THERE COMES A YES

"After the final no, there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends."

Wallace Stevens

Anyone else feeling as though there has been a steady flow of recent and unfortunate news?

I won't bother to catalogue the details here.

Instead I'd prefer to use this space to send some much-needed happy thoughts out to those of my dear friends who could use a little extra right about now:

rainbows (but no butterflies)
resounding vibrations of OM circle energy
deliciously long, warm hugs
singing ABBA songs out loud while dancing in the kitchen
trying to play catch with balloons
warm brownies and vanilla gelato
first cup of coffee on a cold day
climbing into a freshly made bed
lying on grass watching clouds
warm sand and warm waves
sunset on water (waiting for the green flash!)
singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
scratching a loved one's back
painting toenails
warm stone under bare feet
pine needles baking in the sun
maple syrup on fingertips
fresh-cut flowers on the table
fuzzy tomato leaves
a purring cat stretched out on its back
sound of rain against the roof
cartwheels - anywhere
the tooth fairy antics
finger painting
witty sarcasm...

What helps you to forget your worries and sadness?

OUR INCORRIGIBLE SENSES

Our incorrigible senses have the ability to exhume from the vaults of our minds strikingly vivid, seemingly full-bodied memories and images. Retelling stories ancient within the timeline of our lifetime.

These stories are so old that they no longer have the flesh of their own words.

Yet these memories quickly rise to the surface with the merest scent, the slightest texture, the faintest song. Murky are these moments when we are caught unawares by the persuasive embrace of the past.

For today's creativity challenge I created a layered, textured, collage...I'd like to accompany my collage with a soundtrack and scents...so here are a few. ENJOY!

The subtle scent of lavender and echinacea reminds me of a 13-year-old boy who lent me his scarf one rainy May day in Yellowstone…

Sunlight mixed with fresh-cut grass and skin lathered with Dove soap stir images of long hot summer showers…

Dust, sweat and pine needles baked under the sun return me to lazy afternoons on Devil’s Head…

Taste of vine ripened tomatoes and damp creek-scented breeze tinged with dog woods recall evenings plucking vegetables from our childhood garden and the surprise of Alice-in-Wonderland-style surreal-sized tomato worms...

Garden roses still remind me of holiday breakfasts with my grandparents alongside their rose garden…decades ago and scraped knees from climbing jagged, sun-drenched lava rocks to play beneath the pines...

The rustle of breeze through summer-lush, cottonwoods, their fecund fluff filling the sky and blanketing the fields like an early snowfall…

The contrast of daily textures so often overlooked…scratchy garden twine against velveteen tomato leaves and their smooth-as-a-baby’s-bottom fruits. Bare feet moving across the warm, deep pile of our area rug onto the cool, warn slats of our hardwood floors…

Curious mixture of raven’s caw-caw, mingled with a grackle’s tweet-tweet and the rhythmic trance of Hearing Damage, resonating within me like a tuning fork…

Have you noticed? Even in the silence the persistent thrum of technology continues to fill the void…we’re never truly without some sense being artificially stimulated, encouraged, triggered…

Our senses conjure from memory the most fragile of images with merely the faintest of hinted scents wafting upon the breeze. Awakening long-quiet parts of ourselves. Simultaneously wild,translucent, sacred and delicate.

What might happen if we could silence all of our senses? Just for one minute? What might we feel?

Clarity? Or simply a quenching emptiness and silence?

STEADY DRIZZLE

Apparently I needed this...

I am an indestructible romantic. How can it be? I suppose it's not something that can be reasoned. And here in the poem I've written for today's challenge my softer side is revealed.

I've signed on for a creativity challenge. Creativity Boot Camp.

Didn't I just finish telling someone I didn't need a kick in the $%! Well, I suppose this is of a different variety. While I'm a motivated, self-achiever, this boot camp is pushing me explore other mediums, inspiring me to step beyond my comfortable forms of expression and encouraging daily creative outbursts.

Today's assignment was to explore a medium that originally inspired us. Way back when. And to work with the word "drizzle."

Oooh! Such a deliciously descriptive word! Reminds me of messy afternoons, cooking and licking fingertips. Honey, maple and chocolate syrup. Butter cream frosting...

Or the steady drizzle of a rainy Northwest day...coating eyelashes and tree branches.

We were also given this quote: “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

I was reminded of my need to add words, to speak to the art and clearly explain it for my audience. My words tend to accompany my pieces, arm-in-arm.

Today my piece combines my original photograph and poem...

If you remember back to when it all began, what originally inspired you? Is it possible to reconnect to that feeling, that medium, that moment of inspiration?

Are you willing to give it a try?!

Will what started as a drizzle develop into a deluge?

WISER

"Take thy thoughts to bed with thee, for the morning is wiser than the evening."
(Бери мысли спать с тобою, ибо утро вечера мудренее. Beri mysli spatʹ s toboyu, ibo utro vechera mudrenyee.)
Russian Proverb

LAYERS

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”
Julia Cameron

I am grateful for spontaneous reconnections today! I just spent the morning catching up with a dear friend and discussing creativity on a deadline....

Is the term working artist a contradiction? John Cleese was once quoted as saying something along the lines of if you want creativity from your workers you must also allow time for play. Sometimes being creative under pressure and on a timeline is soooo hard! It's like walking into a bookstore with excitement and no list and then all of a sudden every book you have ever wanted to read evaporates from your mind! Why is that?

When nothing is due I am inspired by simplicity, honesty, process, destruction, scribbles, a crumpled napkin, swirls of gasoline in a puddle of water, patterns of leaves on the ground, tire tracks in mud, patterns of shoelaces...for me the courage and work comes from finding(or perhaps more accurately surrendering to) the creativity and inspiration when a piece is due, when a show is in its final stages, when expectations are set and schedules are on.

If I can begin to think of time and schedules like artistic processes...layers...I love knowing something is beneath something else in a piece - there's a quality of something hinted at and mysterious and almost secret...very inspiring! What happens if I allow what has already inspired me to rise to the surface, to reveal itself or its shadows in these times of creative ebb?

"To be productive, any level of work requires the willingness to empty ourselves of what we think we want and know, and a corresponding willingness to open ourselves to what emerges as important and needful."

Grace Unfolding, Greg Johanson and Ron Kurtz

What might have space to arrive if we dare to empty ourselves of expectations?

SACRED AND INEXPLICABLE

“Too often it is we who won't let life be simple.

Why must we squeeze it and bite it and slam it against what we've convinced ourselves are our great powers of reason? We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.

Let the inexplicable sit sacred.”

Marlena De Blasi , A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

In this moment I am loving the vivid imagery of these words.

There are times when my knowing inhibits feeling. Times when my need to understand prevents the subtle truth from just being.

We are such bullies at times...to life, to truth, to others, to ourselves...

Like silly-putty in rough, child-like hands I've shaped and battered many an issue within my own head. Repeatedly forcing reason onto the most unreasonable situations and people. Like trying to extract juice from a pear. Some things are just not meant to be...

Fascinating that I still attempt to attach meaning and method to these events and circumstances.

I have been chronically struggling with the daily realization that several prominent individuals in my life have completely disparate core values and operating systems from my own.

Yes, simply acknowledging the difference was a step. But I couldn't leave it there. I wanted to UNDERSTAND. I needed to find some explanation or reason that would somehow make it all clear, acceptable, excused. Perhaps I finally battered these ideas around until there was nothing left. No reason. None. Zero. No way to rationally explain them. And no reason to...

Wait?! I don't need to understand or accept for them to exist?!

In recognizing these differences as inexplicable and sacred I somehow shifted behind the struggle, into a gap. A space that allows me to find peace beyond the conflict. It's as though the world has suddenly, miraculously, flipped upside down into a playful somersault. Everything looks changed...

What are you struggling against that is inexplicable and perhaps, nonetheless sacred?

THE WAY WE SEE

“The way that we see things today does not have to be the way we saw them yesterday. That is because the situations, our relationships to them, and we ourselves have changed in the interim. This notion of constant change suggests that we do not have to be discouraged.” T.K.V. Desikachar

How does my perspective affect how I see the world?

My attitude most definitely filters and transforms the events and my subsequent reactions. Distance and time shift my viewpoint...extending, expanding, distorting the edges like a fish eye lens.

Erasing the details and substituting generalizations, washes of feeling in their place. Like a familiar, well-worn chair our memories begin to conform to the frequent silent repetition of our story. Our internal dialogue creates its own mental pathway.

Straying perhaps slightly or at times grossly from the truth of the experience. A navigation system gone awry.

At times wishing I could simply remove this lens and swap out for another...is it that simple?!
And you? How do you shift your perspective or change your point of view?