Go Back to Basics Over and Over

                               "A mind too active is no mind at all." Theodore Roethke

While the city slept, my mind on dreams fired off in the most extravagant ways, painting over and over my plans for the next day. By the time I woke up, well, got out of bed, I was fully in my head, buzzy and floaty. Know the feeling? Most of the day I did productive procrastination. I've got a system now and made a bunch of cards and aimed at setting up an Etsy shop mid afternoon. And I started. And I stopped. And I decided if just the thought of all the work involved had stopped my creative juices from flowing what would happen if I force marched myself through the steep learning curve and onto page 800 something in the greeting card category?

So I listened to a Jon Kabat-Zinn mindfulness meditation CD and let the Mountain Meditation take over. What came to me was Morning Pages. Get back to the Morning Pages. Go to the bottom of the mountain and start hiking up again. Have you read Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way? From my notes it looks like I've been reading parts of it for years. Morning pages are three pages of longhand stream-of-consciousness writing aimed at draining the blah blah blah out of your head. Here's where you dump off your creative Censor's negative opinions and other untruths you're telling yourself even though they are certainly the gospel. When I finished writing yesterday, I felt as though I made a U-Turn just before the hitting the wall of creative burnout. Day after day of dumping will finally clear the space for inner wisdom to come percolating through the ooze. I come home to Morning Pages as soon as my mind clears space for the memory of Morning Pages to surface. And so this morning I'm back to the place of my inner grounding, I am gratefully back to basics. Returning home. Yeah!

Here's Laurel, one of the Be Bold Card series, doing the happy dance with bouquets of hearts in her hands. Not sure why she has that big grey box around her, but that's another learning curve to deal with another day. She and her sisters are going to bed for now.

Baruch ata adonai...I am happy and grateful for all the work I've done on this series. I'm delighted the Haggin Museum is buying them. I'm hoping people will love them. Now I'm putting all the pieces and parts in boxes and cleansing my brain. Help me to be willing to write morning pages for at least the next month, because I know this is what I need to do for my health. Remind me to be patient with myself as I begin to paint again. Remind me it will take awhile to get my muscles working. Thank you. Amen