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.

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.

Messages through time

Sometimes the universe gives you all the tools you need, you just have to slow down long enough to realize they’re there. I was browsing Amazon last night, looking through the latest batch of books recommended for me based on wishlisted items and past purchases. I was particularly looking for books related to healing through creating art, and I surfed from one of the recommended books to a similar book, Visual Chronicles. I was looking at some of the preview pages, thinking it looked like just the thing, and was about to splurge on it when… I realized I already had. Several months ago I went on a mini shopping spree when I noticed half a dozen or so mixed media books offered for various very low prices through Amazon Marketplace. Visual Chronicles was among them; and after laughing at myself and scanning my studio bookshelf for it, I noticed there also were two or three other books I’d bought that might help me on my journey towards self-art-therapy.

I curled up with my “new” book and started reading. I couldn’t have been more than a few pages in when the words I was reading reminded me… I’ve already got and altered book in the works. And the word in big, bold, gesso-stenciled letters on the first and so-far-only spread? PLAY!

Um, self? Take a hint…