A Lovely Dream

Art and Volunteering

Are you moody? Envious of others? Do you feel like something is missing from your life? Do you stress over your weight or if you are pretty enough or fear getting older? Are you sad because someone you love died? Does life feel a bit, eh? I want to introduce you to the place I volunteer once a week.
 
TURN CITY CENTER FOR THE ARTS

With the help of Carol Clayton who donated supplies, me and my friends Courtney and Cody decided to bring art journaling to people with disabilities. How did I do it? I looked up art and the disabled online and found this center. I went there and said, hey, let me do this, and they did. I have never taught the disabled before but it didn't matter. I went into my first class with love in my heart. And you can too.

I have 13 students and each one of them has a journal. I chose the one Michaels sells called Artist Loft that has a canvas cover they could immediately paint and make their own. Having something entirely their own where they can make the decisions was most important because I knew they are told everywhere else in their life what they can and can't do.  Having a journal is more than an art project, it is a place to BE. All of the students are at different levels and physical abilites but all of them love to journal. It took a few weeks but we learned what each of their personal needs were and each class I make sure everyone has the materials to make them happy. 

Stamps and stencils and paint and water soluble crayons and markers and stickers and scrapbook papers, all of it is laid on the table and I tell them to play.  And just like every other student I have ever had who is a beginner to art journaling they are afraid to mess up the page.  So I remind them, to make wonderful pages we must first experiment. If you do not play with your materials then you will never make great pages because you won't have control over what you are doing. I give you permission to play! That is what is so wonderful about it. Each page is a new opportunity to make anything happen. Experiment and play and see what comes up. All of it can be turned into a background layer for more serious work if you want, or it can just be free expression. 

And each client has different needs. For some who cannot speak or hear, placing pretty objects into their books by themselves is a great cause for joy! Or spraying a stencil of a seahorse. This is magic for them! And it all happens inside their book where they are in control.  I have learned a lot about my own art journal after working with them and how anal I can be trying to compose a pleasing page. Or how hard I can be on myself when something doesn't turn out perfectly. I want the freedom to play and try things and have it be okay that I JUST LIKE SPARKLY THINGS. Imagine,  a grown woman with a page of soft, glittery hearts to look at. I am not ashamed to say I like it just as much as my students do.We all need help and encouragement. And you don't have to be a fine artist to spread art journal joy. If you love it, you can bring it to others. You can bring it to children or to the elderly. You can bring it to a small group. Just start spreading the joy.  It is NEEDED. As miserable as I can get missing my dad who is now gone, I lose myself in the smiles from my students who know they are not as capable as everyone else. Most have walkers and maybe can't hold a pencil with any coordination.  Courtney actually holds the hand of some of our more challenged clients and guides them into making an image.  It is magical to see.

And do we have a lot of spare time for this? Ha. I have just as much spare time as you. I have none. But it is exactly when we are most busy that our soul needs to give.  We can get caught up in the meaningless things of the world. We can start to feel sorry for ourselves. All of that disappears when we help those less fortunate than us. And instead of depressing us, we are lifted out of our misery. 

I made this painting to add color to our art room and for the students to be happy when they saw themselves in a painting doing what we do in class.  Here is a link to the students; can you figure out which one is which figure?

 

If you can donate any art supplies at all it would be very helpful!

Click here for the contact page.

 

Nina LOVES spraying and the color purple!

and yes, my hair. I'm getting to that.

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Living in the Answer

“When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away.” Alcoholics Anonymous


You know what you have to do, you just don't want to. Whatever that thing is. And so you continue on and don't like where you are at but are unwilling to change your whole life. Because that is what it takes. Whether you want to eat healthy and exercise or go back to school or get a divorce or become an artist or writer.  Staying stuck is more comfortable then doing.

  But I am a fan of doing. Doing is awesome. Afraid of making the wrong choice? If you are passionate about something and keep thinking about it - do it. It may just be a stepping stone to what you really want to do, but aren't aware of yet. But if you stay stuck if you stay miserable you WILL have more of the same. Period.
  Now, people in your life won't like when you Do. Even if they think you are miserable the way you are now too, they are used to you this way.  It may suck to hear you whine all the time but its comfortable for them. When you start to DO, when you eat better and and go for walks and grow stronger, when you start school, when you become bigger than who you have been, unless they are growing along with you then they might not see you as much.  Whatever need you filled for them won't be filled by you anymore. They will not like this. So when you are successful is often a time you loose your friends.

But it's okay because new friends are waiting for you out in the place where they are doing things too. And that's where you want to be. In the middle there will be change, but DO your thing anyway.  What is the alternative?  Staying stuck in dysfunction, in boredom, in a life half lived, you have the power to change that. YOU can be way bigger than you are now. 

   This way you have been living, whatever it is that is making you sad and feel small and crappy, stop it. Start living in the answer.  Get off the couch.  Stop worrying what people are going to think of you. Start being YOU. For petes sake already, you and me, no more distractions. No more whining about how it could be and oh how we'll never get there.  Live it now. Let's drop all the bullshit and BE THERE NOW.  You and me.

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As We Are

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
'Hurry, you will be dead before-'
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton


This is Tigger. Another orange cat in my life.

Somerset LOVE

I don't have my copy yet, but I am in the new Somerset Studio magazine (May 2013). I made a never seen before portrait for Ranger Ink. Check it out!

And it's May

Art from my workshop Tell Your Story.
I've been working myself literally to death, and then trying to exercise, so I got horribly sick. I'm sure it has something to do with my upcoming sobriety date and my general panic around birthdays and holiday events. I dislike milestones. I prefer ordinary days when nothing extraordinary is expected to happen.  Now that I have a fever and can do nothing I am even more emotionally cracked out.  Sitting still and not being able to do anything just lets me think. And feel. Two shitty things when one is in a bad space, and sober.
  I know most of you here don't have a life like mine. Most of you are married and settled, have a kid.  I admit that I feel very foreign to the women I teach, especially when I do in person classes. For varying reasons I have for most of my life sequestered myself in my room and see very few people.  It started after Highschool when I developed panic disorder and really couldn't go anywhere.
But it grew into a general uneasiness in the real world. And sitting here sick makes me think of it even more.  I feel like such a fk up.  That even though I have many valid excuses as to why I am how I am and what fked up things happened, I still feel like I'm doing it wrong.   Obviously I am because I'm so sick.  I know what I need to do for my health and I go on the roller coaster of doing it and then not doing it and I pay for it like now.  It is absolutely the same thing as pouring a bottle of vodka down my throat only its not vodka, its 18 hour days and eating pop tarts.  Same results - exhaustion, sickness, it just happens slower. There's more time for me to stop it then when I'm in a binge of drinking, and when I drank once I had one it was Off To The Races and I would be unable to stop...sort of like how I got to here today. Sick like I am.

 

Once I'm on that manic roll of sugar and work and no feeling and go gO GO! I don't want to stop. Stopping means feeling and thinking and missing and longing and looking at the superficial aspects of my life and knowing I am not where I want to be yet.  And knowing I'll never get there if I don't deal with my health.  It's a circle of not wanting to feel or think then doing things so I wont feel or think and then it makes me sick. So I'm sober, but still act like an addict, does that make sense? The first step is of course admittance.

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