This week I talk about arriving in the New Year a bit tattered and roughed up by my own expectations, and what I created to help me remember my wishes for the year.
While I often get twisted up by trying to enter the New Year with everything all pristine and wrapped with a shinny bow, the truth is I spend a good part of January each year getting myself oriented.
It works for me, when I remember and don’t make myself wrong for it!
When I cast of the pressure to do it the right way, the neat and tidy way.
How do you enter the New Year? A bit ragged and discombobulated like me? Organized with clear intentions, resolutions, and visions? Somewhere in between or not any of it? It is all perfect.
Your way of entering in is just right for you. The year unfolds from exactly where you are right now.
My wish is that it be beautiful and uniquely yours!
(Inspiration for my wishing tray came from Jamie Ridler of Jamie Ridler Studios. In the video I said I could not find the video, on making a blessing bowl but I did! It is a simple and such a beautiful practice. Do check out her work, she is an inspiration for truly creative living.)
#4 in my Facebook series- index card wisdom. A cut and paste oracle project
It is lazy-daisy, pause-and-slow-down season in my world.
Tomorrow is my birthday, the Solstice has just past, we are in the longest days of the year, and in the U.S. the July 4th holiday is right around the corner.
Each year I take this time off. Maybe doing something big and special, most times just resting and unplugging.
This year when I asked myself what I most wanted what came up was time for “creative cocooning”.
Unstructured, free form, dedicated time to creatively play. Just because, just for me.
Time to pull out my sewing machine and make this and this, reconnecting to the sewer I was years ago. Finally signing up and diving into this, stretching into new art forms. Do more collage oracle creating and see what messages come, because I love how the unseens speak though images. Take photo walks and tap into the everyday magic in my neighborhood. All the things I have been wanting to do but haven’t made the time to do. Things I want more of.
So I will take the next week and a half to cocoon myself with art supplies, fabric, needles and thread, and what ever else strikes my fancy. I may come out with some really cool somethings, or not. I may work on just one thing or start many and leave them all unfinished.
But guaranteed I will come out more intimately and practically connected to my creative flow.
This is the deeper purpose of the creative cocoon.
Dedicated time and focus on creative expression and exploration. To break out of ruts. To see newly who you are as creative being. To honor the whispers of your muse and see where they lead. To reconnect to a creative you that got put aside when life got busy. To feel into what feels good now.
To see how the organic rhythm of your expression beats when untethered to expectation, external schedules and day to day demands.
For you maybe it is trying recipes you have pined or planting the side garden. Digging back into your novel or starting a blog. Wandering a museum or dancing on the beach. Learning to paint, quilt, rug hook, exotic dance, what ever is your fancy.
A creative cocoon will look different for each of us, but if you allow yourself to go all the way in you will emerge a new being in someway.
What do you think? Want to slip into your own creative cocoon?
It does not need to be a week long although I wont lie, knowing I have days to wander my creative trails feels heavenly! That may be unrealistic or perhaps too daunting right now. A few hours will do. This much more about the intention and permission to discover and lounge in your creative being than it is about time.
A good creative cocoon has these qualities:
* A dedicated time to explore what calls you.
* Intention to discover and play. No critical judgment allowed!
* No rules about what, how, or why you do what you do. Just that you want to.
* Full permission to the voice of “Because I want to, that’s why!”
* Mess. Make a mess. Gluey fingers, paint smears. Spread out. If needed, claim the dinning room table for awhile and have the family eat somewhere else. Remember this a cocoon time, not a permeant lifestyle.
* Get rid of anything that minimizes external distractions. Feel free to pick up take-out. Better yet, have someone else do it. Leave the dishes in the sink rather than put off your creative cocooning. Bowing out of meetings, dates, appointments that take you out of creative time. Again this is temporary while in cocoon time. Not a lifestyle choice. (Although you never know, you may learn you can do with out some of the assumed have-to’s of life.) * Indulgent, creative musing and play.
When it is time emerge from the cocoon, celebrate your process and journey and take the learnings into your everyday life.
Trying to talk though the void so the world doesn’t forget my voice,
more painful than being forgotten.
So I stay quiet.
Still working, loving, caring, dreaming,
but in the background of the noisy world.
Less outreach, more inner reach.
Sometimes I need to be quiet,
to sink into the comfort of silence,
for awhile,
until my world upends itself again.
I allow the bumpy flow of life to pull me along as it sees fit,
until I find I have found my feet again,
my voice finds her true resonance again,
the words can be found,
again.
Here there is no void to reach across,
instead a rich space craving new life to be grown.
And just like that I know my world has upended itself.
As it always does,
when I trust my rhythm,
my life,
and the quiet,
to do what they will always naturally do.
Allow me to find what is true, now,
what is essential to say, now,
where the treasures are, now.
To remember newly,
how the creative flow is never dry.
It just sometimes calls for silence,
and the subtler senses to lead the way.
There is a dance of emergence that happens as the artist engages in both the making and allowing of the art to come forth.
For me the dance right now is “being seen at 50” and the dance floor is my photo editor. I push and pull my image, playing with filters and color balance and all sorts of things I don’t really understand until something happens. I see something I wasn’t expecting, something that feels true.
In that moment I meet myself. Newly.
Today I see the bare face, the dark circles, some farrows and gray hair, my tired and worn energy. All that we are suppose to hide from the world. All I often do hide from the world.
But here right now, I feel compelled to highlight what often gets covered. I pull the blotchinesss out, darken the tones so I can sit with my somberness, my weariness.
And I see my resolve.
I see truth. This truth of me wanting to be seen. Life is beginning to show on this face and body of mine in a way that is creating character. I may no longer longer be able to mask lack of sleep with more caffeine, but I am also no longer prone to apologizing for my intensity.
Sometimes we want to see our prettiness, but what our Soul longs for is our rawness.
These portrait meetings of myself are rich and already initiating quiet upheaval of my inner relationship to me.
And I am making it public. And that is scary.
And liberating.
And raw.
Will you meet your rawness today?
It is there, just under the surface or beneath what you feel you want to cover.
I would love to hear from you and I want to open comments on this, but it is proving to be a complicated thing. So if you want to share anything with me go here or e-mail me at sandi@lusciouslife.com.
No surprise to anyone who puts themselves out in the world, and that would be all of us, being seen is vulnerable stuff.
I noticed my default thought this morning as I was taking pictures was to “pretty myself up” for the camera. Especially since the post yesterday is my most read ever!
People are watching- Oh My God, I have to look good!
Now there is not a thing in the world wrong with prettying up, showing the world your best face. In fact prettying ourselves can be so much fun and deep self expression! It is Aphrodite at play!
But it is the assumption that our “best face” is always the carefully created one, the powdered and shadowed and glossed one. That we need to “put on our face.” The one that hides the life being lived now.
This is the face of the life I am living now and right now I deem it my best face. It comforts because it is mine.
Sometimes our best face is the private and bare one, showing the truth brought by morning sun and lack of sleep.
Being seen at 50- it is casting magic already.
What is the truth your face is telling?
Thank you for coming on the ride. Let me know how you are seeing you.
(I would love to hear from you and I want to open comments on this, but it is proving to be a complicated thing. So if you want to share anything with me go here or e-mail me at sandi@lusciouslife.com.)
