Arty intuition

The guru of no guarantees

I had an epiphany about guarantees recently.

I was in the beginning stages of meeting someone through online dating. We'd talked for about 20 minutes and had decided to get together the following week. Some concerns had come up but I was okay with going ahead.

The day before our meeting, my date sent me a note asking whether I resembled my photos, that he'd been burned before.

“What do you want, a guarantee?!!!”, I thought. Online dating or maybe dating in general these days, is fraught with uneasiness and expectation.

I was irritated, insulted and kept thinking about HIS attitude!

I did end up calling off the date but the thing that came to me later, was that if I'm honest there’s a part of me that longs for guarantees, certainty, assurance of quality-just like my date!!

So to nail this even further, I thought I'd put down a few for you here:

For my creative ventures, this part wants a guarantee that every piece I make or project I produce turns out awesome, impressive. And people will want more! No confused messes, nothing ugly or angry or boring. None of that!

And I want a guarantee that I'll be able to push into all the fear and resistance that's held me back. That I won't give a shit about the new and scary. I want a guarantee!

That I will always be sexy-feel sexy-look sexy-guaranteed!!

I want a guarantee that all the effort, time and money I’ve put into relationships and workshops on relationships and books on relationships and discussions on relationships will pay off and with great potential and great success. That we WILL find each other.

I want a guarantee that I will always be adored and adoring.

That I'll be healthy and ever gorgeous even until the last days!

And I want to know that all the effort (etc!) I've put into my meditation practice, will have been worth it. I want to know that I will maintain a clear and still mind, always. And that I will become enlightened!  :-)

Most of this has the edge of a rant. Something shifted though when I allowed myself to get into it, to freely rant, be unreasonable and demanding. Felt totally right. I am learning to love the art of being unreasonable.

And now I'm also seeing that it's all about what I do WANT. That it's not so much a rant but more like an audacious ask, as a dear friend once suggested.

I want to be inspired and inspiring. I want to see the usual shit and stop engaging it. 

I want to feel alive, healthy, vital, always sensually, sexually, ever present till the end of my life.

I want my creative work to touch people, to transform our way of being in the world, seeing in the world.

I want a relationship that's all about support and challenge, the crucible for growth and engaging fully. And love.

And I want to keep thriving in my meditative life, in whatever form I will be most served and most able to serve.

But I've also realized that if I demand certainty and no risk in how it all comes in, then I will miss out on the mysterious way these things do come about.

And I want that-the mystery.

Many thanks to the man I almost had a date with. Maybe he just wanted to get it right this time. Got it.


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Posting these two pieces in appreciation of my no guarantee guru! Don't know where either are going!
 

Letting the outrageousness do it's work!

And from my FB post of Jan 24th:

"I've been making a lot of art lately....flowing out of me. And this coming as I'd been feeling really stuffed up with, like literally, with the belief that I simply couldn't get past the block. Here is what I said about it in the middle of December:

"So here's what's up...I'm feeling stuck in my creative flow. I can feel the edges of what's waiting for me to engage in. It's bold, playful and outrageous, can't quite be defined and I'm scared shitless to unleash it."

I kept letting that outrageousness work on me, feeling it's intensity. Man, what a huge wanting to simply be in the world-no apologies.

That wanting brought me to a cross roads. I either had to go into what was holding me back, the anger, the fear etc or back off. Simple. So with the bold and outrageous help in the form of the inspired Rebecca Pell I got it. We wrestled with those demons and with that, a kind of outrageous, playful joy spilled into my system and I started making things.

I'm calling these pieces my Chaos Into Order series. I have plans to get things going on my website/blog but that hasn't happened yet so here's what I have for now."

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These pieces were edgy and surprising to make. I wanted to get out of the mindset that certain pieces or parts of pieces were precious. I kept building on what came underneath, risking that I might cover up something sweet-that I liked or that I didn't want to lose. At times it only seemed like a chaotic mess as I kept at it, spreading paint around with a rag. And then I'd go in with just a bit of a more defining line and things would come together, suddenly united. I also started using a different kind of painting tool-a squeeze bottle of thin paint that I could sling around Jackson Pollack style. Very unpredictable and really tested my resolve to keep things from getting too mechanical.

One

Two

Three

 

Spurred into more work

This is a Facebook post I made on January 13th. It was in response to a friend's very playful use of adult coloring books. Love her use of words!!!

"I'm over the top with Cecilia Moorcroft's recent posts on what she's calling fuckcoloring. Love, love, love them!!!

The piece below I'm posting as a kind of homage to that. I started working on it about a week ago. Then the night before I saw Cecilia's posts, I got the idea that I could just go nuts and squish paint around and REALLY not give a shit.

And then I saw her posts and something clicked. What will come next?!!"

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I had grabbed this ripped piece of printmaking paper quickly, looking for anything to land my red/pink scrubbing wildness onto. The whole thing came from my belly, my life force kind of growling it into existence.

Inspiring connections

Yesterday I posted about some thoughts on being all in and then some inspiring people I've come across along the way recently.

Here are links to these inspiring people. Enjoy!!!

Jayson Gaddis and his Smart Couple podcasts can be found here:
The Smart Couple Podcasts

You can find Bruce Tift here as a guest of Jayson: be sure to also check him out on youtube with Tami Simon for Sounds True.

Bruce Tift interview

And then Layla Martin can be found here:

Layla Martin

Not fixing things in 2016!

My Facebook post of January 5th, 2016.

"Happy New Year everyone!!

As I start this new year, one thing that really stands out is my wanting to be all in, with my relationships, my meditation practice, my art making and workshop ideas, my awareness and sensations of being in the world.

My first epiphany about this came during an online course I took last fall with sexuality genius Layla Martin. She calls her course Obliss and she'd been talking about penetration and letting yourself be penetrated by life itself, in fact, not limiting it to the sexual. Suddenly I got it. It was time to commit myself to diving in, wholeheartedly, in all of my life.

My second epiphany came while listening to my favorite relationship coach Jayson Gaddis of the Smart Couple podcasts. He was interviewing Bruce Tift a Buddhist psychotherapist from Boulder, Colorado. I was blown away by their interchange.

Bruce was talking about not trying to fix anything and instead just sitting in the midst of what he calls the disturbance of living with an open heart. He talked about getting to a place of actually embracing the disturbance and it's sensation because it's a thread to something of ourselves that's been disowned, put out in the cold.

Suddenly, again, I got it. That to sit with the discomfort of showing any of my creative work, without fixing it, explaining it or using it to resolve any of my feelings of being in the world, is freedom. Even when I have no idea what the art is about, whether it will be meaningful or liked by other people. There's no need to concern myself with any of that or to use it to make myself feel worthy. I'm already worthy and this stuff I do is simply part of a package of things that I've disowned and am now in the process of bringing in from the dark. Because when I do, I feel alive and full. Even if incredibly uncomfortable! Hahahaha!

Would love to hear any of your thoughts on this. :-)))".

Discomfort and perfection

This is my Facebook post of November 18th...on a roll!

"Today's confession: I'm having a love affair with this piece. Can't get enough of it-my gaze is never long enough. It's as if it's been made outside the usual way I make things and has been “given” to me. “Did I make this?”.

It has all the elements of what I've been working on. It speaks of beauty and a liveliness that's just way fun to do. It's also done in a freeing mode of not trying to accomplish anything. I love the color, the form of the leaf prints and the drawing into that, that is wildness. 

That's been the theme of all of this latest work but this one speaks to me more deeply....like there's an intimacy of life in it, the intimacy I'm moving towards. An intimacy that is also mysterious and unpredictable.

So the confession is that I'm uncomfortable posting about things that feel undone, incomplete and messy. I'm also uncomfortable posting about perfection and what I love; my heart skips a beat or two at the very thought of being out there with this.
And yet....only sort of!!!

At the very same time, there's no stopping me...I'm all in and make no qualms about any of it. I love all the messiness, all the uncertainty and I f___ing love the beauty that just flows out of me."

Facebook, being seen and vulnerability

This is my Facebook post of November 18th...on a roll!

"Today's confession: I'm having a love affair with this piece. Can't get enough of it-my gaze is never long enough. It's as if it's been made outside the usual way I make things and has been “given” to me. “Did I make this?”.

It has all the elements of what I've been working on. It speaks of beauty and a liveliness that's just way fun to do. It's also done in a freeing mode of not trying to accomplish anything. I love the color, the form of the leaf prints and the drawing into that, that is wildness. 

That's been the theme of all of this latest work but this one speaks to me more deeply....like there's an intimacy of life in it, the intimacy I'm moving towards. An intimacy that is also mysterious and unpredictable.

So the confession is that I'm uncomfortable posting about things that feel undone, incomplete and messy. I'm also uncomfortable posting about perfection and what I love; my heart skips a beat or two at the very thought of being out there with this.
And yet....only sort of!!!

At the very same time, there's no stopping me...I'm all in and make no qualms about any of it. I love all the messiness, all the uncertainty and I f___ing love the beauty that just flows out of me."


Last fall I decided that a really great project for my personal and spiritual development would be to get out there on Facebook. Phew, really?!!

It was time to push myself, my thoughts, curiosities and creative wanderings out of the closet and into the light, not easy for certain parts of my "personality". But as you'll see in my first post below, I knew it was just the thing for me; to get things moving, stirred up and interestingly enough, to feed that part of me that does love to be seen!!

I made the first post on November 17th 2015. You'll see the pieces below. The top three are what I posted on FB and then the rest are added here, reflecting the whole process of getting into the flow.

The process usually involves mono printing with the Gelli plate using leaves and collage and pastel and paint in a random and more physical process of just putting things down.

Here's the post:

"I was inspired by the way my friend LeeAnn Mallory started a recent post with “I confess” and so I will start this post with that.

I confess that I am extremely uncomfortable posting anything here that feels meaningful. There's that exposure/vulnerability element. Because of that, I labor over what's said or put out there-it must be “perfect”!
But since it's a big deal for me these days to let myself and my passions be seen, here goes.
My latest realizations are about being intimate, which to me means being all in on whatever is up at the moment. No holding back. Intimate with life.

So I won't “hold back” with some recent art work. These pieces are part of my recent series that are about what can happen when I just make something without deciding whether they are “good” or “bad” or “done”. I'll let the viewer make those decisions.

Instead of saying anything more to qualify them, I'll just post them.
More confessions to follow, on what topics I can't say just now.....".