Seeking Second Grace

More 2010 work

After the commission for Anna, I worked on a series of collages with small embedded boxes - an idea I've had for a long time that I finally got around to trying out.  I've made five of them, and have already sold four (through Brackenwood Gallery in Langley)!  I seem to inadvertently have stumbled upon something marketable!  Gasp!

Anyway, here are the three of the five that I managed to get pictures of.  All three of these are sold, and then there are two others.  Both are still at the gallery, though, so there's still time to get some pics.

This one was the first of the "nests" I did.  Called "Nest 1:  Still Fly."  Can you find the phrase "still fly? in the pop-up-sized picture?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this was the second of the "nest" themed pieces.  I wanted to call it "Fiesta Nesta," because I was going for a real party nest to balance out what felt like the somberness of Nest 1.   But, I ended up calling it "Nest 2."  Dull, huh?

It sort of shows here, but the cool part of this one was that I put reflective paper behind and on the sides of the recessed area, so that the opaque glass marble "egg" reflects the light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This piece called "There is Always a Path" has a little bronze shoe embedded in the niche space.  This was actually the first of this series, before the nest bug hit me.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, here's a little detail of "Path" that (albeit a bit blurrily) shows the little bird waving the ribbon to show the way through the hills, past the forbidding fences and spiky "plants" to whatever better something is waiting on the other side.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2010 was actually kind of productive

Here's a piece I worked on in the late summer early fall.  The glorious Jennie Dorman commissioned it as a birthday gift for her sister, Anna.  To prepare for the piece, Jennie and I had a number of conversations about Anna and then I received a little box full of Anna's treasures - beads, shells, jewelry fragments...  Somehow it came together in this piece.  

In the rush to get the piece to Jennie before she moved to California (sniff), I committed the cardinal sin of not taking any pictures of it at all.  But, all was not lost!  On New Year's Day, I met Jennie, her stupendous daughter and lovely husband for breakfast in Seattle and she had these three pictures for me! Thanks, Jennie!

 

Here we are on the day of the "presentation."  I'm choosing to overlook the number of chins I'm sporting in the picture...as I invite you to do as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a detail of the center.  The branch is a laurel branch that was given to Anna upon completion of a marathon or race or something of that ilk.

If you click on the picture, you'll get a big pop-up size image - much nicer!

The bark-covered center block is the top of a box that someone gave me that once contained some bulbs or something.  I cut the hole in the center, and inserted one of the million tins of starbucks mints that my mint-addicted mother has given me for just this purpose.  

The beaded band on either side was a broken bracelet of Anna's that was also in that box of treasures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here you see the bottom left corner of the piece, with the quote "The way is not in the sky, The way is in the heart."

If you expand the image, you can kind of see that the spirals in the center background are actually carved into a layer of modeling paste that I put over a layer of collage.

It is so nice to have these pictures!  I had forgotten what this looked like, even though I spent two months up close with it.  So, thanks Jennie for restoring the memory to me.

 

 

 

 

More than enough

Remember

That to have the eyes of an artist,

That can be enough,

The ear of a poet,

That can be enough.

The soul of a human

Just pointed

In the direction of the divine,

That can be more than enough.

I tell you this to remind myself.

Every gesture is an act of creation.

Even empty spaces and silence

Can be the wings and voices of angels.

 

- Michele Linfante

Slow Everything

 First there was Slow Food.  Food that comes from places near you grown by people you know in tune with the seasons you live in.

In the context of a fascinating conversation at my college reunion, I realized that the DIY crafts movement is really all about Slow Stuff.  Stuff that's made by people with faces and hands and hearts and personalities, infused with originality and love.  A sweater hand-knitted row by row; a necklace strung bead by thoughtful bead; an assemblage that grows ever-richer and more layered through the addition of time and patience.

Today, I'm wishing for a Slow Ideas movement.  Ideas grown slowly and not shared until fully ripened.  Ideas mulled and leavened; ideas turned over and thought through; ideas that come fully into their own not in the time frame of a twit or tweet or blog post, but over months and years...maybe even a lifetime.

Perhaps I just crave the conditions that nurture Slow Ideas.  Time to moodle around.  Time to stare into space.  Time to grab a thought by the tail and follow it as far as it wants to go...wherever it wants to go - just to see where it leads.  

Maybe at this back-to-school season, I miss the poetic richness of slow-baked ideas that I used to find in the work of big thinkers from earlier generations.

Or maybe I'm a little afraid that all the little, quick thoughts we all share so readily now will never add up to the kinds of Big Ideas that can only come through focused, sustained thinking.  And maybe I think that those kinds of Big Ideas are what we really need these days.

In any case, I'm considering myself on board with the Slow Ideas movement.  Anyone want to join me?  Don't answer too fast.  Think about it for awhile.  I'm happy to wait.

- SS

Zymoglyphic

Here's a glorious new (to me) word:

ZYMOGLYPHIC

It means "art consisting of three-dimensional assemblages made of natural objects like sticks, stones, skeletons, leaves, moss or grass."

Cool, huh?  

As my daughter happily dives back into school, and the leaves start floating to the ground, it makes me want to go tromping through the fields, admiring the changing light, feeling the beginnings of crispness in the air, and gathering up a collection of source material for something zymoglyphic.

How about you?

Quick Hit: Butt-Kicking Clip (say that 10 times fast!)

Photo clipped from last Sunday's paper...now occupying a central spot on my bulletin board of instant motivation.  I'm thinking maybe a tattoo???

 

Rocking Before Walking

So many new steps, so few muscles

 So, I've been spending considerable mental energy lately trying to get myself oriented to a clear vision for Updraft Services, for Second Grace Studio, for this blog, and for how it all fits together.  More than that, as the penny drops that I'm really, truly, doing this "self-supporting entrepreneur" thing, like, for reals... I'm challenging myself to step up and take consistent, decisive action in the direction of my vision of success - business success.

This is, um, challenging.  For one thing, it is putting me hard up against all kinds of stuff I don't know how to do (yet).  For another, it is making glaringly apparent the imbalance between my skill at imagining stuff (love it!) and my skill at taking effective action to make it happen (not so much).  

I'm seeing how this imbalance creates a kind of manic/depressive see-saw in which periods of ecstatic frolicking in my imagined fields of possibility are followed by desperation over the overwhelming number of new skills I need to master and the agonizing slowness of step-by-step activities like technical problem-solving, mailing-list building, accounting system creation, and all the other hard core, real life stuff that I would much prefer to believe I'm exempt from. 

 I can see how much I've relied (in my first 40 years) on my ability to learn quickly through intuitive leaps (I get it!) and how little I've exercised the muscles required to take an irreducible series of action steps (I can do it!).

 Every effort is the only effort that matters

I found a powerful source of inspiration for the patience of small actions in My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor (of TED talk fame) in which she describes her process of recovery from the stroke that damaged her left brain.  She writes,  

"I learned early that every effort I put forth was the only effort that was important.  On day one, for example, I had to rock and rock and rock some more before I had enough oomph to roll upward.  While in this stage of rocking, I had to recognize that rocking was the only activity that mattered.  Focusing my success on the final goal of sitting up was not wise because it was far beyond my current ability...I had to completely inhabit the level of ability that I could achieve before it was time to take the next step.  In order to attain a new ability, I had to be able to repeat that effort with grace and control before taking the next step."  

In reading this, I realized that the patience and focus and discipline required to scale the learning curve I'm on is no different.  Looking back, I can see I've spent years rocking back and forth just to get the oomph up to sit at my own desk chair in my own office and do work that matches my own gifts and talents.  In retrospect, I can appreciate what a slow slow process it has been getting to just the first stage of knowing how to stand up for myself and what I have to offer. 

And, I can see that when I've tried to jump over a stage here or there (OK, constantly) without doing the work to gain "grace and control" at the pre-requisite skill, I've fallen or crashed or succumbed to hopelessness, desperate about not succeeding at the higher level fast enough. 

Just One Leaf

For a forest-focused brain like mine, the narrowing of focus that Bolte Taylor describes is also a critical skill for me.  I can imagine writing a blog post and telling myself "writing this post is the only activity that matters.  (Later I can add the ability to get other people to re-post it or automatically link it to facebook);" 

or, when I'm creating my online shop I can remind myself "right now getting this paypal link to work is the only thing that matters, (later I can add affiliates)" 

or, when I'm designing an e-book and panicking about what will come next, I can keep the wolves at bay with the mantra "this is the only activity that matters right now.  (Later I can add the ability to do a high quality product launch.) etc. etc. etc.

Defining your learning edge

There was one other phrase that jumped out at me from Bolte's story of recovery:

"If the boundary between what you can do and what you cannot do is not clearly defined, then you don't know what to try next."

 I take from this that in order to be clear on my right next step, I need to be honest about where I really am today (this is harder than it sounds for someone who lives largely in the world of imagined possibilities with only a toehold in practical reality).  

If I forget to celebrate what I already can do, I'm missing critical information, and if my ego takes over and I over-estimate what I already can do, I'm setting myself up to try the wrong next thing and feel a sense of failure.

Listing what I can and cannot (yet) do in the realm of building a business feels like a fine and worthwhile exercise.  Getting a clear picture of my learning edge is a much needed salve for my panicky sense of being vaguely far from where I want to be.  As soon as I look at things objectively in this way, I can spot the learning edge much more clearly, while retaining a hopeful sense of all I have to build on.  If you are up against a ginormous learning curve in some area of your own growth, you might give it a try, too.  

And Now a Word with My Brain

After hearing and then reading Dr. Taylor's story, I am so grateful to my own sweet little left and right brain hemispheres which I now picture humming along up there, doing their brilliant work separately and together.  

I have a special request of you, dear left hemisphere.  I'm going to be asking you to give up some of your ego-certainty and learn some new tricks - OK?  I'm also counting on you to help me put some order and schedule to the big dreams that old righty is endlessly dreaming.  I know I've under-worked some parts of you in these last 40 years, but I know all about brain plasticity now and I know you can do it!   So let's all work together on this, shall we?  

Love ya,  SS

How Do I Look?

 Sometimes, you are going along in your life, pretty much doing your thing from the inside out, not terribly self-conscious about any of it and then...  BLAMMO!  Your 20th College reunion looms, and you find yourself in an hour-long photo shoot of YOU to create a professional-looking photograph for self-promotion, and suddenly you are seeing yourself from new angles, old angles, and other people's angles.  

The context of the college reunion alone has had me seeing my life through new/old lenses.  Suddenly, I'm seeing myself through the eyes of my own younger self, comparing who I've become with who I imagined I would be at 17, 18, 19, 20.  And then, of course, there is the perspective of how I will look to others today - who I am compared to who they thought I would be?  who am I compared to what they value and define as success?  Will they focus on the extra chins, the nascent mustache, the greying temples, or will they see....something else?

Ouch!

 Living with these comparisons for the past few months has been painful and fascinating and, finally, productive.  For awhile, it stirred depression (as the habit of comparison so often does), as I felt the full weight of the distance between the dreams and ambitions of young Sara and the reality of the life I've created.  All the not-thin, not-rich, not-changing-the-world, not-famous-ness that marks my life seemed like marks of failure - and I struggled to imagine how to encounter more "successful" old friends with my head held high.  Not surprisingly, in anticipation of the judgments of others, I packed on lots of fresh new pounds...visible traces of my ashamedness.

Time-out for Truth

But more recently, I've recognized this downward spiral as the mind-%^$%# it really is, and have gotten re-connected to a set of truths - truths that have restored my power and left me excited to go and see and be seen.  They are the same truths I teach in coaching on perfectionism and authenticity...those oldies but goodies that, for so many of us, must be re-learned all our lives.  Here they are:

1. External measures of success are always bogus.  
2. Measuring yourself against anyone else's definition of success - even your own younger self's definitions - is a surefire path to misery.
3. Never offer disclaimers when sharing what you've created.  Don't apologize for yourself, or rush to tell everything you know about what doesn't work (in your writing, your art, or your life):  give others the gift of being able to draw their own conclusions.
4. Check your life and your art against your own values and intentions:  what are the values that you hold that have guided the choices that have brought you this far?  
5. Drop the comparison glasses and pick up the compassion glasses...only then can you relax - and relaxation is the condition for creativity.

What do you know?  I made this life, and I'm proud of it!

So, it turns out I'm pretty proud of my life.  When I remember that I've made a whole long string of choices - all based on a desire to life authentically and joyfully - that have brought me to my life today...I'm really proud of the choices and the driving desire that has guided them.  I'm proud to have consistently been guided by my heart, that I've had the courage to walk away from paths that looked good but felt awful, and that I've insisted on making space for my creative self to do her thing.  

It turns out that the only places of discomfort in my life are those places where I'm still holding back in sharing my gifts, or haven't found the stamina to sustain my energy for all the creative directions I'd like to travel.  These are good kinds of discomforts - the kind that drive me towards greater courage and self-care...and there's no shame in them.  Just a call to keep practicing.

And, then there's the pictures...

Which is all very good ground to have travelled BEFORE the big photo shoot last week!  I pick up a disk-full of over 100 pictures of myself tomorrow - a perfect opportunity to see with the eyes of compassion and forgiveness.  If I don't appear exactly as I'd like - that's ok.  Who am I to tell other people that I'm not gorgeous?  I'm trusting that there's at least one image in there that shows me in a flattering light, that captures something of what I admire most in myself, and that I'm proud to use as a representation of the person I've become...so far.  

It becomes about the groove

Against the backdrop of this swirl of reflection, I snagged this quote out of the paper yesterday.  The speaker is a jazz singer, who is talking about what she's learned by doing an album of African songs...

It becomes about the groove, and not overplaying and over-embellishing.  It's about letting beauty be beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.  But sometimes I get in my own way, and I have to say, 'Stop!  Quit playing all those notes.'

And that's what I will take with me to the reunion and to the viewing of that terrifying disk of images...it's about letting whatever is beautiful in my life just be beautiful (and there is so much beauty everywhere I look!  In my sleepy, summer-freckled daughter this morning, in this gorgeous island where I've chosen to live, in the moments holding hands in bed with my husband before we launch the day, in the shrine I'm excited about starting, in the bright colors of my little office where I work to build my very own business...)  And, it's about getting out of my way and having the courage to not over-embellish.  There is no need to do more, be more, have more.   It is what it is.  I am what I am.  I look like what I look like.  Simple, yeah?  

Who am I to deny the beauty in any of it?

This Zig Zag Life

 As I move between creative practice and presenting my artwork to the world, and building a coaching and editing business and doing the work of that business and trying to be present and accounted for as a mother and a wife, a sister and a daughter, I feel often like I am surrounded by all the right piles of yarn, but they are not weaving themselves into a discernible pattern.  Except for maybe a zig zag pattern.

I tack in one direction for an hour or a day or a week (hardly ever a whole week), and then I turn to a different wind and tack in another direction. There are so many tiny and big choices to be made every day: how to use my time?  where to direct my energies? what is little? what is big? what is next?  what is progress and what is illusion?

It is so easy to lose sight of where I'm heading in all this.

Then, I look up above my desk to the quote centered in my visual field:

"Every time life brings you to a crossroads, from the tiniest to the most immense, go toward love, not away from fear."  (martha beck)

How much of my zigging is toward love?  How much of my zagging is toward fear?  How often am I inserting a new angle as I flee from fear...running toward work I don't love because it pays the bills?  Running away from risky projects because I fear they won't amount to anything?  Running away from the joy of writing in this blog because I tell myself I've got to get my billable work done?

 But, then I return to the sailing metaphor - some amount of tacking is all part of getting where you are going, right?  As a non-sailor, this is a stretch for me, but I'm pretty sure it is all about aligning yourself with the prevailing winds - turning this way and that to make best use of the forces of nature...but ultimately still traveling in the direction you have chosen.

Perhaps the key is to enlarge my perspective - not looking at each zig and zag with the daily, small mind perspective that goes "hey, I was working on that and now I'm working on this - what gives?," but rather the broader perspective...where am I now with respect to my larger sense of destination?  Which way are the winds blowing?  Might it be possible to shift directions less frequently to allow for longer periods without tacking?

 And then, seeking zig zag photos, I come across this one...this shadow of a perfectly straight railing only APPEARS to be a zig zag because it is falling on a set of stairs.  Ah Ha!  Perhaps I'm going straight after all, but because I am climbing, I have the illusion of going side to side.

So, what conclusions might be reached from this little zig zag Monday ramble?

1.  When you are committed to steering your own ship, you must also become committed to paying attention to how you are making choices.  Is anxiety or purpose at the helm today?

2.  It also helps to have reminders everywhere of where you are heading, so that you can tell if you are tacking as a method for aligning yourself with the winds, or just shooting off in whatever direction fear might push you today.

3.  It also helps to make peace with the fact that there may be a difference between the direction you happen to be facing in today, and the direction of your soul's purpose.  As long as your inner eye stays facing the soul's direction, you can focus here and then there without losing your bearings.   

For me, this means being able to focus on copy writing for a website, or designing a webinar for a client without mistaking these as my ultimate direction.  They are all part of my movement toward the creativity-centered life I crave.  And, I trust my sense of love to help me course-correct when fear and anxiety push me to taking a side-track too far.

And now I'm off to climb up the next step!  As I do, something moved me to dig out this quote from my quote file - perhaps just one more reminder that it is not our job to have all the right pieces, but it is our task to continually work to find, and make, the pattern:

 "You can't always change things. Sometimes you don't have no control over the way things go. Hail ruins the crops, fire burns you out. And then you're just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That's what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you or is all you can afford to buy....that's just what's given to you. Your fate. But the way you put them together is your business."

-Texas Quilter, Mary White

Stream of Life

Here is one of the pieces I've completed recently for the May show at the Brackenwood Gallery in Langley.  (Read about my connection to the gallery here.)

 The quote on the nightsky/waves on the rotating center bar reads:

""The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers."  - — Rabindranath Tagore

Isn't that incredibly wonderful?

The center bar is a broom handle section which I covered in alternating strips of music and strips of a beautiful photo of sunflowers at night.  I went over parts of the sunflowers picture with paint - silver to bring out the stars, some yellow to brighten the sunflowers, etc.   The background of the top section is another picture of bare tree branches at night.  I picked out a few of the branches to embellish with silver paint and some with glitter.  I like the way that takes the starkness/deadness of the branches and converts them to something that is also part of the magic of life.

Here's a closeup of the dancing people in the center bottom squares.  This was a pair of earrings that I believe I gave to my sister Shannon probably 25 years ago...recently she gave them back to me for just such a purpose.  I changed their color and gave them silver shoes, but otherwise mostly let them be their wonderful jitterbugging selves.  The "numberless blades of grass" are cut paper, with a bit of paint on top, just for a bit of depth:

Here's a close-up of the heart/tulip on top.  That tulip has been wandering around my studio for the last 8 years - originally cut out to be part of a clock, I think.  Combining it with the anatomical heart image from the Mexican Loteria was, if I remember right, the first move in the journey of this piece.  Everything else sprung from that heart/flower.  The leaves at the base of the tulip/heart are black and green tissue glued onto lightweight cardboard and then cut out. 

So, there you have it - a final side view of the whole thing.  I think it is fun to twirl that center bar with the "handles" I put together.  I am proud of that interactive solution to the problem of a quote that is really too long, but I just couldn't bear to chop it up!