True to my blog name…

Sure enough, I seem to be finding a path. It’s been keeping me so busy I haven’t been blogging regularly. It’s interesting how I seem to go through cycles with that – and it seems like I’ve seen the same with other bloggers as well. I would like to return to blogging more often though, as I find it centering.

For now, I will keep it short and sweet with a little What I’ve Been Up To report. I’m slowly sussing out how to structure a life that feeds me well, and right now a lot of my focus is on a site called Squidoo. To explain what that is, let me just quote from their site. “Squidoo is a hand-built collection of nearly 900,000 pages built by people just like you. Squidoo is about giving you a free, easy place to set up a page online. About anything you’re interested in. Squidoo is about finding people when you care what they know instead of who they know.” This means it’s a great platform for me to teach, to write, and to learn. And the way the community is designed, I’m not limited to one niche only. While I want to write a bunch of articles on paper punches, like “How to Save Money on Craft Punches” if I’m suddenly struck with the inspiration to write a Zombie Gift Guide I can do that too. The cool part is, Squidoo splits their ad revenues between their authors and charity, taking just enough to keep Squidoo running smoothly. So this could generate a bit of revenue for me as well. Woot!

I’ve also finally bought a laptop, which will enable me to do computer stuff when I’m on the go – and is also a good deal more powerful than my old machine. I hadn’t quite realized how out of date my PC had become. I also bought the latest version of PhotoShop Elements, which I’m working on figuring out (I’m used to PaintShop 8!) so that I can get back to making digital collage sheets. I hope to finally launch my art supplies shop on Etsy in the next few weeks – I’ve been working on ideas for this for nearly a year now. With the laptop, I’ll be able to mail out the collage sheets even if I’m out of the house for a day or two (and I often am.)

Oh, and I forgot to mention – my sweetie has started working from home full time, which has shifted a lot of things subtly in happier directions. The most noticible change is that we moved the living room furniture around so that it’s an office on one half and a living room on the other; and now my desk is right by a window, which really seems to help with my SAD. I’ve also upped the amount of vitamin D I’m taking to 6,000 IU. I had a very rocky few weeks through January and early February, but things are evening out a lot. Things are really syncing up, at last! I’m even getting a bit better at writing effective To Do Lists and remembering (relearning, really) how to play and relax.

It’s a Miracle!

Yeehaw! I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I’ve been so busy creating that I’ve hardly had time to post in the past week or so. Right now I’m waiting for my paint to dry on the first of several journal pages I’m working on for the “Heart and Meaning” pathway of my Creative Entrepreneur Mandala. It took a few days to work up the courage to cut up the writing from the journaling prompts for this exercise so I could use them in my visual journal pages. I’m so glad I did though, as the process allowed be to literally cut away the irrelevant bits and the occasional negative self-talk that snuck in. It also allowed me to take all the bits and pieces and move them around and more easily find patterns and uncover more ideas about what’s most important to me. The whole Visual Journal thing is really starting to click for me. The way it engages your brain on multiple levels is really pretty fascinating.

After my last post, I did indeed explore Lisa Sonora Beam’s website, CreativeEntrepreneur.biz. I signed up for a free teleseminar, which I participated in today. Participants were offered a discount on upcoming online workshops, and I jumped at the chance. I’m looking forward to having access to the private forums and getting feedback on the pages I’m working on. Even without the workshop though, I really so glad I bought this book and so glad that I pushed myself to actually do the exercises.

The Creative Entrepreneur Revisited

After posting about the book The Creative Entrepreneur last Thursday, I sat down and started working with some of the prompts and exercises. I wanted to make a quick update post, as a follow up to my initial impressions.

First of all, let me just say that in the very first paragraph of the book it’s explained exactly why I was rather frustrated with this book. It’s not for me. It’s for people similar to me, yes, but it isn’t intended for people in exactly the place I am, and the author says so upfront when describing the sort of person she hopes to help. “…for the creative soul who is blessed with passion and purpose yet cursed by the seemingly mysterious realm of strategies and skills that are needed to make an idea real.” No wonder I felt like she skipped over helping the reader find purpose, it’s assumed that the reader is starting from some level of passion and or purpose to begin with!

That said, once I actually sat down with a notebook and the myriad fine point Sharpies I got for Christmas and started working with the prompts, I actually DID start to find some of the answers I’ve been seeking. I now have an impressive stack of papers covered in colorful scrawls and – even more encouraging – doodles. In fact, I’ve spent several hours now just working with the first project, The Creative Entrepreneur Mandala. While it hasn’t magically changed my life overnight or anything, the deceptively challenging questions like “What do you value?” have helped me gain a surprisingly level of focus and vision. Who knew I had such a strong desire to teach? Or to create beautiful arrangements and displays? And what’s really impressing me is that I’m slowly starting to find way to put those pieces together to form something of a roadmap, a plan for integrating all the things that are important into a meaningful, fulfilling life. (Not just career or job, but a LIFE.)

So there you have it, a lukewarm review and now a glowing one. Take your pick. I have a hard time believing any one book will completely solve all of life’s problems, but just at this moment I’m willing to put this one in the “Seriously Good Mental Power-Tools” pile.

In pursuit of visual journaling

Here is a snippet of something I made last night. I guess you could call it a visual journal page. I’m still a bit tentative to call it that, as I’m still sort of in research mode, trying to get some kind of definition for what it is, if only in my own head. I suspect the term “visual journaling” is one of those terms that can encompass a lot of things and means different things to different people.

I got my copy of the book The Creative Entrepreneur: A DIY Visual Guidebook for Making Business Ideas Real in the mail the other day, and promptly devoured it. I intend to reread it, going through it more slowly to try out some of the exercises and prompts. Initially, my main goal was just to further my understanding of self-help through art and journaling. It definitely helped with that, but what I was surprised to find was some left-brained power tools, geared toward the right brained thinker. Great advice on setting achievable goals and creating strategies for how to achieve them; and this advice applies to anything, not just business. The author advocates using the methods for non-business goals specifically so that you can flex your left brained muscles. I liked the book so well that my next step is to explore her website, Creative Entrepreneur.

My impulse to visit her website is motivated in part by the fact that as much as I enjoyed the book and found it helpful, I found the lack of depth in some areas a bit frustrating. While the are journaling prompts along the lines of “I’ve always wanted to…” and “My creative dream is:” are designed to help you get focused about starting a creative business, for me it’s kind of putting the cart before the horse. My problems are not finding the chutzpah to make my dreams real, or narrowing my focus from broad to manageable. I’m having trouble finding the chutzpah to dream in the first place, or narrowing my focus from staggering and spastic to something that simply doesn’t make me feel like I’m in danger of spontaneous combustion.

I suppose that’s what journaling – and similarly, blogging – is all about. Working through one’s inner Stuff. I’m jealous and angsty because I wish I could be a bit more focused and confident. I feel like a freak because I don’t know ANYTHING about what I want from life except that the entrepreneurial drive is strong with me. But really? That’s probably very common. So I’ve got some added weirdness from being more left-brained than most artists, and the depression and Asperger’s issues sure don’t help. And that sucks. Now I’ve vented, and complained, and possibly not made much sense outside my own head (my apologies if that’s the case.) Well, perhaps that’s just the pressure valve I need, and I can go into the studio and try again to use some of my new goal-setting tools to work some of this out.

Planting seeds of art and naps

I am slowly planting little seeds of healing within myself. With a little help from Sark’s “Change Your Life Weithout Getting Out of Bed” nap guidebook, I am practicing the fine art of therapeutic napping. As a lifelong insomniac, this is hard work but very important. Healing my relationship with sleep is vital to healing myself. By the same token, I’m reading bits and pieces of everything I can get my hands on to learn how to heal my relationship with art.

I’ve taken two or three micronaps in the past few days, and I think I’m getting better at them. Yesterday I finally did a few little art bits, just embellishing projects I’d started or noodling around with pre-painted ATC backgrounds. I could feel even these baby steps working to nourish me though. When the paint bled through a piece and onto the table I scooped up the puddles of color with a scrap of an envelope, and wrote a little note for myself.

Renewing in the new year…

Though I’m still dipping my toes into the blogosphere (netspeak for the world of blogging) rather tentatively, I am definitely seeing quite a few lovely New Year’s posts in the blogs I follow.

Jennifer Perkins linked to the Indie Fixx article “New Years Eve on a Budget” where she contributed tips on how to make a rockin’ pipe cleaner tiara.

I was touched Lani Kent’s beautiful New Year’s wishes; “May this be a year you deeply discover and express your undeniable and unique dreams, gifts and visions!” (click the link to read the full text.) I may have to print this out and put the up on my magnetic whiteboard as a reminder.

At GoMakeSomething.com Lisa Vollrath prompted her readers “Go Make a Creative Resolution!” My resolution was short and sweet; to heal myself through my art. Go check out the 70+ other responses, they are quite an inspiration!

Along with healing, I hope to make progress on, as the title of this blog says, finding my path. Starting – and succeeding in! – some sort of new creative entrepreneurial adventure is not something I feel comfortable “resolving” to do this year, but it’s definitely something I’m putting positive energy toward this year. What are your creative goals, hopes, dreams, and wishes for 2009?

Today’s image is from my art retreat earlier this year. I wanted to start the new year with an image of my hands at their happiest; covered in paint and tingling from the joy of unbridled creating. I want my hands to look like this a lot more in 2009!

Intangible work is HARD work

It’s amazing to me how tiring intangible work like mental, emotional, and spiritual progress can be. After I finished yesterday’s post, I set a goal to spend as much time as I could in the studio before my sweetie got home from work at 6:30. Nothing else required, just spend time there and work to heal my artistic wounds by relearning how to be comfortable with my art. I folded laundry, read a magazine, thought, wrote down ideas, tidied up. By the end of the day I was exhausted; I sat on the couch, wrapped up in my favorite blanket, and cried. It wasn’t even a sad cry exactly, I just needed the emotional release. Later, after dinner, I took a cue from SARK and took a much-needed nap.

Despite how draining it is, it’s important work. I plan to continue to spend as much time in my studio as I can. It’s a little like telling a child who can’t fall asleep “Go to bed. You don’t have to sleep, you just have to rest.” You know that if they do, sleep will eventually follow. I don’t have to make art, I just have to get comfortable with being in my studio. Art will follow.

Intangible work involves fighting a daily war against the Ghosts of Criticisms past. Just thinking about creating art with the same kind of abandon as I did in high school makes a thousand whiny, critical voices in my head rear up with objections like “But what would you DO with all that artwork?” Our world is all about the tangible, the monetary, the useful. So the idea of churning out page after page of artwork seems hideously indulgent to my societal training. To the question “What would you do with all that art?” I am learning to shout back, “I WILL HEAL!” (And if the Ghosts still demand something more “sensible” I can tell them that I will give it away as gifts or sell it on Etsy.)

It seems that as the new year approaches, I’m not the only one thinking about the challenge of starting. After posting yesterday, I curled up with the latest issue of Cloth Paper Scissors and was delighted to find Nic Hohn’s article “Action is the Art of Doing”, which dealt with just the sort of issues I explored yesterday. The practical suggestions Nic offers only reinforce the idea that journalling could be a very productive tool for me. Later on, I was exploring SARK’s book Living Juicy: Daily Morsels for Your Creative Soul, which is set up to optionally be read one page per day, and found that the topic of the first week of pages is Procrastination. Is it the time of year to think about these things, or is it serendipity?

The image in this post is a painting I did in high school or middle school, that I finally got around to hanging today. Click on it to view a bigger version on Flickr.

Starting again, again

Well, my clever plan to post daily and build a habit of blogging didn’t work as planned. As I mentioned in my previous post, my computer promptly had issues which made posting regularly problematic. By the time things were smoothed out with that my seasonal depression was flaring up further, and the holidays made things busy-busy-busy. This year’s Christmas was epically stressful, and not for any one reason. My partner and I spent the three hour drive drive back from Western Massachusetts discussing why things were so stressful this year. As far as I can tell, none of the issues we identified were any different that previous years, they just caused even more stress than they usually do. We’ve spent a lot of the last couple days planning and shopping and organizing, in an attempt to not only take the stress out of the holidays from now on, but where ever possible replace the stressful problems with meaningful traditions.

For example, a lot of our family’s Christmas stress stems from people staying up late on Christmas Eve frantically wrapping. Many of us are spatially-challenged and perfectionists, so trying to wrap gifts when we are overtired and and on a deadline can easily bring us to the brink of tears. This stressful situation is compounded by a few family members being early risers, and we have a late night of panicked gift-wrapping and then a long morning of people trying not to be impatient waiting for the last-minuters to crawl out of bed. The plan for heading off this stressful scenario and reshaping it into a fun tradition is to host a Wrap Party at our apartment in early to mid December.

Having a party well in advance of Christmas will give everyone a whole day to get it done at a leisurely pace. A more complex problem to solve was making it easier on those of us who find gift-wrapping difficult due to perfectionism, a poor sense of spatial-relations, and so on. So we hit Target’s after-Christmas clearance and stocked up on value packs of gift bags, tape, stick-on bows, and yarn and wired ribbon which tie much easier than curling ribbon. Then we took a trip to The Container Store for rolls of wrapping paper; they have some with a grid printed on the back for a cutting guideline. When we mentioned to a salesperson that we were looking for that type, she even pointed us to a tool for cutting wrapping paper that looked so handy that we bought two. We also bought a container to store giftwrap, since the paper grocery bag we used last year was seriously not cutting it. All in all, it looks like we’re well on our way to transforming one of the biggest Christmas stresses in our family into a pleasant get-together.

We have some other ideas like this, and we’re trying to do as much like this as possible. Rather than trying to simply eliminate stressful situations, we’re looking for ways to turn them into something not just less-stressful but actively relaxing. This got me thinking about my ongoing struggles with identity and feeling at peace with myself and my place in the world. It seems to me that I should see if there are similar things I can do in my daily life, and in my mental space. So rather than approaching this blog like an obligation and making rules for how often I must post, I’m going to try and look at this blog as a sanctuary. Somewhere I can go to work through issues, explore ideas, and watch my progress as I find my path. That was the sentiment I was going for in my post “Making myself at home” but I got caught up in destructive language ‘challenge’ and ‘work’. These words shouldn’t have to be destructive, and I want to work on (oops, there it is again!) making them safer words for me. I want to learn how to keep from putting up mental defenses and feeling panicked by words like those. In the meantime, I’ll try looking at the same idea with kinder eyes; so I’m going to try to visit this blog and share my progress as regularly as is comfortable and healthy for me. I still hope that that with be fairly often, but time will tell.

Making myself at home

I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of home lately. It’s a theme that’s been surfacing for me a lot, from the theme of our Meetup’s retreat in September, to articles I’ve happened across in back issues of Cloth Paper Scissors, to the series of ATCs I recently started. You can click on the image to the left to view it in my gallery ATCs For All.

There are so many meanings of “home” a persons finds or creates in their life. There’s the literal home, where you live – and all the physical belongings, pets, or people inside it that are what make it a home. Our bodies and minds are another form of home; home for our spirits, psyches, souls… whatever you care to call them. Our communities are home too – be they family, friends, or interest groups.

Today I’d like to talk a bit about one’s virtual home, the place or places online that you hold most dear. I’ve been online for over a decade, and I’ve called many places home in that time. These days I find I spend most of my time on ATCsForAll.com and the website of my local ATC group. While these communities mean a great deal to me, I think it’s time for me to “nest” a bit, and create a more personal home. (That’s why they call one’s personal website “homepage” after all!) To that end, I’m giving myself a personal challenge: to work on this blog every day for three weeks. Given the lack of inherent structure in my day, habit-building is something I struggle with. They say that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, so I’m going to give it a go. I’m hoping this will help not only add structure to my day, but also force me to take time to nurture myself, my ideas, and my art.

Backgrounds, planning, and meditations

This bouquet of brilliant backgrounds is most photogenic of the myriad things that have gobbled up the week or so it’s been since I last blogged (still getting the hang of doing so regularly, I must admit!). I’m running a background swap at my ATC group’s retreat at the end of the month, and I’m trying to make sure I have quite a few of my own to swap. I’m not sure how many I’ll be able to part with, I love how most of these came out! That’s the joy of working on a somewhat bigger scale; making an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of watercolor paper will produce 10 beautiful ATC backgrounds, as well as a few tiny scraps. I’m sure I’ll be able to part with at least a few from each sheet.

Aside from playing with paints, I’ve been very busy planning our retreat; I’m in charge of coordinating the Activity Guide. There’s been a ton of work involved getting descriptions and supply lists written and rewritten, but I am blessedly nearing completion. I’m eager to have it taken care of so that I can put more of my mental cycles to some bigger issues that have been plaguing me.

I’ve been very preoccupied lately with figuring out what my future holds, with – as the blog says – finding my path. I’m living with a lot of pain right now, from so many sources I’m having difficulty sorting it all out. I’m letting go of a business that once held so much promise but in the end just caused me a lot of pain. I’m learning to live with seasonal depression all over again, as a very rainy summer has left me scrambling for new tools. I’m pondering what it means to be on the autistic spectrum, what it means to be an artist, and how a person like that can fit into a society that doesn’t really seem to know how to accept either of those things. I’m struggling to find my identity, to understand my strengths and weaknesses, and how to make peace with it all.