Archive for Inspiration
Why Bother?
Posted by: | Comments
Keep the Channel Open
Sometimes you ask yourself–”Why Bother?”
Why bother trying to create again, or practice a hard technique, or make work no one sees, or summon the courage to pursue an ambitious dream like having a show or selling your work.
And too often, your self doesn’t have a good answer back to that question, because your self and your doubts are in cahoots.
Well, I have a lot of thoughts about this, as you can well imagine, but I think Martha Graham said it best, so I’ve created this 8″ x 10″ reminder, using her inspiring quote.
I want you to click on that image, read it, and then print it out.
After that, you must stick it on your wall, tuck it in your purse or keep it on your night stand to read last thing before bed.
Click here or on the link below to get the PDF (or after you’ve clicked on the image to read it, just right/click to save it (if you’re on a pc) or control/click (if you’re on a mac) to save it.)
Either way, print it out. I mean it. It’s the best answer to the question “Why Bother” that I’ve read yet.
PDF version of Keep the Channel Open
Big Hugs…
Are You Waiting to be Ready?
Posted by: | CommentsYou’re intrigued by something you want to do or make, but you “don’t feel ready.” So you wait.
Or maybe you plan on making something tonight when you get home from work, but by then, you’re tired or not in the mood.
This is a very natural reaction to adding one more thing to your busy life. And the busier you are, the less “ready” you can feel for anything that’s new or hard or requires your focused attention.
The only thing is, this one more thing is your creativity, and it really matters to you.
The hard part about weaving creativity back into your life–or upping the ante and going deeper with what you are doing–is that it has to come from within.
Because it’s committing to yourself.
Which is a lot tougher than committing to other people. It takes more self-esteem. In addition, everyone understands and applauds committing to others, so it’s safe and the feedback’s great.
Which is why society or your family or your boss aren’t going to carve the time out for you.
So it’s a risk and it’s up to you. Of course you don’t “feel ready”.
Do it Anyway
Here’s the thing–nobody is really ever ready.
I mean, you read about people having epiphanies and suddenly turning their lives around and living their dream, but that’s rarely the way it happens.
If you want to start creating again, if you want to dig deeper and get bolder with your work, if you want to live your life as an artist, you have to start now, even if you’re not “ready.”
In fact, one of the greatest gifts that you can give to yourself and your creative dream is to realize that you can create even when you’re not ready or in the mood or feeling inspired.
But it’s hard. And scary. And maybe a little lonely. And did I mention hard?
Yup, you’re right. It’s all those things.
But that’s where I come in.
Structured Support
Because the creative life requires so much internal commitment, my goal here at Make Great Stuff is to provide you with structured support systems to see you through.
That’s what the 20 Minute Club and the Creative Breakthroughs Collage Tele-class are all about.
Do-able systems to help you create and build your creative momentum so that your artistic, creative essence is as important as all your other facets/roles that currently rule your life.
So that the dream of having a show or selling your work on Etsy or writing that novel or fill-in-the-blank can become a reality.
To live your life as an artist.
Don’t Wait Until You’re “Ready”
You don’t need all the supplies on the suggested materials list to sign up for the next Creative Breakthroughs Collage Tele-class. You just need a speaker phone or an earbud.
You don’t need to re-read how it’ll work, we’ll have fun even as you feel your way through the process.
It’s okay if you’re eating dinner at the same time or still gathering stuff and filling your water container at the start of the call.
Making time to create is about giving yourself your self back.
It’s about remembering how fun it is to play and immerse yourself in something artistic without having time to self-censor or the ability to compare yourself to others (because we’re on the phone!).
It’s about letting yourself try something new or make something ‘bad’ because you’re committing to the artistic experience and (practicing) not judging yourself all the time.
Because even though it’s hard, you realize these two things are a requirement of hanging in there for the long haul as an artist.
Creating Momentum
In addition, the tele-class dove-tails perfectly with the 20 Minute Club.
Because your unfinished or almost finished collage pieces are wonderful reasons for setting the timer for 20 minutes here and there (even when you’re tired or not in the mood) and responding and fixing and thinking aesthetic thoughts.
You’ll start to realize that when each of those 20 (or 30 or 40) minute sessions are up, you feel less tired than when you started.
Rejuvenated even.
You also realize your week has gotten a lot more artistic than it used to be. And that the more you do it, the easier it is to continue.
That’s momentum you’re witnessing–and finally moving in the direction you want.
Wow.
All this when you weren’t even “ready.”
Doesn’t that sound good? Come join me and let’s get started.
—————————————————————————————–
What do you think? Are you waiting to “feel ready” or have you taken the plunge? Do you like the idea of structured support? Please share your thoughts in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.
Arrested by the Art Police?
Posted by: | Comments
Scene: A Courtroom in Your Head
“Your Honor, I’d like to submit the following bad drawings as evidence that the defendant has misled her family and friends by describing herself as creative, calling herself an artist and complaining she has no time to make anything.
As you can see, why does she need time to make anything when she makes crap like this?”
“Why indeed, Counselor. Jurors, please look carefully at all the bad art and reach your worst conclusions.”
“Your Honor, we find the defendant,………. long pause………., ‘Not Talented’.”
“Thank you for your service, the jury is excused. Bailiff, take the defendant to be arraigned, and measure her up for a hideous orange jump suit. I’m glad we caught her when we did.”
You’re Not on Trial
Your creative life is not a trial where everybody and their mother is on the jury determining if you really are an artist or just a big-talking fraud who’s been implying she’s artistic since God knows when.
Your ‘bad’ work is not proof that you’re not talented. Otherwise, everyone would be indicted.
No longer torturing yourself by treating your artwork as evidence in a trial is an important step toward getting on your own side and getting serious about making things.
Since making bad stuff is unavoidable, stopping yourself from going through your own version of this courtroom drama isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort.
But I know it’s hard to change your thinking pattern overnight.
So be gentle with yourself.
A Few Simple Steps
- Just increasing your awareness of your thought patterns is a game changer. Because we’re so used to our inner monologue, we often don’t even realize what we’re thinking anymore and just mistake it for reality. Realizing this isn’t true, even for a minute, is huge.
- Notice when the negative thinking starts. Before you even begin to create? In the icky middle of a piece or project, when nothing looks right?
- Notice how you feel physically when it’s happening. Does your chest tighten? Do you get butterflies? Where does the anxiety live in your body as a physical feeling? Stopping to experience the physical expressions of your emotions can go a long way toward quieting them.
- Give yourself permission. If this means you need to allow yourself to hide your work, throw it away or burn everything right after you make it, then so be it. Even if your rational brain thinks you’re being ridiculous, your fragile feelings need to know that even though they no longer rule the day (by stopping you from creating altogether), they still count and will be attended to.
- Experiment. Can you leave your ‘bad’ piece out in the open for an hour? A day? All the time? Don’t make yourself do something that shuts you down, but experiment with pushing at the edges of your comfort, and pay attention to the ramifications–because chances are, they won’t be any. The next time will be easier.
Building Creative Momentum
The only way to start making good stuff is to make stuff a lot–to maintain a creative momentum in your busy, everyday life. And if you’re making stuff a lot, chances are excellent that some of it’s ‘bad’. Or at least not what you intended.
It’s just about coming up with strategies for getting comfortable with that. Or, at least, less uncomfortable.
To help yourself keep making.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, one great way to keep yourself creating is to join me every week for the Creative Breakthroughs Collage Teleclasses.
Or even just one class, I’m not picky.
I’m absolutely convinced it can help free you up to build a wonderful creative momentum in your life and function as a real concrete support system–making it easier for you to commit to yourself and your creative dreams and goals.
And even if you feel a lot of angst about your creativity, I think you’ll even have some fun because it’s such a blast.
It’s okay to need help getting started again. It’s also okay to sign up even if you don’t feel ‘ready’.
You don’t need to be ready! All you need is a few supplies and a speaker phone.
At 12.00 a pop, what have you got to lose? You can sign up here.
What do You Believe About Time?
Posted by: | Comments
Do you feel like you just have no time (or never enough time) to create?
I think lack of time is the number one obstacle for people wanting to start creating again or wishing they were doing it more.
And it’s easy to see why–our speed-driven culture creates high expectations of how much we should get done and how fast we should be able to do it.
But if we could change our relationship with Time–find our true personal rhythms–then all kinds of possibilities open up.
That’s the premise behind Slow Time: Recovering the Natural Rhythm of Life
Hurrying
One of the first things she asks you is to explore your own beliefs about Time–ideas you might not even realize you embrace because they feel so natural, you’re so used to them, that they just seem like “The Truth”.
Many of these ideas come not only from the culture, but from your particular family.
For instance, I always feel like I’m in a hurry. And I realized that a big belief I learned from my upbringing was that hurrying signified being serious about something.
Conversely, being slow signified being overly relaxed, too casual–not taking something seriously. Therefore, if I cared about something, I had to do it in a hurry or I wasn’t taking it seriously
Whew, let me tell you, that hurrying belief wears me out.
It’s also very difficult to actually hurry through learning new things (which I’m constantly doing), so I usually feel like I’m taking too long to do just about anything–which means I’m also feeling like I can’t measure up. More exhaustion.
But when I think about my notions about hurrying as a belief I have instead of just being the truth or the nature of things, well then I’ve got a fighting chance to stop that pattern and allow a new belief to take its place–one that still incorporates my values and the things I want for myself–such as being productive or doing good work.
Here’s a few new beliefs affirmations I’m playing with:
>When I take my time, I do better work.
>I accomplish more when I’m relaxed and present.
>I feel good, think well, and accomplish a lot when I take my time.
>I make better artwork when I pay attention, take my time, and let my understandings unfold naturally.
>I prefer to pay attention to what I’m doing without multi-tasking.
Creating a New Paradigm
Our beliefs about time are very tangled up with how we do everything in our lives–when I think about my hurrying belief, I see how it impacts everything I do–how I clean the dishes, how I drive, how I create.
When I interrupt my usual patterns and slow down, it’s a great feeling because I’m allowing myself more. When everything isn’t urgent, it helps me remember my priorities. And one of those priorities is my creativity.
It’s exciting to realize I have the opportunity to interrupt what isn’t working for me about how I experience Time and begin creating a new paradigm for myself, based on my own best nature.
Frankly, it’s just so nice to realize that I have a say in all that. That I don’t have to go through life feeling like there’s never enough time to do what I want.
That how I experience time is up to me.
And since my time is my life, this ain’t no small thing!
Your Time and Your Creativity
How about you? Do you know what your beliefs about Time are? How do they impact what you do and what you allow yourself? Please share in the comments–I’d love to hear.
Doing Vs. Trying: What’s the Difference & Why Does it Matter?
Posted by: | CommentsMay was a tough month for me.
It was tough for what felt like A LOT of reasons–personal, financial, business–but I recently realized it was mostly because of one reason.
Too much trying.
I had had to do a lot of hard things for the past several months, and all that trying was wearing me down until I finally felt miserable.
Why couldn’t I just do instead?
What the Heck is the Difference?
I’m a do-er. I do things. I make things. I like taking action. I like to execute, and I like to finish.
Doing suits me.
Doing has no agenda really, other than the task at hand. Doing has no heaviness.
I’m also a try-er.
Sometimes this is healthy, like the way I’m very willing to try new things I don’t know how to do. I’ll give it a try–what the heck.
Sometimes it’s less healthy, like when I try hard to do things right. When I try to succeed. When I try to make something happen. No “what the heck” attached.
This kind of trying has lots of emotional heaviness associated with it. Lots of striving. The effort, the doing, is all wrapped up in the outcome.
Trying = Doing + Drama
As I was trying to figure out how to make myself feel better, I assessed my to-do list. There wasn’t much I could leave out, except the way I felt about what I needed/wanted to get done.
I realized if I could just do them without all the emotional heaviness of trying to get them all right/perfect/successful, I’d be a lot happier.
I’m good at doing, but I was so busy trying that I poisoned the integrity of the tasks at hand. I was ruining my doing with all my trying.
So now I’m focused on the “doing” without the drama of the “trying”.
And since I also have other unhelpful beliefs attached to trying such as “trying=being virtuous” and “trying=being-serious-about-what-I’m-doing”, it’s good at quietly slipping in the back door unnoticed when I’m busy working on something.
But that’s okay. It’s a process.
Your Creativity
How about you? Are you also trying instead of doing?
Is it hard to weave creativity back into your life because what you want to make would be hard and you’d really have to try?
Is it hard to go deeper or get bolder with your art because you don’t have the energy for that kind of trying right now?
What if you didn’t have to try? What if you allowed yourself the endless opportunity of doing instead?
To “do instead of try” combines honoring the present with being committed to the long haul of your life. What a generous, loving, forgiving way to be allowed to move through time.
What the heck–why not give it a try? 
Be Ready
Posted by: | CommentsTime for another poem by William Stafford–a prolific writer and poet who attributed his own productivity to an unabashed obedience to his muse.
A great spokesman for following your heart.
He wrote this poem in the last week of his life.
You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
William Stafford
The Way It Is
i thank You God for most this amazing
Posted 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)
Did you like this post? Click here to sign up to receive updates in your email inbox!
