Feeling Special

Special Ed, that is.

Had my second official drawing class last night.  My take on the camp chair with sock monkey garnered this response from my instructor:  Why don't you try drawing it with your left hand?  So, I did.



This is it -

Kind of faintly drawn, I realize.  Must remember to draw WITH PURPOSE.

But overall, I like it.  I like that little monkey face.  A lot.

The very nice lady on my right asked me if I was sure I was right handed.  That's been food for thought ever since.  I don't do anything much naturally with my left hand, but I am so flummoxed trying to draw with my right.  It leaves me feeling frustrated, angry and stupid.  Especially stupid.  I can *see* it, so why can't I draw it?  And then the instructor was going on and on and on about angles and what you see first and how everything else is in relation to that and it made me feel all swimmy-headed and even stupider.  Words!  I know words!  I speak them all the time and sometimes even write them!  But I could not get it - I could not see what she was trying to show me and I just nearly cried.  In class.  The shame.  I have ALWAYS been an A student.

This is most definitely out of my comfort zone.

God help me.

p.s. I drew this one upside down in attempt to get my right brain working!  I think it helps, but unfortunately the world does not cooperate.

Artist's Way Week 12 - The End of the Line

I'm pulling the plug.

It's been a good ride, but it's just time to let go and let God.  Give up and get down? Quit and be quiet?  Withdraw and wig out?  Decamp and do nada?  I can do this all day, people.  Stop me.

At the risk of repeating myself - and let's face it, that really seems to be my mission in life - it's not you, Artist's Way, it's me.  Here at the end of the 12 week course that took me 16 weeks, I'm undecided.  Was it worth it?  I still didn't create anything other than that one collage, my Seat of Sloth drawing and a few blog posts.  I thought a lot about doing stuff, but I didn't follow through.  In spite of that, overall, I'm giving the experience two thumbs up.  I took a couple of turns around the spiral path.  I'm a tiny bit more honest with myself (and others - beware), I'm an iota braver.  A lot of discontent has been uncovered and I'm gonna have to do something about that.  Something positive and illuminating, I hope.  No more being a mushroom.   Nosirree.  Not  anymore.  Score one, JC.

Where do I go from here?

After much gnashing of teeth and wailing, I've settled on a two month reprieve.  I will continue the Morning Pages (score two, JC), with whom I have a deep and abiding love/hate relationship.  I will continue to meditate, because I took that class and I want my money's worth.  And I will focus on walking daily and feeding my body better.  In a couple of months, I'll take stock again and see if I want to delve deeper into JC or look for a new guru.  I've heard that Vein of Gold is a dense and expounds more on her particular spiritual beliefs.  If she turns out to be one of those Hale-Bopp nuts I shall be profoundly disillusioned.  I've been trying to rediscover and embrace my inner wacko and it's just a little tougher to do at 47 than it was at 21.

Anyway, here's a little something for The End of the Line.

Artist's Way Week Eleven - Brutal Honesty

Winding it down on this Artist's Way stuff - one week to go now, thank you Jeebus. And I have to be honest and admit it's not you, Artist's Way, it's me. I haven't put 100% out there, I have not been conscious and present when I do the exercises. Somehow I expect the magic to happen even when I'm just going through the motions. And to be fair, Julia Cameron does encourage us to keep doing it even if we are just going through the motions. I've been through many many motions now and I'm still just going through them. One of the assigned tasks for Week 11 was to buy a special creativity notebook (I love how JC always invokes the Power of New!) and label the first 7 pages Health, Possessions, Leisure, Relationships, Creativity, Career and Spirituality. Under each of those topics we are to write down 10 wishes. I did these Saturday evening while watching NYRB give Seattle their second defeat in their second game. Looking at my notes the next morning, I have no recollection of completing this task. In fact, some of my notes are as obtuse as the memos I get at work, dangling participles and all.

And the Artist's Dates - well, I think I did two.  When I was supposed to do one per week.  It's just very very hard to get time to myself.  ALONE.  And there are so many things to do on any given day.  The Big To Do List keeps growing, I get farther and farther behind, so I feel guilty about that and  neglect Artist's Way stuff, and sometimes a girl just wants to have fun and that chick flick ain't gonna watch itself...

Just one more hour in the day, please, Jeebus.  Just one more hour.

Keepin' On Keepin' On - The Artist's Way Week 10

This week's focus was recovering a sense of self-protection. To be completely honest, I didn't get a lot out of this chapter. I'm not a workaholic, I'm not famous; I may be a little competitive, but really, who isn't? Other than the Dalai Lama, of course. Some of the exercises seemed a little silly, in particular The Deadlies, in which we were to write down the words ALCOHOL, DRUGS, SEX, WORK, MONEY, FOOD, FAMILY/FRIENDS on individual strips of paper, fold them, place them in a hat or something and draw one out seven different times. Then, we drew one out and wrote down five ways this thing has a negative effect on our lives. I drew DRUGS four times. Julia Cameron says that this should be read as emphasis. Sorry, Julia. I do not have a drug problem keeping me from writing. I also drew FAMILY/FRIENDS multiple times. It was not an eye-opening experience. I am nearing the end of the The Artist's Way (the book, not the life) and I'm beginning to find Julia Cameron a little annoying. Or out of touch. And she's anti-meditation, which I find downright odd.

This could simply be what she terms an 'artistic tantrum' which typically precedes a big leap forward.





One can hope.

Week Nine - Artist's Way

Apologies, dear readers. (tee freakin' hee, readers. As if.) Been busy meditating, soccering, Artist's Way-ing, reading, reading, watching tv and - ugh - working. I've moved forward on the The Way (cue Scott Miller), but I haven't always taken the time to blog about it. Consider this a remedy.

Or a ... reconnection!

Week Nine's task was to recover a sense of compassion. One of the main points of the chapter was to label things rightly, particularly "laziness," which is often just fear. Fear that we won't be able to do something perfectly, fear that we will fail, fear that we will succeed even. We say we're lazy, when we're really just afraid to try. The salve of compassion is not just for use on others, then, but we should apply just as liberally to our own skins. See what I did there?

Also discussed were creative u-turns, where we self-sabotage out of fear, and block-blasting, where we take inventory before beginning a new project of any resentments (anger) and resistances (fear) we might feel about starting. I still find this provocative because I haven't done any actual creative work, other than blog posts and one lonely collage, since I began this journey back in December.

It was my intention today to start a new poem. Truthfully, it was my intention yesterday to start a new poem. I just didn't do it. So I'm going to play a little bit with this blasting exercise and see what happens. I apologize beforehand.

Resentments: nobody ever reads poetry! it means work! thinking! editing! especially the editing!!!

Fears: people will think I'm weird for writing it. it will be awful and I won't know it and I'll show it to someone and ... it doesn't bear thinking about. I won't be able to write it! Nothing will come!

Week 8 The Artist's Way

/begin crazylocosounding new age testimony

I saw it again. A wolf. Running hell for leather across Veteran's Boulevard. I was this close to hitting him, so much that I had to swerve and I nearly hit a truck in the other lane. He - the wolf - never wavered, never gave me a glance, never seemed to notice he was running perpendicular to the flow of traffic. The driver of the truck gave me a are-you-crazy-lady? shrug and sped on heedlessly. This is a six lane road! It was a busy school morning! Have I mentioned that this was the second time I'd witnessed this? Examination of this under Occam's razor leads to only one conclusion: it was a hallucination. Well, more accurately, a vision. A vision of my spirit animal, the wolf.

No, I have not started smoking crack. Gravity is still functioning for me nicely and the sun still rises in the ... east, is it? I can never remember. That and the spring-forward, fall-back thing - it could just as easily be spring-back, fall-forward, couldn't it?

But I digress.

I suppose what really made me pay attention was the fact that this exact same thing happened twice. Or I had dreamt it first and then it happened In The Real World. But either way, that's significant, don't you think? I don't know what it means exactly, but information here indicates that the wolf teaches steadfastness and helps us find new paths and journeys. One standout sentence from that site: Sometimes transformation accompanies Wolf's lessons.

That sounds way cool, no?

To honor my wolf vision, I am wearing moonstone earrings. They are actually simulated moonstone because I am an impulse buyer. Perhaps my spirit totem will teach me to read the fine print.

/end crazylocosounding new age testimony

Week Seven, Artist's Way - Recovering a Sense of Connection

Had to add another two days to this week to get 'er done. Will basketball ever end? I thought I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turned out to be a train. A big ass train.

This week was about connections and the recovery thereof. Tasks included some fun stuff, like listening to one side of an album just for joy; wearing a favorite article of clothing for no reason at all (cue Forest Gump); buying myself something wonderful & self-comforting (my purple polka-dotted robe); and creating a collage. This was supposed to be done very rapidly, but as I went dumpster-diving for the unread-by-me magazines, I took my time looking them over. Another reason I had to add two days to this week! But my collage came out pretty cool, I think, and I am so ridiculously proud of it that I'd like to hang it on my refrigerator.

But I'd have to clean it off first, so...

A good week on the Artist's Way. I reconnected to my inner adventurer in a nanoway. I signed up for a class in meditation. All by myself! With strangers! And I gave a good two minutes of thought to standing up and telling some of ThatSchoolWhichMustNotBeNamed's basketball parents to sit down and shut up and stop acting like schoolyard bullies. But I decided that was perhaps not a risk it would be wise to take just yet.

Learning! I'm doin' it!

Continuing The Artist's Way - Week Six

My first draft of that came out WARtist's way. I think I like that better. I'm not an artist, I'm a WARtist!

Yeah, right. (which is proof that two positives CAN make a negative)

To be blunt, Week Six sucked. It was all about abundance, playing What If again and examining the idea of God's - the Creator's - will for us. One particular quote, which I will now mangle, stood out for me: God didn't make just ONE kind of snowflake, but an INFINITE variety of snowflakes, so he must adore creativity. Which is a provocative idea. But God also created accountants and the need for them, so maybe he's a little OCD too. The idea that God wants everyone to be creative is fabulous, but we can't ALL be artists, can we? Doesn't someone have to make the soup, so to speak? That's the leap of faith I can't seem to make - that if I am meant to be an artist/writer, I should just do it and let the money follow.

Too fond of eating, I suppose, to be that reckless. And I'm not at all sure I'm meant to be an artist/writer. Do you like that slash? I don't. Writing seems so concrete to me, and drawing/painting/creating things out of other things seems so ... spiritual? Like you have to be tuned in to something and it flows through you and out into the work. I've written a couple things like that, none of which immediately spring to mind, and certainly not *this* blog post, but I've never HAD to paint a picture or draw a line or fingerpaint for that matter.

I guess that would be my


....


wait for it



ARTISTIC block.


Mwahhahahahahahha.

The Artist's Way - Week Five!

in which we try to reconnect with a Sense of Possiblity by examining the attitudes and ideas we have about the nature of God the Creator and also by examining what Julia calls Virtue Traps we build around ourselves. Maybe the subtitle of this chapter should be Remember When You Weren't Everything to Everybody? Or, How I learned to let go and let others make their own peanut butter sandwiches. Or something like that. Tasks were all about lists of ten: ways I am mean to myself (I had a HARD time with this one - I am pretty kind to myself as a rule), ten items I would like to own (surprise! I want a VW camper van!!). If I were 20 and had money, what would I do? If I were 65 and same, what then? A lot of what-if'ing and idle dreaming and I am pretty darn good at that.

The Virtue Trap stuff rang dishearteningly true. As I look back over my adult life, I realize that I've gradually surrendered every second of solitude I once treasured. I was a weird kid, I freely admit, and I liked being alone. Not all the time, but I was, as my mother was delighted to find out, totally content with my own company. Once I got married, I still had some alone time, because we worked different shifts a lot. Once the first child came along, it got a little harder, but I was still in college, so I had the class/commute time. Out of school, with baby #2, it got even more scarce and somewhere just disappeared completely. Last summer, I found myself on a Saturday all alone - kids off with friends, husband working. And I had no freaking idea what to do! I had completely forgotten how to be by myself. So, I took the dog to town. Literally. Pet Smart and two dog parks! A big day for her. What I realized from this chapter is that I need that alone time.

The Artist's Way - Weeks 3 and 4

Up to date, I'm not. The good news is that I'm busy doing the stuff, so I don't have time to blog about it. And to be fair, week four was media deprivation week, so technically I wasn't allowed to blog about it.

Take that, Bembridge scholars.

Week Three was all about recovering a sense of power. How one recovers something one has never had is a conundrum I could not solve, but whatevs. Most of the tasks involved remembering favorite things from childhood - toys, games, friends, etc., and remembering things you liked about yourself as a child. I was ridiculously curious about things and I had an active imagination. I liked to read Greek mythology and play pretend Olympus, watch the Wild Wild West on tv and play that with my friend Ian in the wilds of our California neighborhood. Another task was to list 3 subtle foes of my creativity and how I sabotage myself by allowing them to control my time. This is where I discovered the Seat of Sloth that calls my name every night after dinner and, truthfully, sometimes before. I tend to gravitate towards it after the day's work and open a book. Sometimes I read it, sometimes I look at the back of my eyelids. So, that's a place to beware. Nothing wrong with sitting, reading OR napping, but it's hard to be creative there. I do assume some unusual positions when I nap, so there's my creative expression.

Week Four was designed to recover a sense of integrity. What this has to do with reading/media deprivation, I do not know, but I am proud to say that I did not read a book, magazine, newspaper or pamphlet for the entire week. I also severely limited my internet usage. Only work sites allowed! No Facebook! No Elvis! No soccer news! I did allow myself to check email on two different occasions just to see if anybody missed me (and damn your hides, NONE of you did!). I allowed myself to watch tv and dvds also. If I lived alone, I would have chucked that, but it's hard to NOT watch tv at our house. I would have been spending all my evenings in my room. Alone. This does not sound bad, come to think of it. Maybe next time. Again, most of the tasks involved visualizing - ideal environment, what my 80 year old self might say to my present day self, what my 8 year old self would say to her as well - and being good to myself with an extended Artist Date (did not manage) and a ceremonial tossing of some ragged low self-esteem article of clothing. That would be my entire underwear drawer!

Just kidding.

Sort of. Note to self: bras! buy new ones!

I don't recall experiencing any synchronicity during these two weeks, but I have observed that I am not very observant and I'm trying to pay more attention and not just skim through the experience.

Just to define it once and for all, integrity to me is a synonym for authentic. And I want to be my (eeep!) authentic self.

With power. :)

The Artist's Way - Week Two

In which our heroine recovers a Sense of Identity. In order to accomplish this, she will figure out where her time goes, remember things she once loved to do but forgot how when she grew up, make a Life Pie, play If I Could Be... and plan 10 Tiny Changes.

Well, hmm.

A great deal of my time is frittered away waiting. Waiting for the work day to end, for practice to be over, in check out lines, in traffic. I dislike beyond words the feeling of being "on hold" but I tend to internalize that into a kind of finger-drumming, wheel-spinning frustration that is bitter to taste and toxic to productivity because when I'm finally free, all that I can think about is breathing on my own time and not having to answer to The Man. Or The Child, as the case may be. I also waste a lot of time on the internet and in front of the tv and behind books - maybe the book part is a bit harsh. So, I think I need to work on perhaps being more engaged at work. And to remember a book or notebook for the basketball doldrums. And limiting my internet access. I truly believe we all need a little less internet access and more quiet soul searches and some face-to-face just to keep things in perspective.

Coming up with 20 things I like to do - well, you'd think that would be a no-brainer. Proved a little more difficult for me. I like to read, I like to watch TV and dvds, but I do these all the time, so maybe they aren't the treats/refuges they once were. I tried to come up with things that, well, for want of a better phrase, feed my soul. Oh, the humanity. These things include hiking (preferably w/dog), swimming in rivers or oceans (preferably where I can see my feet), going to concerts, rollerskating, writing silly birthday poems for friends and writing letters. Gotta find me some rollerblades!

The Life Pie was kind of a mystery to me. You draw a circle and divide it into six segments: Work, Friends, Romance/Adventure, Play, Exercise and Spirituality. Then you make a mark within the segment as to how fulfilled you feel in that area. My lowest rankers were Spirituality, Friends and R/A. I feel like I've got waaaaay too much work, but it's the have-to variety and not the want-to kind, so maybe it's time for a change there. ( I always envy people who love their jobs so much they don't describe them as work!). Connecting my dots, I created a diamond shape - not that it means anything in particular, it was just kind of cool. Like using a spirograph! Something cool appears just when you least expect it. Gotta find me a spirograph!!


p.s. I really did kinda look like her when I was that age.

New Project

While cleaning a couple of weeks ago, I found buried in a stack of books Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. It's about unblocking your inner creativity. You know, that voice that tells you to buy all the pretty markers and that gorgeous pad of paper, the one you're always telling not to be stupid, you can't waste your hard earned money on anything so self-indulgent and frivolous, and that type of equipment belongs to Real Artists, not wannabes. Yeah, it gets hard to hear that little voice after a few years or decades of that. I made it to Week Four in said tome back in the 90's. But I just gave up after that. It's a 12 week program, so I almost got a third done back in the day.

Not that it matters now.

I decided that I would begin again on December 17. Nevermind that it is my son's birthday. Nevermind that it's the Christmas season. The actual inspiration was several days in the making, during which I was repeatedly - and I'm not just feeling sorry for myself, I swear on the soul of my sweet Pawli - discounted, disenfranchised, marginalized and generally made to feel less than worthy by the World At Large. Examples: I went to work and said hello to the first person at the door - got nothing in response; I clocked in and went to my desk, saying hello to the next person I see in my office - again, NADA. I went through 5 hellos before I got one back and I really tried to project my voice. My facebook stats went uncommented upon. My phone did not ring. My emails were not returned. I was too old to participate in a phone survey. So, I was feeling a little less than loved and I found this book, which we (us royal types) will refer to henceforth as TAW, and decided that dammit, I had to do something just to make sure I was still breathing in this world.

Week One is about recovering a sense of safety. I did my morning pages 7 out of 7 days and one of them was Christmas Eve. The pages are stream-of-consciousness, and sometimes I didn't even have that, I just wrote affirmations over and over. Or the day's schedule. Or what happened yesterday. I was supposed to do an Artist's Date, which is supposed to be an hour or two spent alone doing something that feeds your soul. This was hard to accomplish. Had planned on watching Holiday Inn in the den one night, but the heater chose that night to spew black smoke instead of warm heat and the plan choked to death on kerosene fumes. In what might possibly have been an act of synchronicity, I found myself snowed in Sunday morning with Love, Actually on the dvd player.

It *is* one of my favorites.

So, that was Week One.

Stay tuned.