Thursday, June 30, 2011
A Miracle
One of the things that captures my attention lately has been the idea that we are all miracles. Picasso said that it is a miracle we don't dissolve in our bathwater. I read somewhere that as part of a daily spiritual regimen we are to focus on all the ways we are blessed. Do a gratitude list of 100 things every day. Sounds hard until one tries it. What is hard though is to practice it consistently. I have not been able to do it for more than a couple days. Still, it can be done. Divine intervention in day-to-day affairs is hard to see. At times we just miss the obvious because we are too interested in getting from point a to point b. Today I had to run to the doctor to pick up a prescription. I had to stop at the store on the way home and I was just interested in getting home. One thing I did not notice until today was the amount of trees along the route to the doctor. There was one section that looked like it was a forest and I had not noticed it until today. It is so easy to miss beauty when focused on getting things accomplished. A couple of days ago I walked my dog in a local park. We stopped for a moment and sat down in the grass. I noticed a firefly on one of the blades of grass. Several inches away was a oddly colored ladybug. It is so easy to miss beauty when in a hurry. It is nice when some internal mechanism kicks in and says, slow down. Why is it so hard to see how blessed we are? There is a Native American saying that I like that goes, I am involved in self-pity and all the while I am being pulled across the sky in majestic clouds. ( Paraphrased.) It would be nice if there were a way to open oneself up to that reality.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Filling the Page.
Started reading "The Artists Way" again . Just frustrated with my creative block, Julia Cameron's book has always helped me to get unstuck. A creative block according to a lot of artist's these days does not exist. A dream of mine has been to someday be an artist like many others. But I just don't like to draw or paint. Quite a dilemma. I read "The Artists Way" many years ago when it first came out. Back then I was more creative. There was a lot of energy in my life back then... Now I struggle for ideas. A lot of time I just write. It seems much easier than painting. A favorite artist of mine is Chuck Close. One of the things he says about creative blocks is they are for amateurs, a real painter just gets to work. This makes sense, but I'm still stuck. Writing is just so much more relaxing. Perhaps there is some thing that I am better at than drawing and painting. I used to do little watercolor drawings with inspirational quotes on them. For a long time these were fun to do, but somewhere along the line they turned into a pain. Has anyone found themself in a similar situation-where art turns into a drag? It just seems that there was a time when I loved to create. Then I started thinking. I started thinking about all the artists out there who are better than me. I thought about how my work did not look like other's work. I thought about if it would make money. I thought about how it would look on a wall, and I forgot about how much fun it was to create the work.
The book The Artists Way is about doing writing exercises that are designed to make a person more creative. It works, it really does. Perhaps all the writing gets you to be a writer like Cameron. She is a great writer, no doubt about that. Perhaps if one becomes more creative with writing that is a good thing. Perhaps if we put expectations on what we want to become is asking too much.
The book The Artists Way is about doing writing exercises that are designed to make a person more creative. It works, it really does. Perhaps all the writing gets you to be a writer like Cameron. She is a great writer, no doubt about that. Perhaps if one becomes more creative with writing that is a good thing. Perhaps if we put expectations on what we want to become is asking too much.
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