From there to here, and beyond

I attended a day-long retreat this week where I enjoyed the gift of spacious silence for reflecting on my creative path—how I got here and where I'm headed. I created this sketchbook spread:

I also made an aspiration card that sums up many of my life principles. You can see it on the Bent Tuba Studio blog.

Rest is not the opposite of action.

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 and slowing down aren’t mutually exclusive if I let go of the thought that I 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?

Scenes from the studio.

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.

On being enough.

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?

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.

Reverb10: One Word

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?

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.

Meantime.

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.

All my work is in progress

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?

Reflection: Beginning, and Beginning, and Beginning

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.