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.