Can't Wait for Inspiration

"You can't wait for inspiration. Sometimes you have to go after it with a club." Jack London 

"Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." Anne Lamott

Given a choice, it's a no brainer. I want to live in the world of WOW NOW. I want to stride from peak to peak, to be effortlessly inspired, cheerful, full of seeing things for the first time and knowing my heart is full and I am present. I want to look out my kitchen window and always see the full rainbow that arced across the sky yesterday. I want everything to come easily. I want to write and paint effortlessly. Don't we all!

Entering the unknown of the blank page or canvas takes a lot of wandering in the wilderness. It takes a lot of practice to bring something out of nothing. It takes a lot of faith and a lot of work and given a choice, I want cut to the chase and start with inspiration. But when I start out knowing where I want to go and stick with that, I limit myself. I'm in the land of easy, of tried and true, not on the road to discovery.

We all have limiting beliefs. One of mine is that for most creative people art and writing come easily. I know this isn't really true, but there is this nagging belief; since it doesn't come easily to me, it means I'm not very good. And then Jack London appears. Thanks, Jack. The truth is I love the process of discovery, of not being so good and getting better. I'm so in love with those aha moments. The most important thing is to do a lot of work even if it's not very good work, because I know my work has gotten better. It takes a lot more time than any of us want to become competent in almost anything.

When I get bogged down on the creative path, I realize I am also way low on the gratitude scale. The more I feel grateful, the more willing I am to see the blank page as an opportunity for discovery rather than a stab in the dark.

On my desk is a lovely gratitude box. Around the edges are the cards below, little recycled remnants of art projects and motivating messages.

Card by card, I will write on the back of each one a few words about people and events I'm grateful for.

There are very few whoopdeedoo wowzers in this box. The cards are appreciations of lunch with friends, a good movie or concert, finding something I've lost and found, good food, community, a productive time in my studio. Forty-seven little cards so far this year. I look at that little box and those little cards and know card by card I'll fill that box to overflowing in another couple of months. It helps me to pay attention to the smallest joys, joys that can be written about in a very few words.

Just as I expect too much of myself as a beginning artist, I sometimes forget to remember the power of gratitude. It all takes time and practice. As much as I've been working on this, sometimes I forget how easy gratitude is and how good it makes me feel. Perhaps a few words on little cards in a lovely box will work for you, too.

Baruch ata adonai...writing today's blog has been an exercise in patience. It has taken me hours. Because I haven't been writing, I'm rusty. I'm going to begin writing everyday for five minutes first thing in the morning. I used to do this and I want to begin again. I am grateful to myself for coming back to this piece over and over until I finished. Amen

The Possibilities of Gratitude

"The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention." Oscar Wilde
"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice." Meister Eckhart

Prayer Flag (Acrylic on Denim)

Sunday I received a gift, a most wonderful email, one that has created within me a deep warm feeling of well being. Each time I think about it I smile. It begins, "Barbara...you have been on my list of people for which I am grateful, since 2011, and have wanted to thank....Periodically I search the net to see if I can find contact info for you. To my delight this morning [I found it.] You never know how large the ripple you create is." 

Several years ago I showed prayer flags and bookmarks with colorful pen and ink drawings I'd made  at a local open studio art show. For me, this series of bookmarks are visual prayers. It was a leap of faith for me to participate in that show. I had never gone public with my drawings and flags, and yet with all my uncertainty and a sense of being in heady company, I felt a strong impulse to be there.

One of the bookmarks was bought by a very thoughtful and receptive woman. "You will never know how much your Our Lady of Possibilities kept me focused on the positive when I was battling a now defanged autoimmune disease." She loved that bookmark into weathered raggedness and now keeps it in a safe place.

If gratitude were to have a symbol, it would be the sign for infinity. No beginning and no end. In this case it was a blessing to the person who gave and the person who received and then it worked back the other way.

Thank you notes of any form resonate long after they are sent. I like to think I always write them with a full heart, which probably isn't true. Today I know, when they are written that way, they bounce around like echoes and go on long after I've stamped and sent them, no matter how long it takes me to mail them off.

Yesterday and today I awoke from dreams that could have left me sandbagged for the day, until I thought to be grateful for them because they reminded me I'm not like the person in that dream any longer. I'm not a Pollyanna, though she had a lot going for her in bad situations, and more and more I believe there is gratitude to be found in more situations than I ever thought possible. When I do work my way to gratitude, it is though I had stretched and released in a way that allows me to breathe more freely than moments before. Gratitude works.

Baruch ata adonai...whenever I hear people my age referred to as old, which seems to happen more and more, I laugh. Today I am healthy and strong. Today I can laugh and cry and I know that's because I'm a whole person. I'm brave and move on through fear and doubt, and I'm very happy to be alive. Amen











 

How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick by Lettie Cottin Pogrebin was written just in time for me and my friends. It's an important read for the friend who is ill and for those of us who want to be the best kind of friend we can be when all the rules change. I bought a copy for myself and gave it to my friend with breast cancer. Then I ordered another for myself. Now I'm ordering a third.

My friends and I are getting to that age, not that there is any right age for this sort of thing. It can happen at any age, but more and more a bad diagnosis for you or your friends is likely to happen the older and older you get. My friends and I have been dancing with each other for a long time, dancing like we know the steps when we do and when we don't, dancing when we feel more like crying and hiding, and being wonderfully brave and adventurous when we haven't a clue what dance we're doing. And then the bad diagnosis taps us one of us on the shoulder, cuts in, and partners us off to an unknown ballroom where the rules have nothing to do with us, except they do. And so it is for three of my go to friends.

Lettie Cottin Pogrebin is an old friend too. She doesn't know we're old friends. She's someone like me only on a national scale. She is one of the founders of MS magazine, and because we're the same age and because we're both Jewish we've always had a lot in common. Twenty-five years ago she wrote a book for me when I was beginning to figure out if I had a place in Judaism. She introduced me to her friends and I read their books as well, and I found my way. Some of them cycle back through her current book. I'm grateful I met them all.

If you are in the dark corridor of illness, your own or a friend's, if you're looking for a light to lead you forward, the title of this book is the beginning of everything you need to know. 

Baruch ata adonai....I am grateful for health and the wealth of friends who guide me to unknown parts of myself. Thank you for waking me up this day. May I be a friend to others and especially to myself. Amen

In Sync with Why

"I bless this journey
with moments of delight
where time disappears
and truth emerges...."
Peleg Top

Week Four Life Book 2014

This quote by Peleg Top is my current measure to see if I'm in sync with my why. Why am I doing what I'm doing now? When I'm in touch with my why, I create with soul filling energy.

I would say I'm deep in the healing step of reclaiming my joy in creating. Yesterday I stopped by a shop that shows my cards. I wanted to swap some out, and when I got home, the truth was that I didn't want to make cards to sell anymore. I love the time I spend drawing. The joy drained out when I began to "manufacture" them to sell. Above my desk is an  unfinished painting from Flora's last online class. It has a lot going for it. When I can approach it again and work on it with delight, I will. I will not struggle with myself to get myself to do it. Right now I'm having a lot of fun beginning with a toilet roll and seeing what I can do with it. I'm playing to get the fun back into art.

Elements of an Assemblage in Progress

As I try out different elements and while I play with assemblages, the hours pass seamlessly. I draw little ladies that make  me happy. They grew out of years of doodling and express various parts of me. As with writing, when I draw, my creative expression comes from following an intuitive trail, and when I come to the end, I feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. Painting is a very different thing. Much more difficult and less spontaneous. My main achievement in Flora's Bloom True class is letting go of outcome. I love big brushes, big canvases, big mess, lots of layers. Fun if I don't make work out of it. I'm looking forward to that.

I'm so grateful to artist Jeanne Bessette who asks great questions on her HeArt Space Facebook page.

Baruch ata adonai...it's so easy to do what I do because I've walked down a path I thought was a good idea or because someone encouraged me to, but when I've lost energy and enthusiasm for that way of doing or being, I've lost myself. Just now there are lots of teachers in my life all saying the same thing in different ways and I'm hearing them. Thank you. Amen

Something from Nothing

Start with a blank canvas, a piece of white paper, a cardboard toilet roll. Start the new year wtih ideas from two internet classes, Creative Jump Start and Life Book 2014. Where have three weeks gone? Here's my show and tell.

 

Scrapwrap. Start with a household item, stuff in your stash, low technology and creative time.

Life Book 2014 is a year long class. Each week a new teacher, new techniques. Carla Sondheim, this week's teacher, is known for her blobamils. Start with a blob of paint and see what appears. This is some octopus!

Start with a day set aside to do art. Start with good intentions. Then clean out your studio, get involved with HeArt Space on Face Book, spend time with some newly salvaged stuff for cardboard box art, eat, make some appointments, check for email, go for a walk, lose something you've put in the scanner, spend time trying to find it cleaning up as you go, need to go to the Dollar Store, Michaels, feel tired from so much avoiding doing art. That was yesterday. I'm sure today will be completely different.

 Make a flower with two pieces of paper and see where it goes next.

Lay down three different kinds of tape. Make sure they overlap. Fill in with pen. Who is waiting to appear?

I'm not even going to tell you what this animal was suppose to be. The task was to draw an animal in one continuous line with your eyes closed. Another was to cut a typed paragraph into words or phrases and compose a story. That was a bit of a bust for me. Instead I wrote part of the story around this guy.

Baruch ata adonai...I am having fun and growing and my mind is in creative places. I am grateful. Amen

Open Studio

I'm reading The Hare with the Amber Eyes, a book about a particular collection of objects that is passed down to the author, Edmund de Waal. As he traces their journey, he steps through the door to his family's history as well and learns much more than he could have imagined. This week I also looked through Where Women Create, a magazine showing the work spaces of women artists, and I wondered what one of my work spaces says about me. Here are some of the views of my writing space.

If you sat at my desk and turned your head to the left, this is what you would see. In the first column of shelves are what remain of the books my parents read to me as well as books I read to my children and grandchildren and children's books I bought on trips to foreign countries. In the middle section you see my blue Smith Corona from my freshman year in college and above that, a step below the center of this section is a storyteller from Santa Fe and poetry books from when I was writing poetry. The third section is Judaica, the history of my genetic makeup. Each item on these shelves is connected to a specific memory and touching any of those things transports me to my past.

If I look up from my computer, I see a shelf of my aspirations and books and nichos I've created. I think this shelf is is about what I want for myself.

I like that part of me that is so earnest about creating and is mostly appreciative, looking back, on what I accomplished. At the time it may have been a much different story, but with time, lots of it looks better to me now than then. When I learned about putting books together with binder rings, it gave me an enormous sense of freedom. The first books are the ones at the top. You can see the covers. They're alphabet books containing quotes, cards, stuff I liked at the time. Below these books are three containing a cache of cards I thought I might use as a writing prompt. I'm sure there's a book there I doubt I'll ever write. There are journals from trips and art journals and in the lower left, an accordion book I created with the most delicious Indian orange pages. I think these must be my personal museum shelves.

There's a soulful continuity here I didn't appreciate before I started writing this blog. I began writing about something completely different, and I'm not sure how I segued into where I am at the moment. I'm glad I trusted the need to refocus my writing. Now I can see why I like being in this room.

When I write, I learn things about myself I didn't know before. What I see in this writing is the way I've been able to trust and invest and reinvent myself over my lifetime. It's very comforting to know, especially when I'm currently stewing over an unresolved issues it seems I should be able to let go of or change. 

Baruch ata adonai...this morning I woke up very early and gave myself unstressed time to read and write. I'm grateful I didn't continue to stay in bed and think about what I would do today. Now I feel very ready to enjoy what will arrive through my open door. May I resolve the unresolved and be a more loving person today. Amen

Feeling Content

"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer...It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as  your ambitions."Ira Glass

This morning it only took me an hour to make that watermark. That's a lot of time first thing in the morning. I started at 7:15 and voila! There it is, covering up an important world. I'm settling for good enough. One of my words for this year is ease, and so I relax. This morning Ira Glass whispers in my ear, "It's going to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through."

Well, here she is. My artistic guardian. I love her. She's the first face I've ever drawn I truly love. She looks me steadily in the eye and reminds me to keep being creative and pay no attention to those snotty voices that could be muttering away if I were to listen. She wants me to have fun. And I am. I do need to give her a name. Hmmmm. I'm going to give this some thought today.

My guardian, loving and steely, appeared during the first assignment in a year long online class, Life Book 2014. One week into it and I'm smitten. I think it's going to be a wonderful course for me. There are students from all over the world. It's a huge class in terms of the number of people participating and the content. In the first week there were six videos. There will be many guest teachers over the course of the year, and Tamara, the founder, producer and guide-in-chief has done an amazing job of building in support for artists like me whose courage might flounder, whose stuff is just not that good, yet, but trying to be good and getting better with practice.

The word you can't quite see is Abundance. My guardian wants me to explore Abundance. Isn't she wonderful? With ease!

Usually the first few months of the year I like to go away to someplace warmer and sunnier. Last year I painted in Mexico. Another year we spent a month in Kauai. This year I am very happy and content to be at home and to grow myself right here in my own sweet place. Sometime feeling content has a short shelf life. Today I'm creating a gratitude jar and dropping a little piece of paper inside, a reminder that today at nine in the morning, I am feeling an abundance of contentment.

Baruch ata adonai...I rejoice in moments like this when everything seems right with my world. I rejoice that I recognize in this very moment I am optimistic and happy. No qualifiers. Thank you. Amen