Category Archives: creativity

Craft for the Soul Chapter 2: mornings

“Some people open their eyes in the morning, groan and put the pillow over their head. They are not very zesty. They are cosy-toed. They are not ready to welcome the day.”

This is the first paragraph in chapter two of Pip Lincolne’s book Craft for the Soul. And it is talking about me.

Which is why this chapter, titled Wake up and improve! also makes me groan.

Put very succinctly, it extols the benefits of getting up early and having a morning routine.

I get it. I WANT to be one of the zesty morning people and love mornings, like Pip. Just like I WANT to love exercising, and I WANT to love gardening. But I’m just not a morning person, and I’m not sure I want to try not being not a morning person! I love my bed. And I never get enough sleep – there’s this slight problem with insomnia I have.

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On creativity and ‘finding happiness’

Lying in bed one cold morning, keeping warm and being cosy-toed (I thank Pip Lincolne for that term – it’s perfect and one I have co-opted for myself), I was gazing at my bedroom bookcase, as I do. It gives me happiness. Often. In it are many, many books I have bought or been given but have not yet read.

Quite a few of them are books on creativity, and this particular morning, feeling cozy and homey, it was Craft for the Soul that caught my eye. Written by Pip Lincolne of Meet me at Mikes, the tagline of the book is “how to get the most out of your creative life”.

Pip is one of my favourite bloggers – there’s lots of crocheting and other crafty things to attempt on her blog. It’s a comfortable place to be, like sitting at a kitchen table with a friend gossiping over coffee.

Craft for the Soul by Pip Lincolne

 

I bought this book two years ago, and like most books on creativity, I never worked right they way through it – I’ve dabbled here and there. I don’t know why – yes, it has exercises in it, but nothing like The Artist’s Way or Fearless Creating which require actual work.

So, I am restarting my goal (and I am committed this time) to work through all of the books on creativity I have on my shelves but have never worked through, starting with Craft for the Soul.

It’s a gorgeous book to look at – each chapter has at least one recipe – not fancy ones, but nice homey ones. There are inspiring quotes by herself and others scattered throughout, and at the end there is a bunch of crafty projects to try out.

Happiness – where does it come from?

The first chapter of Pip’s book is titled Have nice times, and is essentially about happiness and how it has become a “fairly lofty aspiration”. (It also has a recipe for raspberry and coconut tarts in it – YUM!)

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Meditating at Black Head Beach, and new beginnings

Black Head Surf Club
Our view, meditating inside the Black Head Surf Club

Yes, I am making another attempt at reprising my poor neglected blog. I have exciting changes to make to it in the very near future, but until then …

I have a friend (I know, shocking, right?!) We’ll call her Bee. Bee has been hounding me to start blogging again. To get the words out there. To think creatively and to just plonk down my thoughts. I’ve been resisting … the last thing I want to do, I thought, after a day at work sitting at the computer writing stories to go on our mastheads’ websites, is to come home, sit down at the computer and do more writing to go online.

Last week I decided I might want to get back to it after doing my end-of-month goal check-in and reading something I wrote at the beginning of the year about creativity. I had that urge, again, to start reading the collection of ‘creativity’ books I have (mostly unread, the others partly read, none of them finished) and blog about working through them. I felt a frisson of excitement, thinking about doing it once again.

External discipline leads to internal freedom.

Yesterday I decided to do it NOW, after a day spent with Bee at a one day meditation retreat spent in noble silence and doing guerilla walking meditation at Black Head Beach (along with a lot of formal practice). During the day, our teacher, Sharn Rocco of Mindful Works,  talked about The Artists Way, by Julia Cameron – an old classic that nearly everyone has picked up or heard of at some time. I’ve picked it up many times. And I’ve never finished it. She talked about incorporating artists dates and morning pages into mindfulness practice. What a brilliant idea, I thought.

So hence my thoughts coalescing into an actual action. I may or may not pick up and read and work through all of these creativity books I have. I do hope to, though. I will also share thoughts and experiences about meditation and mindfulness practice (or the battle to establish one, which has been taking many years). I’ll also talk about singing a lot, I’m predicting, as this year has unintentionally turned out to be ALL about that.

So … hello again, interwebs.

May all of my non-existent readers be happy.

Namaste.

 

An exploration of creativity

There’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while (say, a year or so!) and I’m finally committing myself to getting around to it – starting a series of posts on creativity. Specifically on creativity books.

I’ve amassed quite a collection over the years and, I am ashamed to say, have never finished working through any of them. One of them I haven’t even started reading.

Why now? Two reasons. One is that this blog is badly neglected. Two posts back I wrote ‘Perspectives of an Australian regional journalist’. I had to – it was a uni assignment for my post-cadet journalism course. I even included a photo of myself (again, only because I HAD to) in all my chubbiness. Even though it was a uni assignment, it felt good to post again, and of course, I’d been ‘meaning to get around to it’ for a long time.

Then I posted the planner post, which felt to me kind of like a non-post. Making the video was fun and I’ll definitely do more, but I’m also wanting to be authentic on here, explore, find community, and grow. The way things used to be in my blogging world, all those years ago.

The other reason is a fascinating chat I had with a friend last week on creativity, blockage and manifesting things.

My friend is an artist. She paints gorgeous whimsical illustrations. You can see her work at www.sharninormal.com. She hasn’t done anything for a while and I asked her why. So we ended up talking about blockages, which bought to mind the creativity books I had sitting around.

Blockages – let’s face it. When it comes to creativity, we all have them. I have them up the whazoo. Most of them limiting self-beliefs. Like labels – I am no artist. I would feel a fraud to call myself an artist. It’s only the last two years I’ve felt comfortable calling myself a writer – and that’s only because I’m legitimately being paid for legitimately writing, even if it is ‘just’ journalism. I love the job, and people appear to enjoy my feature stories, but it’s not easy.

I remember going through years of existential angst and a yearning to create, but not knowing how or what to create. That was over a decade ago. That horrible hunger has gone entirely, perhaps because I am writing on a regular basis (again, even if it’s for work). But, in some form, I want it back.

The subject of creativity has always fascinated me. What is it? Where does it come from? How do you get it?! Particularly the ‘how do you get it?’ question. All of my life, I’ve wanted to be a writer. And I’ve always associated that with so-called creative fiction, aka fiction novels. (Isn’t all writing creative? It’s coming out of pure mind no matter whether it’s fictional or not.)

Coaching the Artist Within by Eric Maisel on creativity

One of my oft-uttered phrases is “I don’t have a creative bone in my body”. By this I mean, yes, I can sing, play musical instruments, draw, but it is always someone else’s composition in the first place. I am a good copyist when it comes to drawing, but when it comes to drawing or writing something out of my imagination? Hmm. What I am lacking, really, is imagination. Can you be creative without imagination? Can you grow imagination starting from nothing? So many questions!

 

Hopefully, my journey will answer some of these. I am starting with Eric Maisel’s book “Coaching the Artist Within.”

 

Yes, today I am embarking on a journey. I don’t know where it will end up, but I’m excited and curious to find out where I will visiting and exploring on my odyssey. Maybe I will make friends with fellow-travellers on the way.

Here’s one to follow…

The 10 minute writer over at blogspot. Bookmarked here so I can find it easily, though I am following by email. She posts writing exercises to get people writing for 10 minutes at a time, and to get the creative juju flowing.

What an inspiring woman!

And no, I won’t be posting my writings. I need to write knowing I don’t have an audience so I’m not ‘editing the ugly out of my bio’

Last night, I dreamed I of a sentence I was writing, and thought to myself, oo that is good, I am going to put that in a novel. Huh. I was having these dreams in 2008 when I was going through chemo and radiotherapy. Huh. I NEVER remember the text though *sigh*

 

Sonnet I

Beez are buzzing in my head and pain is starting to settle on my forehead. I feel the flu coming on.  And just as I was about to go warm up on the front verandah and read in the sun, the lawnmower man has arrived. I think a lay down on the lounge is the order of the afternoon. As other countries know that winter starts with the equinox or solstice or whateveritis, I know winter has started when the cat suddenly gets very affectionate and likes to lie on top of me. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking he actually likes me, but the reality is that he is just a heat-seeking body.

I have been meaning to post properly for a while, probably an inaugural ‘planner’ post to appease the Filofax gods. Notice I didn’t capitalise the word god. The jury’s still out since my sister died. I am rambling. Yes, I’m definintely coming down with the Dreaded Lurgy.

My sole reason for popping back for a bit was to share what I did on the last New Year’s Eve.

 

As I look back upon the months gone by,

and breathless, contemplate a loved one’s end,

I ponder on the grief that makes me cry

and wonder how it is we humans mend.

For lessons in humanity we learn,

When one we treasure leaves this earthly plane,

When we are left to in the darkness yearn,

We realise that ALL humans suffer pain.

 

The soul then takes a breath and comprehends

that right beside us, if we are aware,

are those who’ll always be there, our lov’d friends,

who gently nurture us through deep despair.

It’s love and cherished friendship that transcends,

The burden of humanity we share.

 

Yep. That’s what I did and all I did. I wrote a sonnet. My partying days are over and  I have a habit of reflecting and journalling on NYE. Of course the first year of grieving was highest on my mind, and so instead of journalling, out popped a sonnet. I’m quite surprised that I managed it … I didn’t set out to write a sonnet, and after all it’s got all the right and proper requirements of a REAL sonnet (as opposed to my pretend one?). It has the quatrains/octet and sextet and volta and rhyming scheme and iambic pentameter and all. It’s not strictly Petrachan, Spensarian or Shakespearean in form but more of a melding of the three. A Jularian as it were. thyggghb the cat said as it walked across my keyboard in search of my lap. Muwahhahahaha says the Lurgy as it passes through my glands and scratches its way down my throat with rampant rapidity.

lurgi

Haiku, and “A Little Sense of Music”

Tonight I found some old poetry I had written and forgotten about. A haiku:

A mirror to you …
I reflect back your beauty
and you are entranced.

And this:

A Little Sense of Music

The question is not of harmony
the length of phrase
the breadth of lyric

it is that you inflame my inner song
that you are the long fingers
to my quivering strings.

I do not exist

I am non-existant.

I am an echo, a relic of an afterimage.

I am the last exhale.

Question: Is using “I am” and “non-existant” in the same sentence an oxymoron?

More: Do you notice the void I left behind? Do you remember I used to exist?

.

Thus, I do not exist. Not even to myself.

And perhaps, I never did.

Who was it, then, who drifted through your soul?

 

Wine-fuelled ramble

Shocked to find my last post was in December last year. I have now moved into a tiny little dollshouse of a cottage where I intend to stay for all of my foreseeable life. White and blue, sunny verhandahs, a little chandelier and my pictures hung, my iron bed the home of countless feathers and down stuffed into pillows upon pillows upon a ‘feather bed’ mattress topper. A proper home for my piano. A delightful back yard with fruit trees and herbs and even a hammock. And a cat, who’s christened name is Bilbo, but I am convinced his spiritual name is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, depending. Wolf Blass Pinot Grigio. Any Sauvignon Semillon Blanc from the Adelaide Hills. Birds. Fresh air. Just being so bloody grateful for being alive and healthy.

A lot of the time, I am insensibly happy and content. Sitting on the front verandah in the sun with a cup of coffee and a book. Looking at my home, inside and out and the beauty of it. Having friends over who don’t leave until the early hours in the morning and who exclaim over how gorgeous and delightful my home is. Innumerable kisses from my loving big little boy. Adoring looks from Dr Jekyll.

But always the underlying. Always. Underlying what? Sadness, for my sister, for my parents, for my sister’s children, for life for beauty for everything. Deep grief and heaviness and, yes, depression. Guilt. Oh so much guilt. Guilt at having survived cancer (careful, early days yet Dris) while my sister is 30 years too young to be living (or should I say dying?) in an old persons’ nursing home. Does she resent me? I can’t get a smile out of her, while she beams for others, I know it’s (most likely, always a qualifier) illogical to think this, but it’s inevitable and it’s there. And on top of that worry because I have mammograms and ultrasounds next week (always an unconscious depression settles in before that annual even too). Worry because, of course, what if its’ come back? I could not tell my parents. Or anyone in my family for that matter. ‘Doing Cancer’ is already hard enough for those of us who are single, but second time around, I’d have to do it totally and entirely alone. My parents are barely coping with what is happening with my sister. No. Not feasible. I could not load that on them. Then I must try and remember to stay in the present and not worry futilely about the future and what may or may not come to pass.

And anger. Anger that this (unfair) thing is happening. Anger that my parents should have to go through this, not to mention my sister, anger that we ALL have to go through this.

But also a more personal anger. So blocked creatively and have been for the longest time. I feel the block viscerally as a ball in the middle of my chest. Unable to write for SO long. A couple of years. I used to find such a release in it–creatively, for just being me, for communicating. If I could cough up this ball. Oh I know where it stems from. A period of time of constant ridiculing and belitting of my ‘writing’ by someone who supposedly cared more than that. And I’m quite angry at him for perpetrating that upon me. And angry at myself for letting myself be affected by it! I believed too much in every word uttered.

Which leads me straight into my womanhood, or lack thereof. Again that same person has a lot to answer for there for certain absolutely unforgiveable comments about my unfitness for ‘heterosexual relationships’. It’s no wonder I feel so divorced from my feminity and sexuality, when you add to that the changes that cancer treatment makes to the body–the scars to the breasts, the effects of enforced menopause, the weight gain. I feel like I do not not how to be a woman. I do not feel like a woman. And I hardly even try and appear to be a woman. After all, I am ‘unfit for relationships’. I have lost my sense of womanhood, my femininity, my sensuality, my sexuality, my mystery, my allure, my whimsy, my creativity  … everything that makes up that part of me. And I’m mourning it GOD DAMN IT. And THAT makes me angry too.

So in an effort to counteract all of that, in an effort to find the me that is missing, I am back to reading nurturing non-fiction, and meditating. Trying to find my centre. Trying to find my Goddess. Trying to shed that heavy dark cloak of negativity put on me by the person who has stifled and shrunk me so I would believe I am less than what I am. Oh God, please, trying to find the ability to write again.