The Dangers of Thinking Big
By · CommentsI’ve been feverishly working on several class ideas that I want to offer here on the site and at my studio to help everyone feel freed up to play, experiment and gleefully wade into the creative experience again.
It’s taking much longer than I anticipated.
Partly because I tend to underestimate how long things take and partly because these are ambitious ideas that really do require a lot of thought, planning, and practice to be the way I want them to be.
Big, time-consuming projects that may or may not work out.
Oh the worrying! I mean, I really want to get it right–to create something great that will empower people. Oh the fretting! What if I make this class and no one wants to come? What if it’s all a mistake and I’ve “wasted my time.”
What then?
Risky Business
In order to really develop a big idea, to create something complicated or try something challenging, we have to invest time in what we’re doing, even when we’re not sure it’ll work out.
We have to choose a direction and wander down that path for quite a while before knowing if it’s a way through or a dead end.
It’s a risk, no doubt about it.
And when you have a finite amount of time to create, you might think, what if I do all that work, and then it’s for nothing? What if I waste my precious free time on a project that doesn’t work out in the end? Harsh.
When we do that though, it’s because we defined that time as “wasted,” not because it actually is wasted. And defining the time as “wasted” is not honoring the process.
Sigh.
So easy to say, so hard to feel. Read More→
i thank You God for most this amazing
By · CommentsIt’s that time again!
I’m a huge poetry fan, as I was an English major back in the day, along with studying art, and poetry is one of my earliest loves. I feel like it’s the most marginalized art form, and most of us were taught poetry in school by people who didn’t like it. What a shame, since so often it’s the art form we reach for when we need to express our most important emotions.
I thought the exuberance of this poem would be good for a grey winter day (like the one we’re having here in the Northeast) and e.e. cummings‘ playfulness with language is a great inspiration for doing your own thing in whatever your art form.
You might not know that e.e. cummings also painted and drew, and was influenced by Surrealism, which I talked about recently in my blog post on Automatic Drawing.
Enjoy.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
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Pushing Past Rejection
By · CommentsIn my last post, Bags of Gratitude, I mentioned two big takeaways I got from a talk I heard from motivational speaker Kevin Touhey, but I only wrote about one.
The second one is something I’ve wrestled with on and off for a long time–pushing past rejection.
As part of his talk, Kevin shared his experience of writing a memoir/motivational how-to book and trying to get it published. He sent his book out to fifty-two publishers and they all rejected him.
Fifty-two. 5-2.
And then he published it himself.
It got to 2nd place on the Amazon best-seller list, and now he has a publisher for his 2nd edition.
As I listened to his story, I thought, hmmm, when would I have quit? When would I have thought that I needed to read the writing on the wall and understand that what I had written was no good? Twenty rejections? Eleven rejections? Thirty-one?
All my life I have been so moved by stories of people ignoring rejection or prevailing wisdom about what’s “good” or “worthy” and what isn’t, and turning their dreams into success.
I’ve marveled at their emotional fortitude and lack of self-doubt. Their unwavering belief in what’s they’ve created above and beyond what anyone else thinks about it. Read More→
Bags of Gratitude
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Last night I went to my first ever business networking meet-up in Manhattan.
I almost ran out in the first 5 minutes, panicking about out how I was going to keep chatting with perfect strangers all night.
But I met a lot of nice, down to earth small business owners and we had a motivational speaker, Kevin Touhey, who was a very pleasant surprise.
“Pleasant surprise”, I guess, because I tend to wrinkle my nose at titles like “Motivational Speaker” and the blurb I read seemed like a lot of internet sales hype I’ve seen before. But he was warm, honest and real. And now that I’ve met him, I know he means it all.
And while a lot of what he said wasn’t new to me, it was a great reminder. And he shared two experiences that lingered especially in my mind after the talk was over.
Bags and Bags
One was that he has grocery bags in his office filled with scraps of paper with different thoughts of gratitude and appreciation written on each one. Bags–plural.
He pulls out an appreciation or two when he needs to counteract a negative belief or experience.
He holds his hand over his heart and breathes into it as he reads these thoughts of gratitude and appreciation to himself in order to blunt the effect of the negative belief pattern and stop the spiral of indulging familiar demons.
I really like the idea of physically creating and keeping actual bags of gratitude around me–it’s so concrete and poetic at the same time. Read More→
Finding Time a Little at a Time
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Last spring I took a great online class about Time Management taught by the lovely Cairene at Third Hand Works.
Calling it a “time management” class is only half of it though, because she teaches you about making friends with your time rather than controlling your time. I loved it.
I also learned A LOT as a fledgling, right-brained business owner trying to use her time effectively. Very different from going to work and plugging into an existing system of deadlines, work flow patterns, etc.
What I’ve found interesting however, is how much my awareness of how I use my time since taking the class has grown gradually over time.
I now spend more time just noticing my patterns with time so I can improve our relationship, get closer, and make it all more worthwhile. It’s been eye-opening.
Keep a Time Diary
One of the things I keep circling back to is how I use my time. One neat exercise we did in class was to keep a time diary which is basically like a food diary.
Gah! That kind of food diary “facing up” can make you panic. But rather than it being the beginning of a deprivation plan like a DIET, keeping track of your time can help you figure out not only where you’ve got some wiggle room (to start making things again!), but also when you function best and what your beliefs are about time. Read More→
Creative Spark
By · CommentsElizabeth Gilbert wrote the wonderful memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Last winter she gave a fantastic Ted Talk and I thought I should share it here in case you haven’t seen it.
It’s a great talk on creativity, “genius”, success, fear of failure, and the cultural stereotypes of the “unstable artist” and how we might rethink that. I hope you enjoy it–she’s very engaging.
(If you’re reading this in an email, you’ll have to click here to view the video.)
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Automatic Drawing–What IS it?
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I realize that in my last post, Expressive Drawing, I forgot to explain what “automatic drawing” is.
Maybe it’s obvious, but in case it isn’t, here’s a bit more information and how to do it and why it’s a great way to let loose and free your creativity.
Liberation
The Surrealists embraced automatic drawing as way to incorporate randomness and the subconscious into their drawings, and to free themselves from artistic conventions and everyday thinking.
This technique, they felt, was a way in to access meaning and information unavailable through tradition and the conscious mind.
Surrealist wackiness aside, it also lets you sink into the quality and experience of making marks and developing the relationships between them which in turn lifts you out of your logical brain’s desire to make something that’s “good” or “accurate.”
It lets you tap more easily into your intuition, emotions, and the physical experience of drawing and painting.
So if you judge your own drawing ability, this technique can be very liberating because it’s so physical, there’s no wrong way to do it, and it improves your drawing skills in the process.
Most importantly, it gets you out of your head. Read More→
My name is Sarah Bush and this is my blog dedicated to helping busy artistic people like you weave creativity back into your life again.
