February Reverb

On a winter Sunday I go to clear away the snow and green the ground below

April, all an ocean away.  Is this the better way to spend the day? Keeping the winter at bay

What were the words I meant to say before you left?

When I could see your breath lead where you were going to

Maybe I should just let it be and maybe it will all come back to me

During the month of December (and in my typical style, overflowing into January), I followed along with daily prompts through reverb10.  Each prompt was aimed to stimulate your reflection over the past year, and to set goals for the new.  The folks at reverb are sending out monthly prompts to keep the thinking going.   

February's Prompt is:

One month into 2011, what question(s) are you living?   Are there any prompts/questions that arose during #reverb10 that are still resonating in your life?  Are you living new questions?

I realized that even though I followed through all of the daily prompts, I hadn't been quite as specific as I meant to be in setting goals.  I will say that going through the prompts made it possible for me to move firmly into this new year.  And I like the way things are going.  I've set aside a lot of things that were very bothersome during the year, and am more and more focused on now, the present, and me.  With pride, I share that this is the first year of my life (or at least my life in Boston) that I have not felt like I was going to die midway through winter from seasonal depression.  And I am trying on what it means to be an artist and an art therapist while feeling stronger and more centered in my body and thoughts.

I still think about the idea that we each have a Core Story:  this blog has served as a way to start bringing all these lose pieces together and I'm really starting to feel like a more unified, cohesive whole instead of my scattered, jack-of-all-trades, directionless self.

Also Achieve:  I secretly set the goal of having twenty kind readers follow me and when I checked today, I had sixteen.  Sixteen!  You all rock!  Thank you for taking a risk, and a minute on me.  I appreciate it more than I could ever express.

I still think about if I made a mistake about not taking the job.  I worry that I chose the right One Word.  That is just me, I worry.  And finally, I was really taken by the tool, New Years Goal Questions for No Goals Creatives, which ultimately asks what does your best self yearn to do, what is your best self called to do?  I'm still trying to hear the answer to that question.  Maybe if I could get past all the worry and just be.

My question now is:   

How do I incorporate as much art into my life as possible, and how do I share it?  

I am following intuition a lot lately, following signs, taking cues from the universe.  If I can fit it in, I will try to.  But I recognize that I will be taking a new risk soon, and I wonder how to prepare for it, whatever it is!  Thank you for reading and viewing.

 

How I lived a childhood in snow and all my teens in tow, stuffed in strata of clothes

Pale the winter days after dark,  wandering the gray memorial park, a fleeting beating of hearts
What were the words I meant to say before she left?
When I could see her breath lead where she was going to
Maybe I should just let it be and maybe it will all come back to me

January Hymn, the Decemberists

G2W: 10 (SOOC) Yellow

Another week of Good to Wow!  I also just realized that I've been calling it Now to Wow or Shoot and Edit, I don't know why, so many apologies for that.  Our fearless leaders lead us through technique tutorials every week, and I am learning so much on a subtle level and I want to try new things.

I had so much fun this week!  I kept spotting yellow everywhere, and wanted to take pictures all week.  I could make a whole project out of yellow.  Who knew?

We adventured around town on Saturday, with me stopping every two seconds to grab another shot.  Does anyone else find they have a frustrated husband in tow?  I'm trying to get gutsier about taking images on the street - its what I like, and I'm constantly seeing amazing opportunities but chickening out.  Here are some of my shots...Which one to edit?

Scavenger Hunt

I'm trying out some new techniques to resize my images for the web, using the unsharp mask and now I'm hosting my images on Flikr.  All totally an experiment for me, so bear with me.  But, I'm totally proud I was able to do the Scavenger Hunt again!  This week was a fun combination of wandering around the city and exploring a park within the city - on top of the city!  Wow, what a view.  I'm participating in Now to Wow, and was able to grab a ton of yellow images (I'll share tomorrow!) and Walking in the World, so this ended up being my walk and artist date (also more about that later).

Vanishing Point

I stopped in the middle of crossing the train tracks and yelled to my husband to keep an eye out for me!  I love taking vanishing point images in the city, the streets, transportation, the buildings, all lend to good perspectives.

Square Crop

Took this at Panera.  I ended up blacking out the light outside of the textured squares.  I love the squares within the square within the square crop!

Under

While taking this picture I kept thinking of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,

Towering over your head.

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,

And she's gone.

I have no clue what the correlation is. But this building is a landmark in our 'hood. I love it.  

A bit too purple though, eh.

Welcome to the Jungle

Calm

A beautiful day Saturday, two musicians were playing at the top of the hill, the reverberation of the violin bouncing across the houses as we spied like children.

S&E: 9 (PS) Spring

Okay here goes...a lot of images!  Please tell me if you see differences, feedback is really appreciated.   The lesson for the week was how to resize and sharpen for the web, and recommended hosting outside of Blogger.  See?  Things I don't know.  I was infinitely thankful for this tutorial because I have noticed that the image that shows up on this blog is never the same as the one that I worked on in Photoshop.  So frustrating!  I need to learn more!  And I can't quite get my brain around unsharpening.  But I'll keep trying it.

SOOC, Uploaded through Blogger

Edits:  I did the usual, and then did a Gaussian blur to the background and added a little bit of texture.
Hosted on Flikr.

The above photo re-sized for the Web.  Hosted on Flikr.

With Edits, Resized for Web + Unsharp Mask at 30% Opacity, hosted on Flikr

Final, uploaded through Blogger - I'm a believer.

ABAW:9

I discovered this one nestled in the far reaches of the Harvard Bookstore in their used book section.  I love that a 7 and two teeny zeros are penciled inside the cover.

I wanted to share a couple of quotes because I'm having trouble putting together my own thoughts tonight, and each of these quotes said the things I wish someone would say to me:

Who am I?  We ask ourselves this question over and over again during our lives.  We know for sure that between birth and death there is an experience that we call life.  But am I the experience or the experiencer?  Am I this body?  Am I my faults?...You are none of those things.  You undoubtedly have faults, but they are not you.  You may have a disease, but you are not your diagnosis...All of these things are not you because they are changeable.  There is a part of you that is indefinable and changeless, that does not get lost or change with age, disease, or circumstances.  There is an authenticity you were born with, have lived with, and will die with.  You are simply, wonder-fully you.

 * * * *

We experience our losses in our own time and in our own ways.  We are give a beautiful grace in denial.  We will feel our feelings when its time.  Meanwhile, they are being held safely for us until we're ready...We can't escape our past.  The sorrow of the past is often held in suspense until we are ready for it to find us.  Sometimes new losses trigger old ones.  And sometimes we don't feel the loss until later in life, when another loss occurs.

* * * *

Anger tells us that we have not dealt with our hurt.  Hurt is present pain, while anger is often lingering pain.  As we gather these hurts and do not address them, our anger grows.  We can accumulate many hurts, and it becomes hard to sort them out - eventually, even hard to recognize the anger.  We get so used to living with the feeling that we begin to think of it as part of who we are.  We begin to see ourselves as bad people.  The anger becomes part of our identity.  We must begin the task of separating our old feelings from our identity.  We must release this anger to remember our good and remember who we are.

* * * *

The universe is concerned with who you are, and it will bring into your life, in whatever the situations, in whatever time, what you need to become the person you're supposed to be.

This final quote reminded me of a letter I just received from a family member.  Handwritten on long notebook pages, exactly like my Walking in this World nightly journaling, the same length.  And at the end of the letter, the letter writer told me that God wanted me to have a house too.  No word on when, how or if it would ever actually happen - just that it was noted that I wanted one really badly and the sentiment was echoed up on high.  After reading this, I laughed and cried simultaneously.  Its nice to know at least that my wishes are being received.  But, um, a house would be good too.

S&E: 9 (SOOC) Spring

Not much in the way of spring here.  The snow is almost melted, but the roads are a sandy, muddy mess.  Things have not quite started to sprout yet, everything is still in hibernation.  This is the trickiest time of the year here; it feels like it could be and should be spring but it is not.  It takes work to dig deep and cultivate enough hope to make it through the end of winter.  And then there are moments that bring to life the possibility of a change of season, warmth in the air, more sunlight, and maybe, maybe, far away, summer.

Walking In This World: Week One

It has been a slow start to Walking in this World...I suppose that's the Universe telling me to slow down and shift gears.  Walking in this World is an online, 12 Week journaling journey, guided by the framework from the book of the same name written by Julia Cameron.  I am still waiting on my copy:  Amazon is taking its good ol' time shipping out my book (and some new CDs!).  I've just been making room for the journaling, and finishing up last month's projects.  Here is this week's check in...

1. How many days this week did you do your Morning Pages?

Morning Pages are meant to be done in the morning.  Hmf.  So I set my alarm early on the first day, and slept through the whole thing (that's a lie - I got up, turned it off and returned to bed).  I silently berated myself all morning and on my way to work, where I learned that my first client had canceled.  I started to in turn curse that person, and then I switched and offered them a silent thank you. 

For the next thirty minutes, I grabbed a plain pad of paper, sat down and wrote.  I struggled.  I felt like I should be working (even though I came in an hour early that day just to meet with that person, and this hour was technically my hour).  I wondered why I was doing this, I thought about my next client and confronted my feelings about that person.  And I decided that Morning Pages could just as easily be Evening Pages, and so they have become.  I have done them faithfully every night. 

2. Did you do your Artist’s Date this week?

Yes.  Every weekend I make time for some sort of art making.  This weekend, I finished up my February project, prepped my journal for more art journaling, tracked down some photos and took some more.  I'd like to take this further:  getting together with other people to make art, going to a museum or three (and these dates are supposed to be by yourself, but I might cheat and go with my fella), something else to take this time to a new level...

3. Did you do your Weekly Walk?

I had to do a compromise here, but I promise to try to find a way to do both.  This weekend, I chose to use my time to go running outside.  It was so warm (50 degrees!), it was a simple, sheer pleasure.  Ideal would be scheduling in a walk during the week at work...

A Thing A Day: February

During the month of February, I made the commitment to make one piece of art a day.  (The other part of the commitment was to post it but I couldn't get that part done in time!)  I finally finished scanning and posting all of the images, and would very much like to share them.

To the left is the card for February 28th, but I didn't make it until yesterday.  I didn't want to end, and I didn't know how to encapsulate how this project made me feel.  And I found this surprising:  many nights I didn't want to sit and make a card, or cards would back up, waiting to be finished.  I thought I would be glad to be done.

But this project has helped me to shake myself out of the day-to-day grind that I was stuck in, especially at work.  I had to start looking and paying attention, instead of covering my eyes and running blindly through my day.  I had to stop and pick up images or sort through my thoughts that would make it to the day's card.  Unusual for me, I was okay with letting things be what they were and I was uniformly pleased with the results.  I began to see patterns in my art making and journaling that I don't quite understand:  symbols of tsunamis, noticing that my writing started to lag behind the wiser image.  And it seems that the project isn't quite done yet:  I have to link the images together somehow.  I may not know what the project needs to be complete for many months.

Beyond that, I have this feeling that this project will take me to new places in my art making and journaling, I just don't know how or where.  I just know I have to keep going and trust the process.

S&E: 8 (PS) Self Portrait

"Blurred" from the Scavenger Hunt

SOOC - Self Portrait

This was pure play.  I got lots of great comments that recommended creative edits, so I went for it!  When I was taking the photos I took a bunch of ones with my husband wandering in the background, rapidly losing his patience...  I pulled in each of those photos into Photoshop as a layer, resizing with me as the center; erased me and the mirror but kept everything else in the background.  This kept his skulking form visible, and created this awesome, off kilter background.  All those straight lines became slightly crooked and slightly rotated.  Loved that.  I put all the layers in a folder, and did basic edits.  Not so sure about how all that worked but liked the results.  And then I pulled in a texture:  my first one!  I found this here.  I lowered the opacity and erased just me, so I stayed primary in the picture.  Wish I had gotten him wandering around the other side, far in the background or closer to the mirror. 

Talk about a self-portrait:  I can't help but admit that this is how I feel sometimes!  That aside, pure fun.

ABAW:8

I recently picked up this book from our local Borders which was sadly going out of business.  Books were ridiculously cheap, maybe 80 cents for this one.  Heartbreaking and scavenging-inducing.  I felt compelled to rescue them from uncertain fate.  And so I left the store with another pile of books.  Sigh. 

I know I joke about my book addiction.  But the serious truth is that addiction is part of my history, my family, and now my work.  I feel resentful because I was never taught about addictions in graduate school:  things I know are unfortunately things I know.  I've learned theories about family systems, trauma, development, but there is something about the lived experience.  I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

Beyond that there is a ton of new information, research, changes in drugs, a new movement in the world of addictions, addiction vs pain management, inclusion of eating, shopping, sex.  I want to learn more.  I'm not sure where to start.