The Unfolding Moment

Rest is not the opposite of action.

2012-01-03T18:19:00.095-05:00

Photo by shikeroku (used under Creative Commons license)

Sometimes my fallow periods are filled with resistance: I want something specific to happen and it's just not happening (yet), leading me to recognize that things are still germinating. At other times, lying fallow is a deliberate choice that I make.

Six months ago I received two devastating pieces of news within a few days of each other, and the nature of my circumstances led me to choose rest as the best course of action. It's as if I were lucky enough to walk away intact from a train wreck, and rather than immediately searching for another train heading toward my original destination, I decided to just walk for a while and take in the landscape. To slow down, serve in a smaller way for a while, and discern the shape of things.

Though I've been at peace with my decision, reading this post by Alana Sheeren on practicing self-care led me to an epiphany: Rest is not the opposite of action.

Alana writes: "The revelation that has come this past week is that inspired action andslowing down aren’t mutually exclusive if I let go of the thought thatI need to be there now. I can get more sleep and spread the word about the pregnancy loss support group I’m starting. I can meditate and journal and answer my emails. But I can only do this if I truly let go and trust that there is time."

These words sparked an insight for me: If "inspired action and slowing down aren't mutually exclusive," then rest contains elements of action, and action CAN include elements of rest.

I've always seen it as rest versus action, as if the two can only be at odds. But if there is action that happens within a state of rest, then rest isn't just restorative (taking you back to where you were before) but also transformative (bringing you into a new landscape entirely). And if there can be places of rest within a state of action, then that changes the game entirely, doesn't it? What if restorative transformation can happen all along the way? What if there's a deep breath available with every step?

Metamorphosis

2011-08-31T10:31:00.000-04:00

I created this mixed media collage/assemblage, titled Metamorphosis, to donate to the "Art Lives Here" silent auction fundraiser for Hirsch Wellness Network, which provides creativity workshops to cancer survivors and caregivers. This piece is a diptych that incorporates tea and coffee stains, vintage pattern paper, ink, image transfer, magazine collage elements, and found objects.

A few detail views:

Some of the other art works to be featured can be previewed at the "Art Lives Here" auction Flickr page. Check out Hirsch's Facebook page for auction details.

On the creative process

2011-08-22T12:07:00.000-04:00

1. "Just being at the piano – egoless – is to reach that place where the only thing that exists is the sound and moving toward the sound. The music on the page that was outside of you is now within you, and moves through you; you are a channel for the music, and play from the center of your being. Everything that you have consciously learned, all of your knowledge, emanates from within you... You are at one with yourself and the act, and feel as if the playing has already happened and you are effortlessly releasing it. The music is in your hands, in the air, in the room, the music is everywhere, and the whole universe is contained in the experience of playing." [Mildred Chase]

2. "We create together with our materials and our bodies, not just from our minds... When I move freely from my body and other senses, the materials will respond." [Shaun McNiff]

3. "I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another." [Brenda Euland]

Sketching mindfulness.

2011-08-10T11:56:00.002-04:00

I started a new sketchbook. A record of liminal space.

Making marks / old friends in a new space: seeds and mandalas.

Finding one thing to love in a place I don't want to be: crooked lamp in a waiting room.

Seeing the sky: clouds.

A breath, and a breath, and a breath. That's what I know.

Scenes from the studio.

2011-05-28T22:56:00.000-04:00

I love, love, love having a studio space again. This one is finally really starting to feel like home, and I look forward every weekend to my studio time and the corresponding (almost physical) act of stepping back into my artist identity.

The following are photos of some goodies that live in the studio now, after last weekend's field trip to The Scrap Exchange in Durham, NC. Round things and cylindrical things and fabric/wallpaper/paper samples...

These old friends, which have been packed away since I last had my own studio space five years ago, found a home on my work table today:

And here is a snapshot of the middle section of my inspiration board:

And finally, instigated by Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists, a page of cat doodles.

Postcard exchange: Everyday mandalas

2011-04-12T08:08:00.000-04:00

Here are just a few of the 25 art postcards I've made for the international postcard exchange hosted by Art Therapy Without Borders. All made with love and delight in my new studio space.

My weekday schedule has become very busy now that I'm being supervised for my counseling license and art therapy registration, and Saturdays in the studio are a touchstone for me. Now that the postcard exchange is coming to a close, I'm feeling pulled to return to the SoulCollage deck I started about three years ago--but the beauty of a dedicated studio space is the ability to work on more than one project at once.

On being enough.

2011-03-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been experimenting with what I think of as everyday mandalas. I created this one, called Heart Mandala, to accompany my guest post at Tracey Clark's I Am Enough blog.

Or is it more?

2011-02-02T22:11:00.000-05:00

I'm keeping a visual journal as a form of professional processing. This is what showed up this week.

is this my same broken-open heart

or is it more?

more broken

more open

It's an echo of process work I was doing in 2007 during my first year of graduate school. Which, in its turn, was a continuation of unfinished work from my undergraduate thesis the previous year. Artistic process, like life experience, can be a spiral in which we encounter a theme again and again, but always at a richer level.

Be your own lifeboat.

2011-01-09T17:26:00.000-05:00

I began this blog nearly two years ago, in a place of transition and unknowns, just before graduating from my master's program in Colorado and moving 2000 miles back to the Southeast. For the past 18 months since the move, I've struggled to maintain my artistic and professional identity while volunteering, networking, and holding peripheral part-time jobs. But this New Year has brought me the gift of a new full-time position, and for the next few months I'll be enjoying a different kind of transition as I learn to effectively serve at-risk youth and their families as an intensive in-home counselor.

The drawing shown above, titled "Self-Portrait with Water Wings," is a reminder that I have everything I need to stay afloat. (Look for this image in Patti Digh's book What I Wish For You, due out this spring.) As I begin this new professional challenge, I'm making a commitment to an ongoing practice of artmaking for self-care and spiritual reconnection.

Here's hoping that the New Year fairy will leave something nice under your pillow, too.

Reverb10: Letting Go

2010-12-05T21:59:00.000-05:00

This month I'm participating in Reverb10 with creative responses to daily prompts as a reflection on the year. I'll be including some of my written and/or art responses here.

Today's prompt: What (or whom) did you let go of this year?

I can't seem to find the answer to this question. Is there one answer? Is there a concrete list of things I've let go of in 2010? I think maybe this is such a difficult question for me because I never feel like I truly, permanently let go of anything. Every person to whom I've ever said goodbye, whether by choice or unexpectedly, has left an imprint on my heart. Every lesson or awareness that comes from growth has altered my relationship with something, yet still I cycle through these lessons again and again, if perhaps with a deeper or wider learning each time.

I could make a list of things that I wish I had truly let go of this year, that I want to be done with abruptly instead of gradually. I could describe in great detail what I've been grasping onto repeatedly. But letting go? That's like breathing out. It's only one part of the dance.

Wanna play? Find out more at the Reverb10 website or follow along on Twitter with the #reverb10 hashtag.

Reverb10: One Word

2010-12-01T10:07:00.000-05:00

This month I'm participating in Reverb10 with creative responses to daily prompts as a reflection on the year. I'll be including some of my written and/or art responses here.

Today's prompt asks us to choose one word to summarize 2010, then consider what one word we'd like to be using in December 2011 to describe the year ahead.

My one word for 2010 (okay, really an adjective phrase) is touch and go. This expression has multiple connotations. People frequently describe a situation as being "touch and go" when things are unpredictable, risky, precarious, with an uncertain outcome--and that pretty accurately describes the past year for me. Things were up, things were down, and nothing turned out to be quite what it seemed at first. But "touch and go" also holds a very different meaning for me because of my exposure to the "touch and go" meditation technique, which is a way to find balance within the two extremes of withdrawing from experience and clinging to experience. The past year has been an off-the-cushion experiential in returning to the middle place between grasping and letting go.

My word for the upcoming year is embodiment. Some of what this word means for me: tangible expression of ideas or qualities; being authentically representative; deep relationship with self that is grounded in community; here and now presence; a way of being that leads to creation.

Wanna play? Find out more at the Reverb10 website or follow along on Twitter with the #reverb10 hashtag.

How can I keep from singing?

2010-11-19T16:06:00.000-05:00

It sometimes happens that when I have a strong drive to express something, it seems impossible to name or describe that thing. Or vision, feeling, experience... I don't even have the right word to categorize its very thingness. I can't tell you, with words, what the above image (a sketchbook spread using oil pastel, watercolor, and Sharpie) is about. But when I look at the image, it distills the essence of something I am deeply in touch with right now.

The past couple of weeks have brimmed with connections, potential, joy, and curiosity. And I don't know what else to say about that. In my journal lately, all I can do is make visual marks and make lists; sentences and paragraphs just aren't forming. And that's okay. I'm always a writer, and always an artist, and always a musician, but what I keep discovering is that at any given moment, one of those creative selves is primary and the others recede--and they all support each other.

Among all the intangible experience of recent days, here are the links to some virtual gifts that have arrived in my awareness this week:

Jen Louden's kick-in-the-pants manifesto about following your calling, a.k.a. the thing you want so bad you can barely stand to think about it because there are a thousand reasons you can't possibly walk that path: Holy Selfishness

Meditative artwork by my mentor, Adele Wayman. The images on her website cannot do justice to the visceral gorgeousness of her installations viewed in person, but go take a look anyway. Her art conveys so much about mindfulness that can't be explained with words.

My friend Melanie Weidner, a Quaker artist and spiritual director, is offering a 5-week online course called Creative Spark: Advent Meditations for Creativity and Community, and at an insanely low price. She's wonderful. Please support her if you can.

And Havi's blog post about safe rooms, which is bursting with a lot of really useful stuff as always, offered exactly the thing I needed to hear today: the bit about the V formation. Maybe you'll find it useful, too.

Happy colors and happy news.

2010-10-31T09:15:00.000-04:00

Among many things that are bringing me happiness this week, here are three of them.

Thing 1:
My fiber art piece "Circle the Ring Again" (shown above) was included in Patti Digh's book Creative is a Verb as an illustration for Patti's essay of the same name. This book features a variety of artwork by Patti's readers, and I'm delighted to be included among them. The book is out in stores now, and Patti is on a book tour. I'm looking forward to meeting her, since she'll be stopping nearby in December.

Thing 2:
In totally related news, I submitted a drawing to be considered for publication in Patti's next book, What I Wish for You, due out in April 2011. This week I found out that my work was accepted! I may have done a little dance when I got that email...

Thing 3:
I live in a gorgeous part of Greensboro, NC, where the autumn leaves are currently at the height of their beauty. I missed this landscape so much when I was in grad school, and I'm still so happy to be back.

Meantime.

2010-10-25T10:52:00.002-04:00

This time last year, I was ruminating about how I'm always surprised by the advent of autumn and all of its emotional connotations. Now, although many of the small details have shifted in a year's time, none of the big questions have been resolved. I guess there's a reason that Rilke's letter about loving the questions themselves is quoted so often.

So here's my meantime: I'm teaching art to kids. I'm a freelance writer. I've signed up to participate in the International Postcard Art Exchange with other art therapists who support Art Therapy Without Borders. My partner and I have re-launched the Defabricate Etsy store, featuring handmade baby gifts, mini quilts, ornaments, coffee cozies, and (as of this week) cat toys. (I stitched up a feline mascot, shown above, for the cat toy packaging.) And bit by bit, I'm making marks in my personal mini-journals.

Doing it all breath by breath, as always.

Small and simple: ATCs on a theme

2010-08-30T11:30:00.002-04:00

Here are the ATCs I created for the Art Therapy Alliance swap, "Collage Unleashed." Each of my four ATCs features the use of tissue-thin paper from an unwanted sewing pattern. Each card focuses on a variation of a personal theme: awareness of emotional patterns.

Old Brick Road / New View

Resting in Uncertainty

Underneath Doing is Being

At the End of the World is a New World

Check out the full album of ATCs for this swap to see what other art therapists have done in response to the "Collage Unleashed" theme.

Keeping it small and simple

2010-08-24T10:21:00.000-04:00

I've been making scrap mini-journals, inspired by this series of posts by Lisa Sonora Beam. We had a box of collage ephemera left over from a recent creativity workshop, and it's been a thrill to juxtapose these ragtag materials in booklet form.

My mini-journals use paper (and paper-like) scraps about 7.5" x 4.5", stacked, folded, and stapled. (They could be larger or smaller, depending on what you have on hand. It might be fun to make tiny ones.) They can be used as-is for journal writing or other notebook functions, but they also have the potential to be further altered and embellished.

In other small-and-simple news, I joined an ATC swap sponsored by the Materials and Media subgroup of the Art Therapy Alliance at LinkedIn. ATCs (artist trading cards) are very small, approximately 2.5" x 3.5", and I wasn't sure I would enjoy creating images on such a tiny canvas. As it turns out, I love it. I like the challenge of making an image simple enough to be expressive in such a small space, but without compromising on the subtle layers and textures that are my favorite part of the art process. I'll be sharing my finished ATCs soon. Meanwhile, you can take a peek at the ATCs already submitted for this swap, courtesy of organizer Melanie Glassey and sponsor Art Therapy Without Borders.

If you try your hand at ATCs or scrap mini-journals, I'd love to see or hear about them in the comments!

I feel more human when I play.

2010-07-29T20:05:00.001-04:00

A postcard of the ocean

2010-07-26T22:11:00.001-04:00

Photo credit: Stacy Lynn Baum, Creative Commons license www.flickr.com

I was a teenager when I first encountered the statement, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” (It seems to me that dance might actually be a very effective way to evoke architecture... but let's leave that detail aside for now.) This quote comes to mind when I remember that I first learned about mindfulness from books. Reading about mindfulness is a lot like talking about music. You can find plenty of words to describe what music does, or how it makes you feel, but no amount of discussion can convey the true experience of music. It's all secondhand.

My first experience with mindfulness was secondhand. About six years ago, I started reading books by Western Buddhist teachers like Surya Das and Pema Chodron. I loved the words, which felt like spiritual poetry to me. Mindfulness seemed like something to aspire to, something beautiful and pure, beyond my everyday experience.

Two years later, in my first weeks as a graduate student at a Buddhist university, I became a true student of mindfulness. In weekly meditation classes, I learned how to meditate Tibetan-style: shamatha-vipassana (calm abiding / clear seeing), which is an eyes-open awareness practice. When I took a seat on a cushion for my very first meditation session, I fell into the struggle that epitomizes true practice.

And boy, was it a struggle. I had thought that I knew what resistance felt like. But sitting practice showed me the true depth, color, and texture of my resistance, all the layers of experience and fear that had brought it into being. Sitting on the cushion brought me face-to-face with the specificity of my own experience. I began to understand that mindfulness happens in our willingness to be in relationship with the gritty, uncomfortable, awkward details of our inner lives. (I also learned that avoiding the actual act of sitting, out of fear or overwhelm, does not result in one's self-awareness mercifully going away. But that's a story for another day.)

In merely reading about mindfulness, I had been gazing longingly at a postcard of the ocean. But when I became an active student of meditation--on the cushion and fully engaged in relationship with myself--suddenly I was standing barefoot at the edge of the world in the stinging salt wind. When I finally stepped up to meet the ocean, I knew for the first time exactly how small I am, and (yet / also) how vital I am within the complex web of human connection.

But what about those days when we feel too defeated to even try to practice? If you're like me, you get frozen into inaction by a desire to practice perfectly. What helps me is to reframe practice as being less about mastery--what is there to become perfect at, really?--and more about just showing up to maintain a friendly relationship with myself. Know, too, that what you do as a practice is far less important than your intention. Although I do revisit shamatha-vipassana occasionally, these days my mindfulness practice takes many different forms. Instead of sitting, sometimes I do several minutes of savasana (“corpse pose” in yoga). Some days I do a little Shiva Nata.** Some days writing is my practice, and some days it's making art. Some days there is no intentional practice, and I am merely a student of the moment-to-moment: noticing what's happening inside, knowing that I can choose how to react, and just coming back to my breath as needed.

Whatever your practice or not-practice, if you're showing up with love, then you're doing it just right.

(**That's not an affiliate link, y'all. I just like Havi Brooks an awful lot, and I want more people to know about the amazing work she does.)

All my work is in progress

2010-06-10T13:34:00.001-04:00

This is a dreamcatcher I'm making. It's a work in progress.

I've started and not-yet-finished several art objects in the past few months. This tends to be the way I work as an artist: an organic start-and-stop, shift-and-reshift of focus, letting things marinate. I have complicated long-term relationships with what I'm creating. Very often this seems to echo the gestation of a human infant. There's a conception event, several months of development (physical, mind-spirit, or some of each), followed eventually by the midwifing of a physical presence in the world that was not there before.

A list of projects that are in various stages of gestation at the moment: A series of stitched mandalas in hoops. Several essays. A new interest in jewelry-making, from the perspective of amulets or talismans. Collage work in an old planner.

Less tangible things that are also, always, works in progress: My job search. My professional identity. My creative and personal self-understanding. And, weaving in and out of all of these, my efforts at maitri (compassion for oneself).

All my work is in progress.

What are you working on? Or, put another way: What's working on you?

To-day I Am On Bird Time.

2010-05-13T08:38:00.000-04:00

bird time by verdissage on Polyvore.com

I start my mornings with a cup of coffee and a notebook, writing morning pages on the sun porch. Most mornings the trees just outside the windows are filled with a variety of birds, who move quickly beyond the canopy of green leaves and can be tracked only by their songs. They call to each other as if that singing is the most vital and immediate action the world needs in this moment.

Watching birds go about their business, the vital right-now business of perching in trees and searching for food and communicating with other birds, changes my relationship with time. Bird Time is right now, neither fast nor slow, just exactly what it is. On Bird Time, I find myself: mind and body and spirit, right now, just as I am.

I've been wanting to write something here about mindfulness. It's relevant to my art process, my art therapy training, and my everyday experience. It has utterly changed my relationship with myself. And it's hard for me to write about.

So what is mindfulness exactly? And what isn't it? Is it a thing you do (technique) or a way to be (perspective)? And what's the point of all this?

After three years of mindfulness training (as a foundation of my graduate school coursework), I have a pretty good sense of what mindfulness means to me. But it is very much a sense--a visceral understanding, a somatic knowing. Like the classic example of riding a bicycle, it's stored in muscle memory. It's difficult to translate the fullness of that visceral sense into words. I find myself stumbling vaguely around the concept, saying only that it's about what I notice, what I'm aware that I know and don't know: my relationship with Self in every new moment.

Other people have created fabulous explanations and definitions and examples of mindfulness. I'll link to some of them in a moment. For now, the closest I can come to describing my relationship with mindfulness is this: it's like being on Bird Time.

It's not just birds who are inherently present-centered, of course. So are all wild creatures, mammals and fish and insects. So are dogs and cats. So are young human children.

Birds don't live in the future: they're not making a mental grocery list or wondering how the weather will be for migrating next season. They don't live in the past: no ruminating on regrets or perceived slights. Birds are fully embodied in present action, vibrantly alive in the now.

And sometimes, when I slow down and listen, so am I.

Five views on mindfulness:

Havi Brooks on harbor seals

Jen Louden on sensation (not more effort)

Cathy Malchiodi on mindfulness and the creative spirit

Sparky Firepants on blauthenticity

Carrie Newcomer on letting it be

Retrospective: Transformed by Touch

2010-04-08T09:07:00.000-04:00

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.

Over and over when the world offers itself
to us for our awakening, all we have to do is meet it.
–Jack Kornfield

While working on The Direct Experience of God, I became enchanted with fingerprints. I pressed my inked fingers against white paper, marveling in the variation that could occur in multiple prints from the same finger because of how the ink lay differently on the finger’s surface each time. One fingerprint in particular struck me as beautiful. I used a photocopier to blow it up to 200 times its original size. The resulting print, an intriguing visual, hung in my studio for weeks.

In March, ready to begin a new piece, I come back to the fingerprint. What if it were even bigger? I take it to a copy shop and have the large print blown up even more, so that the fingerprint is now the size of my forearm from fingertip to elbow. I sense that this piece needs to remain simple because the fingerprint itself is already so complex. One fingerprint from one individual, and yet it contains multitudes. After a failed experiment with transferring the print onto a piece of wood using wintergreen oil, I decide to simply use the huge photocopy itself. I glue it to a piece of wood. A friend with power tools cuts around the perimeter of the fingerprint so that the shape of the wood becomes the shape of the print itself.

Pondering my next move, I am toying with the idea of building up the lines of the fingerprint dimensionally using the text-and-binder method from The Direct Experience of God. But it doesn’t feel right. Remembering my intention to keep it simple, I decide to enhance the dark lines of the fingerprint with black ink to heighten the contrast between fingerprint and paper. I do this work slowly, on the floor, with a bottle of ink and a fine-tipped brush. Like the stitching I have used in previous pieces, the inking process is deliberate and meditative. I become immersed in the careful process of filling in tiny dark areas with ink to make them darker. During this process it occurs to me that my fingerprint is both unique, because there is no other exactly like it in the world, and universal, because a fingerprint is an instantly recognizable image. Fingerprints manage somehow to be universal symbols of uniqueness.

My fingerprint, now startlingly large and visually bold, makes a statement about the uniqueness of every single one of the billions of individuals currently alive on this planet. We lose sight of that so easily. I remember Annie Dillard’s description of the struggle to comprehend the complexity of all of the individual lives inherent in large numbers of people. Referring to the 1991 death of 138,000 people in Bangladesh, she writes, “I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning. ‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’” We cannot comprehend the specific and the abstract at the same time. But I want to attempt to convey this idea nonetheless.

During the creation of this piece, I have been collecting black walnut seeds from the grassy area outside my basement studio. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to them. They’re huge, just the right size to fit in my palm with my fingers wrapped tightly around the seed. The pattern of lines on their outer shells reminds me of my fingerprint.

Because the fingerprint itself is so simple, I need something more to the piece, an altar of sorts to hang just beneath it. In the final exhibition, there will be a shelf, collaged with teastained text, which will hold a small pile of these walnut seeds.

Interspersed with the seeds will be strips of stained text. The text for both the shelf and the strips comes from Jack Kornfield’s book A Path with Heart, specifically from a chapter titled “Enlightenment is Intimacy with All Beings.” Kornfield proposes that “mindful awareness is itself an act of profound intimacy… [which] is both the beginning and the culmination of spiritual practice.”

It is only through intimate relationships with other humans that we can begin to comprehend the enormity of multitudes of complex human creatures co-existing on Earth. And indeed, it may only be through human relationships that we can recognize the presence of God. Pema Chodron remarks that taking the bodhisattva vow is equivalent to declaring oneself not afraid of other people. I interpret this in my own experience to mean that we must be willing to love and be loved in order to know God.

Chödrön defines the kalyanamitra, or spiritual friend, as someone who makes us see ourselves clearly and honestly, an inspiration to stay on the path. Spiritual friendship can be the primary basis for the understanding of the divine.

Ruminating on the unique and the universal, on spiritual friendship, and on the human urge to make one’s mark upon the universe, I decide to call this piece Touch.

Process: How It All Unfolds

2010-04-01T11:54:00.000-04:00

I sometimes describe myself as a process-oriented artist. To me, that means that I value the path of artistic creation as much as the finished work of art. I view artistic process as a sacred relationship between me and the materials--a relationship that continues to develop even after the artwork is “completed.”

Being process-oriented, for me, also indicates that I am continually open to the unexpected. My art usually begins with some particular image or question, but I never know how it may shift and change on its journey toward fullness.

One thing I've noticed about my process over the past few years is that at least half of it happens outside of the studio. (By “studio” I mean any dedicated space, physical or temporal, where one does the tangible work of making art. At the moment my studio is a portable 12” x 12” box of collage materials.) I love the part of the process that is hands-on and messy and in direct relationship with the physical materials, but I also value the intangible stuff that happens outside of that space.

Studio time is expressive time: making, giving voice, giving form. Outside-the-studio process is often receptive: not giving, but receiving. Sometimes this means simply noticing what thrills me, calls me, makes me curious. It could be a particular color that makes my heart sing, or a found object. It could be a line of poetry or the musical bridge of a song. It could take the form of ideas, materials, sensation, or conversations. Receiving can mean soaking in new information and experiences, letting them sift and settle among the inner layers. A connection may emerge: two unrelated pieces of data, juxtaposed, suddenly make sense.

Need a creative jump-start?

• Try changing your perspective, literally: Strategic planning is for the birds

• Take ten minutes for a creative practice.

• Consider: What are you hatching?

Share in the comments: What do you know, or notice, about your own creative process?

Awakening from a Fallow Season

2010-03-25T09:34:00.003-04:00

I've been wintering over.

After being fully underground for a while, I'm easing back out into the sunlight. Slowly uncurling roots into the earth, gathering my energy for a re-emergence. Ready to begin again, but not from the same place or in the same way.

This year my inner winter paralleled the external shift of seasons. Right about the time that I saw the first patch of tiny purple flowers--my personal indicator that Spring is really here--I also felt the hint of an inner thaw, a visceral sense of coming alive to new possibilities, a renewed interest in old passions.

The really amazing thing about blooming is that it happens too slowly for us to watch. What occurs in an inconceivably slow progression, hour by hour, can seem abrupt: yesterday just a tiny velvety bud, this morning a flower.

Meanwhile, there's a frisson of expectancy. Hiro Boga's lovely first blog post describes the mix of anticipation and dread that comes just before the commencement of a new project. Feeling ready and also not-ready.

Is it today?

On Mark-Making: Post-It Notes from the Universe

2010-02-10T17:09:00.000-05:00

I think a lot about the making of marks. In fact, "mark-making" is one of the five core values that are posted on the inspiration board above my desk. As an artist, I'm interested in the physical act of making a mark: a stitch, a charcoal line, a splash of ink, an indentation in clay, a stain on a surface. As a human being in service to the world, I am driven to understand the metaphor of mark-making: changing my world through actions, words, or emotional and spiritual connections with others.

I am still learning so much about making marks--in my sketchbooks, in writing, and in relationship. Lately, small lessons have floated into my awareness in ones and twos, like post-it notes from the desk of the Universe.

Ellen Dissanayake writes about the role of art in human experience--the drive to "make special" and to bring into existence a form that did not previously exist. We do this because it feels good, because we can't help it, because an idea calls to us to be manifest. We make marks because to do so makes us feel supremely, actively alive.

This month I'm co-leading an art journaling workshop for cancer survivors (sponsored by this lovely nonprofit: Hirsch Wellness Network). At our first session, we played with new friends: compressed charcoal, chalk pastels, soft and hard drawing pencils, oil pastels, erasers. We made marks. Broad ones, wiggly ones, smeary ones. We crosshatched and blended and experimented. And at the same time, with music and stories overlapping all this artistic exploration, a small community began to cohere. We made new friends, we got friendly with new materials, and in the process of all that, we got a little friendlier with ourselves.

Andrea Scher of Superhero Designs describes how a simple gesture of kindness can change a frightening situation. When her son had a seizure in public, she writes, the terror and confusion of the situation was ameliorated by the presence of a young man who stated, simply, "I'm here to help."

We all have the power to be miracle makers. All it takes is showing up.

I live in Greensboro, NC, which recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins at the downtown Woolworth's lunch counter. The local newspaper gave plenty of column inches to the four African-American men who first took seats at that counter--a simple but powerful (and dangerous) action that led to enormous cultural change. But the News and Record also ran a feature describing the supportive backbone of the six-month protest at Woolworth's: The "Fifth Men" Kept Counter Sit-Ins Going. Read the stories of other men (and women) who played small but vital roles: the ones who organized a benefit concert, offered rides to protesters, or bailed out people who had been arrested. They showed up however they could--and by showing up, they helped make a lasting difference.

I have always believed that my power to change the world lies in momentary individual interactions--one moment of connection at a time. But, I confess, sometimes I worry that what I'm capable of is just too small to make a difference. Thanks to Mark Silver for drawing my attention to this quote by Mother Teresa: "No one can do great things. You can only do small things with great love."

For another view on why your tiny, insignificant mark really is important, read Sonia Simone's post on Compassionate Selfishness. Like she says: just start somewhere.

To be a mark-maker is to be a miracle maker. Offer your help, your art, your superpower (whatever that may be). Follow that divinely human urge to create connections. The world is made better by every single mark made with an open heart.

Reflection: Self-Care for Artists

2009-12-30T16:07:00.001-05:00

I'm sick again. As a healthcare volunteer, I've been inoculated against H1N1 and the seasonal flu, but I seem to be catching every other possible bug that goes around. Being sick always brings me face-to-face with Resistance. It quickly shows me what I've been avoiding--I recognize the sense of relief that I can't possibly do That Thing I'm Avoiding when I feel so crappy. It also gives me clues about which activities are the most soul-filling for me; this comes in the form of resentment and impatience around missed opportunities.

But I digress, a little. My physical state is a stark reminder that self-care is important. We can all recite the self-care checklist, right? Get enough sleep, eat well, get exercise, all that stuff. But that's just the physical body we're talking about, and there's a lot more to being human than just the physical body experience.

What if we look at self-care from a creative standpoint? Why would self-care be important for an artist? What would be on that checklist? (It doesn't have to be a list. Right-brainers, feel free to think of this as a mindmap, a collage, or whatever works for you.)

Note: I'm approaching this topic as if it can be broken down into discrete categories. In practice, you may find a lot of overlap.

First, let's consider physical self-care. Obviously, that "usual checklist" is important for artists, too. Taking care of our bodily needs will support us to do our important work of making art. (A wonderful reference for intuitive movement is Open Body: Create Your Own Yoga.) But there are other physical aspects of self-nurturing for artists. For example, cleaning up your studio space or taking care of your artmaking tools is a tangible way of nourishing your artistic self. Maybe you've noticed that the lighting in your workspace could be improved. Or if you don't have a dedicated studio space — believe me, I feel your pain — perhaps you need to organize your materials in a protective container to keep them away from smaller members of your household (like children, or cats).

Artists also need intellectual self-care. We must acknowledge that we move through cycles of engagement with our work: a period of activity followed by a period of rest. In the active part of the cycle, you can take care to document your ideas and progress in a sketchbook (or whatever format works best for you), and you can schedule your time to allow flow states to emerge. In a rest period, you might choose to refuel by viewing others' artwork--or you could enjoy the "beginner's mind" stage of a brand-new activity that is unrelated to your art. For more on intellectual self-care, check out On the Care and Feeding of Ideas at the Make + Meaning site.

What about spiritual self-nurturing? On the most basic level, an artist's spiritual self-care is about staying connected with the Source. Self-doubt and disengagement can creep in if we lose sight of our purpose as art creators. It's not my place to say what that purpose might be — it's a unique relationship between the individual artist and her/his context of experience. But I can tell you that, however you may define your artistic purpose, your work is important. Not just your "artwork" (the tangible evidence of the art process), but all of the hard work of being a creative human being. Spiritual self-care might take many forms, including a practice such as meditation or prayer, connecting with the natural world, or dreamwork. (For an unorthodox guide to spiritual connection, take a look at The Red Book by Sera Beak.)

And let's not ignore self-care on the emotional level. It can be hard to engage with artistic process when we're wrestling with emotional demons. Most artists have experienced some version of self-doubt, whether it's brought on by external events or internal questioning. Either way, it can lead us to put down our tools and wonder whether we deserve to ever pick them back up. (For an honest look at this state, see What to Do When You Feel Like Dirt by Havi Brooks.) For me, the most effective way to deal with self-doubt is to ask someone I trust to help me understand why my contribution to the universe is vitally important. Barbara Sher suggests an Ideal Family exercise to provide a new perspective on your strengths (check out Havi's version here). And, of course, I recommend keeping a journal, a practice that has sustained me through many difficult periods.

General recommendations: Art and Fear functions as a kind of self-care manual for artists. For a great how-to guide on overall self-care, see The Woman's Comfort Book (also available at Jennifer Louden's website).

I'd love to hear your comments about self-care for artists. Which type of self-nurturing is the most difficult for you?

Holding Zone

2009-12-05T14:47:00.000-05:00

I've been juggling a lot of different roles lately: two unrelated part-time jobs, volunteering at a local hospital and volunteer training for hospice, continuing my search for opportunities to use my art therapy training, and now co-ownership of an online business: Defabricate. With the holidays, more of my focus has been on the Etsy shop.

I will return soon with more sketchbook goodness. In the meantime, please visit some of my art therapy colleagues to view their experiences at the national art therapy conference:

Creativity in Motion

Inner Spirit Arts

Denver Art Therapy Counseling

Lani Puppetmaker's Blog

Retrospective: Stumbling Towards Grace

2009-11-04T11:45:00.007-05:00

Stumbling Down the Path (2006). Paper, fabric,

and found/collected objects on plastic and wire armature.

Once upon a time, the story goes, a seeker

asked a monastic, “What do you do in a monastery?” And

the old monastic said, “Oh, we fall and we get up, and

we fall and we get up, and we fall and we get up again.”

—Sister Joan Chittister

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.

For the past year I have been collecting small found objects—seeds, feathers, leaves, coins—anything that caught my eye made its way to my studio to live on the windowsill or on my makeshift altar. And for most of my life I’ve collected interesting small objects, unique paper scraps, fabrics, and magazine clippings, some of which have made it into collages or pages in my art journals, but many of which still live in boxes and folders. I’ve been wanting to use some of these found and collected materials in a collage for this project, and I’ve talked about doing so since last fall, but it’s February and I’ve made no progress toward beginning the piece. Finally I spend a couple of hours sorting through all of these materials, looking for ones that might work together. I create piles on my work desk, by color or by type.

I’m ready to begin. But am I? When I think about buying a large piece of heavy paper to use as a support for the collage, I resist. It shouldn’t be flat. It should be sculptural, indicating strong movement. I want it to be dynamic, not static. But what does that mean? I have no clear image with which to proceed. All I really know is that I want the piece to convey that the spiritual path is difficult.

I have a Rosanne Cash song in my head: We’re falling like the velvet petals / We’re bleeding and we’re torn / But God is in the roses / and the thorns. I’m walking from my studio to a nearby parking lot, thinking about how people can be so inconsistent in their actions despite their beliefs, how no spiritual practitioner is perfect at it and many spiritual gurus have had well-known character flaws. I remember what Thich Nhat Hanh says about practicing imperfectly: “If we want to head north, we can use the North Star to guide us, but it is impossible to arrive at the North Star. Our effort is only to proceed in that direction.”

Suddenly I come across a small tree branch in the path. I pick it up and examine the way that it twists and turns, changing directions again and again. My spiritual path is like this, I think—not a clear progression from one point to another, but a stumbling path with twists and valleys. This is how the canvas for my collage should look.

So I use the twisting branch as a model for a chicken-wire armature. Two layers of papier-maché go over the chicken wire; when this dries, I carefully pry the dried paper sculpture away from the chicken wire, which I discard. Next comes two layers of plaster strips to add strength and stiffness to the piece to prevent it from breaking at the thinnest point. Finally, I add a coat of gesso to both sides. Now I have a canvas for my collage, a sculptural support that twists and turns and even rises off the wall. Now the real work begins: the collage itself.

I want the collage to look simple from a distance, a progression of colors from dark to bright and back to dark again, but also to contain intricate embellishments that can be noticed only on close inspection. The darkest areas will anchor the piece at the top and bottom, with the brightest area occurring at the point where the canvas rises off the wall. I begin choosing materials by color, laying them out in a progression alongside the canvas—fabrics, papers, buttons and seeds and fibers, all remnants of my life experience over the past five years. And then, working very slowly, I begin to place and glue each piece. At first I think I should get the basic color variation in place, to cover the canvas, and then come back and embellish with small objects.

But that isn’t how the piece unfolds once I begin working; instead, I finish each area completely before moving on to the next. Although the work is very slow, it’s satisfying. It’s as if I am ordering and assembling elements of my already-lived life, making sense of them in hindsight, seeing patterns that I could not see at the time. I am feeling very at home with this collage piece. It and I have an understanding, a cooperative spirit; we are together without pretense, just getting things in order. Once the detail work of the collage begins, I am working intuitively. My hands and my heart know what to do.

By the time the collage is nearly finished, a week later, I understand that it is the culmination of these months of spiritual searching, a kind of visual summary of what I’m trying to accomplish by spending a year making art about God. The collage presents not only a gradation of color—from light brown to orange to red and purple—but also a visual trail of small personal remnants from tip to tip. Every piece of fabric or paper, every embellishment, contains its own story. The collage process echoes the life process. I choose what to carry forward and what to discard; I choose what is important in each new moment.

Reflection: Beginning, and Beginning, and Beginning

2009-10-23T16:34:00.003-04:00

Phoenix Seed Cycle by Melanie Weidner. Image used by permission of the artist.

Autumn is a season of mixed emotions. I love to watch the daily changes in familiar trees as their leaves shift hues—delicate gradations here, bold sweeps of flame there—and then drop to the ground, a process that seems somehow gradual and abrupt at the same time. But along with the pleasure of admiring the annual performance art of the trees, a sadness arises. It’s particularly potent for me this year.

Photo by Nicole C. Deyton

Up until now, there has only been a brief period in my life (ages 22-27) when I wasn’t in school. Even as an adult, my life’s rhythm has almost always been closely tied to an academic calendar. This year, for the first time since 2002, it’s October and I’m not planning for fall break or studying for midterms. This awareness brings both relief and a sense of loss.

We’ve come to expect the physical signs of Nature’s changing of seasons. The color dance of the trees is a delight, but not a surprise. We human beings dance the same rhythmic dance of change, but on a more frequent and highly irregular basis—so when we find ourselves shedding an identity, it does come as a surprise.

Our human identities cycle through. We shed the old skin that doesn’t quite fit anymore, then endure a season of bareness that eventually (what seems like a very long time later) brings tentative new growth. And then, after having enjoyed a season of full identity bloom, we find ourselves startled when our colors begin to turn again, willy-nilly.

Sometimes, in contrast with the shedding-bareness-growth-blooming-shedding model, it seems much more abrupt. We go from full bloom (competence and confidence) to starting over as a beginner, all in the blink of an eye. In the last six years, during my academic journey to becoming an art therapist, I’ve gone through multiple rapid cycles of firsts and lasts.

When I began my second undergraduate experience, I was already competent at the academic side of things—I’d already graduated from college once, after all—but in my art classes, I was a rock-bottom beginner. I distinctly remember the terror I felt on the first day of my first drawing class. That terror came and went over the next three years. In order to arrive at the happy pinnacle of my senior-year thesis show, I had to make it through many hours of self-doubt and struggle alone in the studio—not to mention the raw frustration of a figure-drawing class that challenged every drop of my self-respect. It was in my art classes that I learned how to fail without giving up, how to balance mastery and beginner’s mind with every new project. And I became an utter beginner once again in graduate school, where everything I thought I understood about myself was either transformed or deepened over the course of three years.

In the past five months, I’ve experienced another abrupt transition from competence to newness. When I first went back to school, getting my master’s degree was at the far end of a new road; now that I’m on the other side of graduation, my M.A. is only the starting point of the current journey. I’ve moved from a hard-earned sense of competency (the final weeks of internship, my capstone orals presentation) to pervasive newness: a recent graduate searching for opportunities to become a new professional, starting volunteer work in an unfamiliar environment, living in a new part of an otherwise familiar city.

The gift of this neverending transition is the mandatory return to my core self. Who am I when I am not a student, not an intern, not an employee? The in-betweenness of this unaffiliated autumn season reminds me that who I am is not equivalent to what I do. My basic goodness does not change within the dizzying transitions from one identity to the next.

In Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, Pema Chodron writes of finding her own Buddha nature still present regardless of the situation: “Buddha falling flat on her face; Buddha feeling on top of the world; Buddha longing for yesterday…” This autumn, I am Buddha looking for work, Buddha studying for the national counseling exam, Buddha making marks in a journal, Buddha struggling to recognize herself in the mirror. Hello old self/new self: no less valuable to the world than any other Buddha. Namasté.

Reflection: Stitching Meditation

2009-10-11T18:41:00.000-04:00

It is from fiber that all living organisms are built—

the tissues of plants, and ourselves. Our nerves,
our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles.
We are fibrous structures.

—Magdalena Abakanowicz

Stitching: it’s a rhythmic, repetitive process. Like taking steps. Like breathing.

Stitches are collective. One stitch out of context is merely a mark. Stitches together can form a line, or fill a space. They can tell a story.

Frequently, a pattern of stitches viewed from the back (the “wrong side”) tells a different story than the front view.

Stitching shows up in my art process a lot.

It can provide a focal point…

…or enhance an evolving image…

…or it can be the line I use to create a drawing on fabric, by walking the path of the image one threaded mark at a time.

But sometimes I stitch just to be stitching, for the pleasure of it, with no end product in mind. I find it soothing.

Stitching meditation creates space. I can’t rush it. It helps me remember what it means to notice. What is true? I only know this moment of pulling this needle through this fabric. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Retrospective: “Now, Again, Poetry, I Grasp For You”

2009-10-07T11:03:00.007-04:00

Now, again, poetry,

…I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your

ancient and stubborn poise

—Adrienne Rich, “The Fact of a Doorframe”

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.

The serpentine form is haunting me. It’s been several months since I saw the documentary Rivers and Tides, in which sculptor Andy Goldsworthy creates breathtaking structures entirely from native natural materials—leaves, thorns, mud, ice, stones—only to document their literal disintegration through time and natural processes. Watching Goldsworthy work, slow and deliberate, sometimes seeing a structure unexpectedly crumble beneath his hands—it’s an otherworldly experience. “There are always these obsessive forms you cannot get rid of,” Goldsworthy admits, sounding as if he himself is haunted by the forms that repeatedly appear in his work—circles, egg-shaped cairns, stone arches, and the snake-like or river-like line that he calls “the serpentine form.”

I love all of Goldsworthy’s work, but I am particularly captivated by the serpentine form in its many versions. He draws it in a canvas of snow atop a frozen pond; he builds it into a wall of dried clay in a museum gallery; he recreates it in wet leaves atop a flat stone. It’s a little different every time, but you’d know it anywhere.

Months before initiating this journey, I created a mixed-media painting that borrowed one version of Goldsworthy’s serpentine form. In it, I used red Carolina clay (mixed with a binder) on a wood support to create the bold line of the form. The background texture was formed by torn sandpaper and found objects from nature that I had painted black. Now I feel a strong leading to work with similar materials and again to borrow Goldsworthy’s serpentine form, but this time to incorporate text. I turn to poetry, the first art form I ever loved. The text itself will create the form—poetry as media.

I find two poems that speak to me of the direct experience of God. The first, “Evening,” is a short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in which the final stanza describes the “immensity and fear” of the human experience. We search for our place in the universe and the meaning of our presence here, unable to quite grasp the idea that God is both external and within us: “now bounded, now immeasurable, / it is alternately stone in you and star.” We are flawed, stumbling, imprisoned human creatures, and yet we contain sparks of the divine Source from which we spring.

The second poem, “Matins” by Denise Levertov, explores the possibility that God is found in mundane everyday routines, in kitchens and bathrooms and dirty streets as well as in holy places. The final section of this long poem directly addresses the divine: “Marvelous Truth, confront us / at every turn, / in every guise… / Thrust close your smile / that we know you, terrible joy.” Levertov’s word choice indicates her ambivalence about the omnipresence of God. The possibility that the divine is woven into daily life, that no place exists where God is not, brings a mixed reaction that is both welcoming and fearful.

Both poems suggest that the divine is as near as we allow it to be, that the Source is somehow tangible. I see a connection to Annie Dillard’s description of the beliefs of a certain Hasidic teacher: “[A]ll we see holds holiness… This is not pantheism but pan-entheism: The one transcendent God made the universe, and his presence kindles inside every speck of it” (For the Time Being). I am drawn to these poems because they suggest that it is not possible for us to truly be anything other than awed and a little bit afraid of the nearness of God, who dwells within us whether or not we acknowledge (or enjoy) that presence.

I make multiple photocopies of each poem and soak the copies in coffee for a couple of days to dull the bright-white copier paper. Meanwhile, I gesso a pine plank and use charcoal to draw the winding form on the gessoed wood. It pleases me to again be immersed in the landscape of this curving, flowing line. Next, I fill in the background of the form with black gesso, leaving the form as unpainted negative space. I like the bold yet empty look of it, and it remains at this stage for several days.

The following week, tearing the coffee-tinted sheets of text into very small pieces—single words or parts of words—I soak the bits of text briefly in a solution of matte medium and water. I begin to layer the text onto the serpentine form.

Although I am placing the bits of text at random, the repetitive act of handling and placing each piece allows the poems to sink deeply into my awareness. Again and again I see the words “alternately stone in you and star” and “terrible joy”; I carry these words in my heart during the days of working on this piece.

I am constructing a physical form from literal pieces of poetry. The drips of wet binder integrate with the black background as I add numerous layers of text to the winding form. The serpentine form, flat against the background at first, has risen dimensionally from the support.

…A friend suggests that the serpentine form might be more striking—and more true to the influence of Andy Goldsworthy—if I incorporate gradations of color. It feels right. I decide to keep the central part of the form as the lightest tone to give it somewhat of a glow, with the darkest sections at the top and bottom of the form.

I begin painting segments of the form with coffee. It’s a slow process—I have to let each application dry overnight before adding the next. Drips from the coffee mingle with the dried matte medium drips, leaving further traces of the long process of creating this piece.

In the end, the lightest section of text is tinted only by the original soaking, while the darkest sections at the top and bottom of the piece receive up to seven separate applications of coffee. I title the finished piece Direct Experience of God. It is the most visually striking work I have done yet.

There are many images of Andy Goldsworthy’s work available on the Web. A good starting point is here.

Retrospective: A Crack in Everything, Part Two

2009-09-28T14:29:00.001-04:00

Hatching Out (in process), 2005. Mud/clay, plaster, and chicken wire on wood.

I tell you this

to break your heart—

by which I mean only

that it break open, and never close again,

to the rest of the world.

—Mary Oliver, “Lead”

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long spiritual exploration through artmaking.

I am not a sculptor. I have no training in three-dimensional art. I remind myself of this fact when I get the first glimmers of an idea for a piece about cracking open. The surface will be red Carolina clay, which cracks organically as its moisture evaporates over a period of days. And the armature, or supporting underlayer, will be in the shape of an egg half-protruding from a flat wooden support. …This piece will test my trust in the process. The materials themselves will do most of the work, which means that I will begin the piece but not directly finish it. Once the final mud layer is applied, I will have to relinquish control and accept whatever happens. …

This visual image of an egg with a cracking-open shell springs from a recent visit by my friend Melanie Weidner, a Quaker artist. I have invited Melanie to see my studio space and my work so far on this spiritual and artistic journey. We are struck by the overlapping themes of our current work, including the use of poetic texts. Melanie tells me about a particular Rumi poem that makes reference to hatching open through prayer.

In the following days I am haunted by the image of mud cracking as it dries, and I wonder how I can use mud as a primary media in a new piece. …When I open Risking Everything to the Rumi poem, I am stunned to see the words “I am stuck in the mud of my life.” I cannot ignore such a blatant indicator of the direction I should follow…

So, non-sculptor that I am, I enlist the aid of a fellow artist to mold a half-egg armature on wood using chicken wire. I plan to cover the armature with two or three layers of papier-maché, followed by a layer of gesso, and finally a layer of red-orange mud. The piece will be called Hatching Out.

…At first I’m convinced that the physical process of this piece will be fairly uncomplicated; I just need to complete each step carefully, and the only surprise will be the manner in which the mud will crack. Alas, it is not for me to dictate the arrival of surprises… I’m nowhere near the point where I can apply mud, but cracks are happening elsewhere.

First, because I get impatient with the first papier-maché mixture and add some gesso to it in a devil-may-care moment, that lumpy layer cracks as it dries. But since it’s solidly adhering to the egg shape, I don’t try to remove it. Instead, I decide to add a layer of plaster to smooth out the lumpiness of the egg. Applying the wet plaster with a plastic palette knife is startlingly like icing a cake. My plan is to return the next day and sand down the plastered egg to a uniform smoothness.

Instead, I get sick. I spend the weekend in bed instead of in the studio. When I return, ready to sand down my egg, I find the surface cracked yet again—the semi-smooth plaster surface shows several fractures, and the plaster has entirely cracked off in two areas. Not only that, but the combined weight and moisture of the plaster and papier-maché layers have begun to warp the wood support, to the point of causing a two-inch crack in the support itself.

At this point, I know what I’ve done wrong in barging ahead with unfamiliar materials. … I have to decide whether to forge ahead with this imperfect and unstable piece as it is, or start over with new and better materials. I’m torn. I’m fond of my egg, flawed though it is. But it seems ridiculous to cling unnecessarily to something that isn’t working.

…It dawns on me that this idea of “letting the process lead” requires a more-than-intellectual willingness to embrace whatever happens. It’s not about certainty, a guarantee that the piece will work out. It’s difficult, this business of trust. Sitting down with my journal to ponder my next move, I come across a quote from Surya Das about “work that genuinely develops us as we develop it.” It’s really about the Buddhist concept of right livelihood, but at this moment it feels like an offering, a reassurance that this difficult work of making art is well worth doing. It’s a blessing to be in development. I’m not perfect, and my egg isn’t going to be perfect, either.

…I do a little first aid with wet plaster strips to make the egg’s cracked surface solid and unbroken. …Three days later I come into the studio with a bucket of red Carolina clay and a small bag of dark earth. … I had forgotten how much I like working with clay and mud. Being on my knees in the studio layering mud onto this egg structure feels primal somehow, as if I am building a world. My plan is to cover only the egg and later paint the wood background with black acrylic, but I find myself spontaneously covering the entire background with a thin layer of clay as well, and the visual effect is striking. I don’t know how the background layer will react when it dries, but I’m eager to see what will happen.

…I check on the egg every day to mark its progress. Each time I leave the studio, I know that the egg will be different when I return. It dries unevenly, the moisture slowly withdrawing from one side to the other. In this partially dried state, the egg seems like a living creature, an object imbued with transformative powers. It takes more than three days to fully dry and crack. Finally, all of the moisture is gone. Deep cracks run throughout the clay surface as well as in the dark circle. Despite the cracks, the dried mud is firmly adhered to the egg armature, but I will add a finishing layer of spray-on fixative to ensure that it remains intact.

…The piece becomes irreparably damaged in an accident soon after its completion. One in-process image is the only evidence of its existence. The forced letting-go of this piece, a struggle at every step, feels like a lesson in my ultimate lack of control over the process. Even the final product of the art process is not really final. Some of my artwork may outlast me, some of it will not, but the fact is that whatever mark I make on the world is impermanent. And yet the knowledge of that impermanence fails to persuade me to give up this business of making art. In fact, it leads me to want this divine connection not less, but more.

Reflection: Leave the Roots On

2009-09-26T14:38:00.034-04:00

.... Lie down, wounded
angel. I love you. I know there is
no tender palpable miracle happiness.
— Mary Adams, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis

Every once in a while, I become reacquainted with old notebooks.

My life is flush with them: sketchbooks and art journals, commonplace books of other people’s poetry, binders of old poems and nonfiction and school papers. scrawled journals chronicling nearly every developmental phase—the identity crisis we call “adolescence,” a bleak period of young adult depression, the secondary identity crisis known as graduate school.

There used to be journals from elementary and middle school, too, but I destroyed them years ago in a fit of 15-year-old embarrassment. I know better than to destroy old journals now, although I have sometimes been tempted to reach for a wide-tipped Sharpie to obliterate passages that make me cringe.

Sometimes, in retrospective reading, I admire my past selves. I cheer them on. I write them imaginary love letters detailing their unknown strengths. I wade through the murk of dilemmas from six years ago, or 16 years ago, and I feel deep compassion for that past-me who was so much braver and smarter and more creative than she realized.

And sometimes I wince at what I wrote, wishing I could do a bit of time-traveling to nudge my past-self in a better direction.

It is a blessing, these riches of so many years of introspection. It's a gift of instant perspective. It reminds me that if my here-and-now 34-year-old self can be so compassionate toward my past selves, there will also come a time when a more experienced me will offer compassion-in-retrospect to the self of my here-and-now. (Notice all the hyphenation. It’s a complex interrelationship that requires the mediation of hyphens. I am now the same self I always was and always will be… and yet, from another perspective, I’m not.)

The only thing that doesn’t change is the urge to document what’s happening. There’s not really a specific motivation. It’s not just about keeping a record for myself, with an awareness of how helpful it is to touch base with all of the old myselves. It’s not just a means of expression for difficult or confusing or overwhelming feelings. It’s not just because I would like someday to share some of these journals with my children, or to revisit them in difficult parenting times as a way to remember what’s hard about being four or 14. It’s not just because I want to leave as many marks on this earth as possible in my time here.

It’s also just because I am compelled to do it.

Many thanks to the Notebook Stories blog for featuring this post!

Retrospective: Stitching Broken Into Whole

2009-09-23T10:26:00.007-04:00

Portal (2006). Stitching and tea stains on paper, mounted on stretched fabric.

Ring the bells that still can ring

This is your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

—Leonard Cohen

This is an excerpt from my undergraduate senior thesis, which describes my attempt in 2005-2006 to clarify my spiritual path by making art about it.

…This piece begins with the idea of a stained glass window, one that is beautiful and simple and transcendent despite showing the scars of old wounds. But my intention is to suggest stained glass, not to try to emulate it. I struggle to find a shape that seems appropriate, something simpler and less majestic than the soaring spires of cathedral windows.

Perhaps, I eventually realize, what I want is not a window so much as a doorway, a portal. This insight brings the piece into greater clarity; now I understand more not only about the shape (I settle on an elongated oval that resembles a keyhole) but, significantly, what purpose the piece should hold for the viewer. I want it to be, rather than a beautiful object to be looked at, a beautiful opening to be looked through—an entrance to deeper knowing.

…It takes a couple of hours and a great deal of patience to tear the medium-weight drawing paper into the right shape and then to tear that shape into smaller irregularly sized pieces. Then I reassemble the portal shape by adding one piece at a time, using tiny strips of masking tape on the back to anchor the joined pieces. Next comes the slow work of stitching closed the tears I have created, using heavy quilting thread the same color as the paper, which will only be evident on close inspection.

I am thinking about what brokenness means, how breaking apart is useful to an eventual coming together. Art therapist Catherine Hyland Moon points out the many expressions that use the word “break” as a metaphor for transition and new insights: breaking new ground, having a breakthrough, breaking away. “We are made ready to nurture others through our own experiences of brokenness,” she writes.

I’m ready to begin staining the reassembled shapes. I prepare five different teas at high concentrations: an herb tea made of various red berries, an orange herb tea, green tea, lemon herb tea, and a chai black tea. I haven’t tested the resulting colors to determine how they will look when dried; I’m just playing it by ear. With a watercolor brush, I begin to apply the various colors of tea to the paper, staying mostly within the bounds of the stitching but allowing some degree of overlap. Deliberately, I paint each shape with concentrated tea, careful to include the quilting thread as well because it will absorb the tea colors. It takes four separate tea applications, with hours between to allow the paper to dry, before I’m satisfied with the results.

...The portal is one simple shape, but it comprises so much turmoil—tearing and rejoining, overlapping stains in diverse colors of varying saturations. It speaks to me of wholeness that evolves from brokenness. It is our scars and the marks of our varied experiences that make us the complex and beautiful human creatures that we are.

Reflection: To Be In Relationship

2009-09-21T12:55:00.000-04:00

Untitled print (2005). Tempera on paper.

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.
Help someone`s soul heal.
Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
- Rumi

There is one word that sums up many things for me: my way of experiencing art, my approach to art therapy, my understanding of spiritual purpose. That word is relationship.

Our experience of the world is individual. We can only know what we experience from within our singular mind/body sensory amalgam. We rely on others for additional input and new perspectives, as well as for comfort and belonging. In connection with other individuals, we create the world.

The phenomenological approach to art therapy allows therapist and client to enter together into the world of an artwork. There is no attempt to interpret, to attach definitions. Instead, the artist engages in relationship with his or her creation. What if we approached other human beings this way? Putting our bias aside and listening to what longs to be heard... One relationship, one moment at a time, you can change the world you share with others.

Rumi offers us simple and powerful ways to be in relationship. To be a lamp: shed light where we can. To be a ladder: give someone a leg up. To be a lifeboat: hold steady for someone who feels as if they are drowning.

With every open-hearted connection you make, your love buoys us all.

Retrospective: Be Very Afraid. And Then Draw It Anyway.

2009-09-14T17:03:00.000-04:00

This is a drawing I made in 2003. It is untitled. I made it with a green gel pen on 60-pound sketchbook paper.

Please take a moment to notice whatever thoughts or feelings arose in you when you first glanced at this drawing.

If your response was That's not a very good drawing. The perspective is all messed up, and it's not very realistic, and there's hardly any detail... you're absolutely right. If we approach this drawing from a sheer technical viewpoint, it gets a failing grade.

On the other hand, if your first thought was That's such a good drawing! Whoever made it was really paying attention to their environment... you, also, are absolutely correct. If we see this sketch as an attempt to interact with and remember a specific moment in time, a way to record an impression, then it succeeds.

And if your reaction sidestepped the question of quality, if you saw this drawing and wondered how and why and by whom it was drawn, if you intuitively identified with the underlying desire to somehow name and contain one little piece of an overwhelming experience... then you are the most absolutely correct of all.

I've never been very interested in debates about how to define Art, or whether a piece of artwork is Good or Not Good based on any specific parameters. What interests me is what type and degree of relationship a created object compels from me. Sometimes I can't seem to stop looking at it—I fall instantly in love. Sometimes I find a piece aesthetically displeasing but, because it elicits a strong response from me, it has succeeded in its job of creating relationship.

This is why I love seeing pages from other people's sketchbooks. In our sketchbooks, we are vulnerable. Sketchbooks are tender places where our drawings sometimes tremble or smear or are left unfinished. I began recording my world in notebooks at age 9. They were purely written journals for the first 17 years, no visual elements until about 2001. Even now my journals and notebooks and sketchbooks are a messy and cryptic mix of handwritten entries, sketches and collages, lists, color-coded schedules, and notes from a smorgasbord of whatever I'm studying lately... but always they are vulnerable and doubtful, with bravery leaking out around the edges.

So here's what I see when I look at this drawing now. I see a young woman holding a green gel pen and a cheap sketchbook, sitting on the back of a couch in an empty common room at twilight, struggling to breathe in and center herself, despite bone-deep anxiety and self-doubt. She is afraid of being caught in the act of being an artist—afraid of being told that she is not an artist and never could be—and she hurries through the drawing so as to escape unnoticed. But she so badly wants to capture the beauty of the mugs drying on a table at twilight. She draws because she can't help seeing and loving the world.

What matters here isn't the drawing itself, or the hurried and anxious way in which it was produced. What this drawing records is a moment in time that mattered, and a desire to document seeing the moment that was stronger than the artist's fear of doing it wrong.

So it is that the drawings I am least proud of are sometimes also the ones that make me feel the most proud.

Review: The Book that Catapulted Me into Authenticity

2009-09-10T18:38:00.000-04:00

I think I was about 26 at the time, which places this story about eight years ago in history—the world's history, and art therapy's, and my own.

I may be getting the date wrong, but I do clearly remember the context: the chronic stress of being bad at (and miserable at) my job in scholarly publishing, and the acute stress of a close family member being suddenly quite ill, and the particular sensory details of one hospital waiting room where I would be spending nine hours waiting to hear that things would be okay, and the library book I read in its entirety during those hours—which happened to be Art Is A Way Of Knowing by Pat Allen.

How I actually came across this book is lost somewhere in the ephemera of time. But what matters is that it created a definitive dividing line in my experience, marking the crossing of a transformation threshold. Before I read it, I had no idea there was such a thing as art therapy, but afterward, I understood that I had to follow this path. Note: this wasn't "hey, this might be a viable career option." It was a calling; a vision; a beacon of purpose in the midst of so much chaos.

The front cover of Art Is A Way Of Knowing doesn't say anything about art therapy. The subtitle is A guide to self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through creativity. Inside is a patchwork quilt of information and stories and art images. It was 1995 when Pat Allen offered the world this intimate and sometimes painfully honest reflection on her path to, and through, art therapy as both a career and a means of self-understanding. For me, this offering was a divine gift at a time when I had no choice but to be reborn, but also had an utter lack of clarity about what that meant. Pat's book gave me an instant mentor: a flawed, uncertain, struggling, and deeply honest woman whose artwork spoke as expressively as her storytelling.

I encountered Pat Allen at an art therapy conference two years ago. It was my first conference as a grad student, and I was awed and humbled by everything I was learning, not to mention the experience of seeing so many art therapy pioneers in the flesh after having known them only as author names on journal articles. I couldn't help approaching Pat to tell her how her book had changed my life (although I was determined to avoid uttering such a sophomoric phrase). I stumbled through some words of gratitude, and she gracefully replied that she always appreciates knowing how her work has been received, because birthing a book is a long and painful process.

That exchange was the highlight of my graduate life up to that point. It was recently eclipsed by an unexpected high-five from Bruce Moon. But that's a different story.

You can visit Pat Allen's virtual studio here. I also recommend her second book: Art Is A Spiritual Path.

Retrospective: Poetry and Process

2009-09-06T19:36:00.000-04:00

Over & Over / Breath (Diptych). 2005.

Stitching, stains, pencil, and found objects on paper.

I cannot walk an inch

without trying to walk to God.

—Anne Sexton

This is an excerpt from my undergraduate senior thesis, which describes my attempt in 2005-2006 to clarify my spiritual path by making art about it.

…In a moment of anxiety and desire to work on a low-pressure project, I decide to make a mess, to get my hands dirty and just play. I steep several teabags in water for an hour or two and then pour and drip the dark tea onto a large sheet of heavy paper, the kind of paper that can take a lot of abuse. Later I begin smearing wet coffee grounds over the paper, in some places rubbing the grounds heavily into the surface and in others letting the wet grounds sit in clumps on top of the paper. I give it a day or so to dry thoroughly and then shake the coffee grounds into the trash. And then I don’t know what to do with this messy, cryptic piece I have begun, so I set it aside. It sits in my studio, propped against a wall, for weeks.

Then another day of anxiety occurs. I want to work on something safe, something that doesn’t matter much, some kind of action to calm my mind. Looking at the messy piece, I notice that one strong curving tea stain dominates the tangle of suggested images formed by my staining and wiping. I take out a brown colored pencil, two shades darker than the stain itself, and begin to trace one edge of the dominant stain. The sweeping line of the stain becomes a bold dimensional shape because of the contrast of the dark pencil line, which forms a kind of shadow illusion. It seems to me that this strong shape wants to be a frame or container for some important element…

A brief excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sunrise” has been ringing in my heart for several days: “What is the name / of the deep breath I would take / over and over / for all of us?” I don’t understand it, but it stays with me. It’s difficult to discern what she means by “deep breath” or why her question is how to name it. But it’s clear that it happens, or must happen, “over and over”—every day, every new moment, for the duration of a life of undetermined length. Whatever the poet meant by these words, to me it speaks of prayer, the attempt to pray despite not knowing how to do it or who might be listening. I find it striking in the context of this poem that the word “spirit” comes from the Latin root spiritus, “breath.” And it touches me that Oliver expresses this desire for an enveloping nurturing gesture in the form of a question. Like the poet herself, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but one moment at a time I continue creating whatever it is, something that I hope will be “for all of us.”

...The bold container shape, then, is there to highlight a word: “breath,” the offering to the tormented world. I write the word in pencil, drawing it reverently as if inscribing the briefest of prayers. But it isn’t enough to have placed it there in the container; it needs to be bolder than the dark line surrounding it. I thread a curved needle with yarn, a dark olive green hue, and sew “breath” onto the paper, following the pencil line. It’s a slow process, piercing the heavy paper with the needle tip and pulling the fibers through, front to back and back to front, one stitch at a time.

I have now reached an uncomfortable crossroads in this work. There is no unifying image in the piece as a whole. How can I unite the strong curving “breath” segment with the rest of the stains and smears? With some trepidation on my part—it’s scary to tear a work-in-progress in half—the piece becomes a diptych… the “breath” segment and a second one with an echoing subtle curve. To this second segment, I add text to clarify “breath”: “deep breath,” followed by “over and over.” This text undergoes the same stitching process as before, using two new colors.

…Other poems have been burning in my consciousness. I search my journals for lines that connect…With colored pencils in various shades of brown and olive, I begin to add text to the diptych. Text becomes texture as I use the words to fill in a space here, to visually extend a line there. If Mary Oliver’s key ideas are the centerpiece of this work, then Adrienne Rich provides the anchor—I carve a slice from her lines and lay it repeatedly across the shape that encloses “breath,” so that breath/spirit and words/communion are intertwined and interdependent.

…I walk around my studio space, picking up one by one natural objects that I have found on long walks—gingko leaves, stones, small metal objects. I pause when I come across a dried hydrangea blossom, the color of a tea stain but perfectly formed. I found it on a walk six months ago and have kept it in my studio ever since, not knowing why it was important. Petals from this blossom become the final addition to the diptych, waterfalling downward. Weeks later, a visitor to my studio tells me that the color of hydrangea blossoms vary, blue or pink, depending on the acidity of the soil.

Artistic identity.

2009-06-01T13:16:00.000-04:00

Mal at turning*turning is asking readers to consider: How do I make time to make? (She's also offering a mini-quilt giveaway, which is highly motivating me to respond to the question! Nice work, Mal!)

My answer to this question is less about the logistics of How than the underlying foundation of Why. All the How in the world doesn't spur me to actually create art; it's the Why that paves the way and makes all those silly little logistics seem very easy.

Seven years ago, when I was 27 (probably not coincidentally...that whole Saturn Return thing), I experienced an artistic reawakening--my own personal Renaissance. I woke up to an awareness that I had been sleepwalking through an endless winter in my personal and professional lives, and I woke up to a tiny vulnerable desire to Make Something of my life.

I began by Making Little Somethings, physically, by hand. I didn't think of myself as an artist before this time, but suddenly making art was all I could think about. I started keeping a sketchbook (although it was mostly writing for a long time, and often still is). I started buying things like paint pens and fabric and trying to figure out, through experimentation, how one might use them.

It was an explosion of creativity that had been building up for a very long time, a volcano of artistic identity submerged beneath a lifetime of not knowing who I was or what I wanted. This explosion led me gradually to my current professional identity as an art therapist. It also changed my worldview in a profound way, especially after I took my first drawing and painting classes. I learned to see differently. The world (including myself, as a vital part of the world) became more vibrant and beautiful.

Art has given me a way to know myself, and a new way to see others.

Given all of that... the How is nearly irrelevant, because I Must Somehow. There is nothing more important than connecting with my deepest awareness as an offering to the world.

Asking for it.

2009-05-15T15:16:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotation to Get What They Really Want by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. This book provides great insight into why women often have a difficult time negotiating for anything (not just a promotion or a salary increase, but a variety of things that would make our day-to-day lives happier).

Most significant for me, the book explores how to get what you want while maintaining a positive relationship with the other party. It made me aware of how much I fear offending or alienating others by asserting myself. I recently got feedback from a supervisor that one of my weaknesses is a failure to sufficiently advocate for my professional needs. So for me, it's a revolutionary concept, this idea of negotiating as a way to mutually improve the experience of both parties involved.

All of this leads me to wonder: How much of my fear of self-advocacy is due to my upbringing? How much is tied into societal views of me as a woman? And how much is based on personal experience? In the past five years I have experienced numerous successes on many fronts... and yet my belief system seems to be based instead on all the cumulative experience of perceived failure that preceded those five years.

I think of that moment in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (which I re-watched recently) when Harry protests that he can't really claim his successes as his own, because it was usually luck and outside help that got him through. Likewise, I feel like a fraud when I talk about my skills and what I've done well.

It seems that even when I acknowledge my successes, I feel guilty--as if, maybe, there isn't enough to go around, and I'm stealing success from someone who deserves it more. When will I begin believing that I deserve to succeed?

rationale.

2009-03-28T16:35:00.000-04:00

There's nothing rational about it, this urge to be seen and heard. But in the logic of intuitive reaching, the clear call of what my heart needs to thrive, it's simple. So here it is.

I've always been a writer, in a far deeper way than I have always been an artist. Words were my first love, my first glimpse of power, my first understanding of how to shape an idea or an image. The containers for my writing have changed many times over the past thirty years. I've kept handwritten journals in bound books, lined and unlined, and in spiral notebooks. I've experimented with online journals and social networking and instant messaging. I've written literary email to close friends, sometimes epic in length, sometimes more like Imagist poetry.

And this is something different, at the same time that it is utterly the same thing.

Intention: To enjoy what is, and let go of the attachment to definitions.