21 Days to Creative Abundance

Or Does It Explode?

A few weeks ago, I signed up for Sebastian Michael’s “Photo Artistry” online course, basically a Photoshop course for digital artists. I liked it so much that, when the opportunity came to join the life-time “Awake” program, I jumped at it.

A bonus that comes with the “Awake” program is the “21 Days to Creative Abundance” course. I wrote it off as a non-starter. Been there. Done that.

A lesson that seems to come my way regularly, but obviously one I haven’t quite learned, is that when I resist something, it’s my old thinking wanting to stay in its comfort zone*. After reading comments from several people about how beneficial the 21-day course was to them, I relented and began the course. (*Caveat: does not hold for political challenges.)

The course is organized into a series of videos and Day 1 talked about getting organized with one suggestion being to set alerts on your phone. Not the normal, “do this and do it faster” prompts … things like “wake up,” “be here,” un plug,” “move."

Having jumped in, I set up some alerts as directed. I’ve never really played with this part of my iPhone and discovered that I could link a song to an alert, not just as a ring tone, but to play the whole song. What fun to suddenly have a high energy song get me out of my chair, dancing around the living room for a few minutes before going back to work.

On the first day a couple of things happened that make me think this might be an interesting 21 days. I was on my late afternoon walk, when my phone started playing Edith Piaf’s “Milord,” and showing the message, “Be HERE!” I didn’t listen to much of the song or dance around because I was in the middle of the street at a time when a lot of Mexican families were sitting on steps chatting while the children played. I didn’t want them to think “gringa loca,” but it did make me really pay attention to where I was, taking in the colors and textures, the sparkling green of the hills behind us and the friendly faces as they called, “buenas tardes” when I walked by.

The second surprise was an alert (with no song, just tinkling crystals), that said, “Wind down.” Sebastian suggested it as a before-bed reminder to shut everything down and prepare for sleep. This called for a break in my online-until-the-last-minute routine.

Walking away from the computer calmed my mind and I spent the allotted hour cleaning the kitchen, making coffee for the morning, straightening up bits of clutter, stretching and then reading. What amazed me was that even though my computer doesn’t make noise, what I noticed was the quiet. My mind felt calm and no longer flooded.

One recommendation Sebastian makes is to develop an accountability system, which could be a friend, but I’ve decided to make it this blog. So for the next 21 days, I will post thoughts about the course and the process and any art developed along the way.

The piece shown above was created after beginning the Photoshop Artistry course. After reworking it several times using newly learned techniques, I submitted it to Living the Photo Artistic Life, the incredible magazine featuring the work of artists in the “Awake" program. I do not expect to be accepted into the magazine yet but have made a commitment to submit one piece every week. If you would like to see some of the incredible work done by artists who are “Pushing Photography Further,” go to http://www.quillandcamera.com/magazine/

This piece, “Or Does It Explode?” was submitted with this description:

The photo of this young man was taken by me at a public event in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. His brooding look reminds me of Langston Hughes’ poem “Dream Deferred” which ends with the title line. So many young people are being left behind by technology and a world moving too fast. What will they do with their pent up anger and frustration?

For more information about Sebastian Michaels or his photoshop artistry courses, go to http://www.quillandcamera.com/.

Musings on Love and Loss and the Great Ride of Life

Twenty-one shots fired into the drizzly morning.  The veterans in dress uniform paid honor to my mother's military service, not knowing that her time in the Women's Army Corps was cut short after two months when they discovered that she was only sixteen and sent her home.  Witnesses at the graveyard were few … my dad, two cousins, the overly effusive funeral director, and me, the only child, the one who got mixed up in the hospital, the one who didn't fit into the preconceived notions of daughterhood.

For years, I had wondered if I would cry when this time came. Two of my cousins had traveled  across country to be here and they told stories about how much they loved Aunt Lucille.  As they wept at the graveside, I stood dry-eyed behind them repressing the impulse to tell them how much each of them had annoyed my mother. I stood there not feeling grief or pain or even loss as this pivotal part of my life was ritually sent on her way.  I felt some angst about what might have been, but I knew my parents had done the best they could.  I had worked out my feelings toward her.  Or, had I?

Five years later, at a writer's conference in Santa Barbara, a workshop leader is talking about screenplay structure, drawing pictures of story arcs and the weaving together of plot and character development.  She plays a clip of "It's a Wonderful Life," a movie I've seen dozens of times.  The scene is George's lowest moment, when he yells at those he loves and believes that all is lost.  Suddenly, I am weeping and my chest is in a vice-grip of pain.  

The scene changes and George is in his living room after seeing the world as it would have been without him.  He is ecstatic even before the townspeople surround him with love and the cash that solves his problem.  My tears and pain gain momentum; I am thankful I'm in the back of the room.  This wave of grief puzzles me and I try to find its source.  The only thing that comes is:  mother.

Jung says the story of a life begins somewhere at a particular point where memory begins.  My earliest memory, at about three, was waking up in a car alone in the dark.  I now know that my parents must have stopped on our way home at a neighbor's where they bought milk.  I am not aware of it then, however, so I decide that they must have been eaten by a bear. I wonder who I will live with now.  I am not frightened, I know someone will take care of me, I just have to decide who it will be.  

Then my parents return and I tell them I was frightened because, somehow, I know I should have been.  I wasn't though, if anything, I remember feeling anticipation.  I was on the brink of a new direction, I could see another path winding off into the distance.  I didn't get to follow it that night but I always knew it was there waiting for me.  Somewhere out there, my people were waiting.  Years later, it appears that, by age three, I was already disconnected from my family, willing to move on to another place.  I was unbonded, looking for my real life.

Thus, my story was born, told and retold through the years in a hundred ways.  Now I recognize this tale as the archetype of the abandoned child.  However, as Leonard says, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." Feeling abandoned is the crack in my life but that was how the light got in, making me independent, self-reliant and strong.  I left home as soon as possible and, by keeping several states between my past and my present, I gradually learned to love myself, grieve for my abandoned child, and, eventually, began to find my place in the world.

Perhaps the return to grief brought forth by that perennial Christmas story was for that abandoned child, but maybe it was also for my too-young mother, a wounded child who had her dreams stolen before she even knew she had the right to have some.  Her life story made mine look like the Brady Bunch. She left my birth father after only a few months of marriage and found her self unemployed, undereducated and with an infant who cried continuously because her mother's breast milk was not providing sufficient nourishment.

While I was still a toddler, my mother covered over her wound by marrying a man who adored her but whose love she could never fully accept or trust.  In her last months, lost in deepening dementia, she repeated the same question over and over as fast as the words would come out to anyone who came near her, but most of all to my father, "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?"  

Even before she began to verbalize it in a river of pain and confusion, that desperate, unending question wrapped around her life like barbed wire, wounding everyone who came close and keeping the very people who might have cared for her at a distance.  In an ideal world, together we might have healed our karmic wounds.  In the real world, we nursed our wounds, separate and alone.

All of this makes me think about the great scheme of things.  We seem to be thrown together in a way guaranteed to create wounds, shaken up in the great bag of life with the very ingredients (people and happenstance) that tear at our hearts and then offer healing for the wounds. It's all there  … thorns and bandaids … with no signs that say, "Try this; it will make you feel better," no instruction booklet included.  Was that an oversight?

The other night I listened to a reincarnated Buddhist master talking about the path of the bodhisattva which, as I understand it, includes a vow to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings.  Perhaps that's the instruction manual, period.  In this time when purpose and meaning seem to be so illusive, maybe that's all we need to know.  Perhaps all of us are here simply to learn to love, care for, and reduce the suffering of ourselves and our fellow travelers.  There are a lot of ways of doing this so it probably doesn't matter which form we choose as long as the intent to help others is part of it.

Of course, that still doesn't explain why we've been thrown into a world that guarantees that we will be wounded but does not guarantee that we will be healed.  Maybe we've chosen to come to this theme park where we can either ride the roller coaster screaming and shouting in fear all the way until we stagger off rubber-legged and delighted, or walk about as an amused but unengaged sightseer until the park closes and we go home to sleep.