Or is it more?

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.

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

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.

How can I keep from singing?

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.

Review: The Book that Catapulted Me into Authenticity

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.