those who have gone before.

Hyde writes:

[T]here are three primary ways in which modern artists have resolved the problem of their livelihood: they have taken second jobs, they have found patrons to support them, or they have managed to place the work itself on the market and pay the rent with fees and royalties.

I want to look at the last of these first: selling the actual products of your artistic labor.

With my new album, “at the edge of the unknown,”  being released as we speak, issues surrounding selling our artwork is definitely “up” for me right now. Every time my phone buzzes with an alert from Paypal that someone else has bought a CD (a CD, can you believe it, in this day and age?!?) I feel a little thrill. And when I put them in the mail I know I will be thinking: “There it goes, one sweet shiny disc with all of the love that I tried to squeeze onto it, winging out to spread hope in the world.”

At the same time, I feel torn. Do I actually want to try to make money from selling CDs (or downloads) or do I want to be able to give my music away freely? Which approach will actually feel more nourishing to me? And how can I make my approach to sharing my music with the world best line up with my larger mission of helping people find their truest voices? As another recent post here on Scoutie Girl pointed out, we don’t want to monetize everything we make.

One danger Hyde points out is that relying on sales of your art to feed your family can lead toward making pieces based too much on what we think will sell.

How do we balance the urge to give people what they want with the need to return over and over again to that deepest Well of Creativity itself?

And then, some art is priceless; we give away what is most precious, like the quilt my sister-in-law is making in honor of my wedding.

Are you wrestling with questions of selling your art? How to price what feels priceless? Does the question of making things for market trouble you, or do you feel like: “People pushing to pay vast quantities of money for my art? I should have such problems!” Or have you made peace with piece work? Let me hear you!

Filed Under: Buy You, For You, Finding Your Voice Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
July 19, 2011

Vulnerability in action – Share your dream

This is a guest post from Marthe Hagen.

"Dreaming" by SpiritEssenceArt

I have a dream.

You know the words.

You might have seen the speech. And you have read about it in the history books.

But let’s pause a minute and think about what would have happened if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t shared his dream with the world.

Let’s say he was too afraid his dream wouldn’t come true to share it. Or he was afraid people would laugh and think it was stupid. Or maybe he didn’t want people to know who he really was and what he really cared about.

What would have happeneded then? – – You’re right. Probably not much.

Your dream might be of a world changing nature. Or you might be dreaming about something for yourself – like a business, a house or having children. All dreams are importrant.

And all kinds of dreams need to be shared.

Because it’s when you share your dream you create space for it to come true.

Only when you share your dream do you create space for people to reach out.

Right now, I’m dreaming of moving to New York City, traveling round the world for a year and writing a novel. When I started sharing this with my friends, readers and mentors, opportunities started to flow in. A friend of a friend could set me up for the first few weeks in NYC. Blog readers invited me to meet up during my travels. And absolutely no one has ever laughed or said that my dreams are stupid, cliché or not worthy of pursuit.

Martin Luther King Jr. took a big risk that day in sharing his dream with the world. A risk that cost him his life in the end. Dream sharing is vulnerability in action. Living is risky. And if you don’t share your dreams with anyone, it might cost you your life too. Your dream life.

So today I invite you to share your dreams with the world. Start with someone you trust and take it from there. You’ll never know when you’ll share your dream with the very person that can make it come true.

Embrace vulnerability.
Open up.
And dream big.

 

Marthe Hagen is a soulful, adventurous writer and imagemaker. She writes, shares, helps, searches, inspires, crashes and burns (like a phoenix). She shares her wisdom, musings and philosophy along with her images and inspiration over at The Freedom Experiment. She is a collecter of dreams and would love it if you would share yours. You can follow her at @Marthehhagen.

Filed Under: guest posts, inspiration Tagged With: , , , , 6 Comments
June 7, 2011

what’s your story?

This is a guest post by Brandy Walker.

Sturm and Drang leather book by TheBlackSpotBooks

For some time now, I’ve been obsessed with the power of Story.

I’m talking magnetic, raw, life-changing power. The kind of power that takes your breath away and leaves you flushed. It can bring a grown man to his knees and make a little girl giggle with delight. And the most fascinating thing is that each of us possesses our own little piece of this power.

Everyone has a story.

Sadly, most of it goes untapped. We’ll use 10% of our story, and bury the rest – convinced that no one really cares.

But they do! And to demonstrate, I’ll use a pithy little anecdote from last week.

My family and I lived out of hotels all last month. My husband joined the Army this past fall and just got orders for his first duty station. The entire journey – from broken down cars to not getting paid – has been an uphill battle. To top it off, I’m pregnant, which, as you can imagine, makes everything just a tad more difficult (mostly because I’m stubborn and loathe having to ask for help with our luggage every couple of days when we have to switch hotels and my husband is at work and I can’t lift the suitcases by myself).

Last Wednesday, I had a mini-meltdown. After finding out that we wouldn’t be able to get into our new place for yet another couple of days, and that the movers with all of our furniture wouldn’t be able to come for days after that – I burst into tears. To console myself, I waddled over to the coffee shop across the street. My eyes were still red when it was my turn to order.

“How are you today, ma’am?” Asked the pleasant barista.

I hesitated, faltered, and realized I was incapable of offering the standard, “Fine, how are you?”

“I’m awful! Heh, I’m sure you don’t care,” I self-deprecated, “But life’s too short and the day has been too crappy for niceties. My family and I just moved here and we’ve been living out of hotels for the past month. It’s just been one thing after another, you know?”

She smiled apologetically and took my order. Her kind face eased my pain somehow. I realized that, actually, she did care. She handled me a bag with the cake pop I had ordered. When I found a table, I peeked inside. To my surprise, there were two!

That simple gesture affected me deeply. I had shared a piece of myself with a stranger, and she had used her resources to make my day a little brighter. That’s power. And that’s what I hope to be about every day. It is the heart of my business.

At my core, I am a dreamer. And my current dream is to harness the power of story and use it to fight modern slavery, earn a living for myself, and teach people from all walks of life how to do the same (and hopefully much more). With my blog as my main platform and words as my tools of choice, I know I have ventured down an exciting rabbit hole.

So tell me, what’s your story?

Brandy Walker is a writer, a speaker, a spoken word artist and a modern day abolitionist. She is fascinated with living a life that truly sparkles and wants to inspire others to do the same. She blogs at brandyglows.com and tweets at @brandyglows.

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October 18, 2010

do you have a ‘please use’ policy?

You create wonderful things. Your ideas are unique. Your vision, original. You need to create and the world needs your creations. Your art – be it paint or ideas or sculpture or joy or freedom or stitches – could change the world.

And then you hide it, protect it, chain it up and apply duct tape.

You fear the copycats and cheaters. It’s 7th grade and you fear the girl who sneaked peeks at your test no matter how hard you tried to cover your answers. You fear the repercussions of iterations beyond your control.

Your fears are real. They’re justified by human nature and everyday experience.

But when you hide from the cheaters and kidnap your art away from the copycats, you also steal it away from those who could use it, from those who need it. You conceal it from those who could spread your work to far corners you cannot reach.

Consider instead, giving your life’s work a “please use” policy.

I would never, ever suggest that you devalue your work or play chicken with your passion. It’s important to draw a line – no one should profit from work you’ve done. Consider reasonable bounds: what guidelines can you put in place to be as generous with your work as possible while maintaining your integrity?

Generosity has a way of coming back to you. Be generous with your art and see it come back to you many times over.

I’ve decided to post “please use” policies on each of my blogs. Please quote me, repost me, use my images, riff off me, disagree with me, converse me. Just credit me with a link.

Do you have a “please use” policy? How can you create one that maintains the integrity of your work?

{ image above from my photoblog – fotos }

Filed Under: creativity Tagged With: , , 13 Comments