Skip to main content

journaling

A friend of mine asked me recently to share my journaling process.  I don't know that I could really do that.  I have been journaling since I was a young girl.  I took a long hiatus from private discourse after the divorce debacle and made "journaling" public in the form of this blog.  A few years ago I was able to begin journaling again.  Here are a few of the pages that fill spiral bound art journals.  I work on a page or two in the evenings before I begin my meditation.  This is a time to download whatever remains unresolved from the day.  I have permission to screw up and make a mess.  There are no mistakes.  If something bothers me I don't tear it out, I just cover it with gesso and build on top of it or add to it or sit with my discomfort and listen.  This is how I approach art, as an ongoing conversation and there isn't a right way of saying anything.
 The work can be cathartic or illuminating or just relaxing.
Working on this scale is nice.  There isn't the pressure involved in "creating art" or filling a canvas.  The blank pages are merely a quiet invitation to express.

Comments

Wind said…
I want to take this beautiful inspiration and practice laying my processes out on the blank page!
Thank you sweet!
March 28, 2013 at 10:42 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more