Creative Every Day

Rumblings

February 27th, 2007

I'm feeling all abuzz. I think I can hear/sense/feel the whispers of spring. They're not even whispers, they're rumblings, like a hungry stomach. Despite the winter that finally decided to settle on us with it's thick layer of white, gentle flurries and gray, gray skies, I know it's there anyways. This is what came out in the art I made last night, all this bursting color beneath the ground of a landscape that is dark and gray. I love my subconscious sometimes. I'm at work, so I'll post the art tonight. It felt *so* good to get creative last night. I was feeling pretty crappy through the weekend and then Sunday, the fiansor came down with the same bug and was violently ill, so I was taking care of him. Man oh man, it was a rough week for the two of us! Despite all of the negative, I feel so much closer to him somehow. All the stuff that came up just reaffirmed how much we love eachother. Love that. ok, before I get mushy...

I've been experiencing so much synchronicity lately it's making my head spin. The morning pages help to wake me up to this. I was intuitively drawing in a sketchbook before bed last week, something that was suggested to me by some book (I read a lot, so who the heck knows where that idea came from), just doodling some ideas, whatever comes to mind. And I started drawing a figure who turned into a trapeze artist, one trapeze artist with their legs curled over a bar reaching out to another trapeze artist who was flying in mid-air. And I thought to myself, yep, this is sort of how I'm feeling now, like that one in mid-air. And the next morning I followed a link to Patti's blog with a post called "Let go of the monkey bar" that was just filled with trapeze artist images. I got the shivers seeing it and I saved the post for later because I wasn't quite ready to read it. So, I read it this morning and it's a beautiful post with lots of words that support the process I'm going through. I'm trying to live in this mid-air space with as much joy as I can muster because god, it also scares the ever-living-crap out of me. I'm definitely one of those hold on to the bar as long as possible and then maybe just drop to the ground type of people. It's not that I fear change exactly. I think I often push myself off the edge of it to force myself out of my hesitations, but if given the opportunity to wait, I'll often wait too long and then go running back to what's safe. But I feel ready to be in this space, my body is fighting it or perhaps it's my mind that's fighting it and my body is paying the price, but I'm all nerves lately.

My mom tells me that when I was younger (and this actually happened all the way through college), the week before school and through the first week, I would get so nervous that I would have awful diarrhea every morning. I didn't show my nervousness outwardly, but my body made it clear how I really felt. No matter what I told myself or did to try and relax, every year it was the same. And that's sort of what this illness felt like for me, my body making it clear how I really feel about the changes ahead. The good news is, that once I got going, I relaxed into the new rhythm and things eased for me. So, ok, I know this about myself, I understand, I'm trying to have compassion for my poopy self. But how can I approach this differently? How can I see the unknown as more fun and less nerve-wracking? How can I release the pressure-valve in my head and let off some more steam?

The only thing I can think of is being gentle with myself, but also acting, meaning I need to get to work, create, do, play. We'll see how that goes this week. I'm bursting with ideas anyways, I ought to let them out.

It's funny, I'm usually able to let go and leap into the unknown in my art. I was just commenting to Caroline this morning about the fact that the spark of where I start in a piece of art is often far from where I end up and I actually like that. I always want to allow that freedom and flexibility, it's part of the fun of creating. So, perhaps with my art I can help myself do this in the other parts of my life?

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties
-Gail Sheehy

 

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