Tag Archives: Jen Louden

Talking turkey with my creative self

DSCN0748At the prompting of Jen Louden, I recently asked my creative self what she was hungry for. I told my creative self I was ready to listen and I wrote while she dictated.

Boy, did she let fly! I confess to being taken aback. My creative self barely stopped short of swearing at me. Let me quote her (removing the more colourful language):

For months without end you’ve been utterly immersed in [various worthy things! Ed] …In all this, I may have got an hour! A scatty distractedDSCN0815 hour if I am lucky!! … You came back here and I was hopeful I’d get some quality time. But what did I get? Nothin’!  When do I ever get that focussed, dedicated time you give [various worthy things. Calm down creative self! Ed]? When does the unhurried dreaming happen?…Wendy, I want to tell you that all that other stuff will totally wait! If you give me a day, just one day, that other stuff will all be there the next day. No-one will have eaten you. No-one will have died.  Pretend the line was down, the power cut…whatever. Just do you and me the enormous good favour of a date! A joy date! A creativity date. VERY SOON! Tomorrow even…what I hunger for is your wholehearted, committed time. [Bold hers!]

DSCN0899So we had a date, myself and I. Four hours.  I turned off the computer and put the phone out of checking reach.  I said aloud to my creative self, OK baby, it’s just you and me. Alone. The two of us. I’m yours.  And we played.  We had a ball.

For an embarrassing number of years I have wanted to make a cane inspired by my handbag* so I did. It was a blast.  I made more pendants than one woman could use.  And the next day when I went back to work on all those waiting things, things flowed. Grace abounded. I achieved more than I had for ages.

I think I heard my creative self muttering ungraciously about how if I divided that one day among all the months she’d been bloody waiting there were still some dates owing blah, blah, blah…. but I can forgive her.  I say the same sort of thing myselExif_JPEG_PICTUREf.

*My elder daughter gave me a handbag by a wonderful Argentinian artist Graciela Fuenzalida for a special birthday and it never fails to bring a smile!  Her faces remind me of Picasso’s Les Meninas!  Her bag inspired my canes.

Thoughts on a Thursday

image1. When you have travelled in planes for 24 hours and then driven in a car for 9 hours, sometimes even the company of your magnificent daughters and delightful grand-daughter is not enough to stave off sleep after Christmas lunch;

2. Today marks the beginning of Universal Letter Writing Week and I have undertaken to write one letter (albeit short!) each day for the week. A hand written letter in an envelope with a stamp. Read more about this here!

3. Truly understanding (thanks to being involved in this) that I am a human with limited time and energy and I must make hard choices every single day about where I can put that time and energy can make a profound difference. Jen Louden goes on to say It’s OK to mourn that I can’t do everything, but it’s not OK to pretend that I don’t have to choose.  Choosing is my art. Learning to live this made the latest time in Nepal very different and very special. For me and the ladies!

 

4. On a really long hot ( over 1000 km) drive when one hearing aid isn’t working so you1305549469484 can’t really talk and you only get inklings of music, you can make a wasabi coated pea – just the one – last for 20 minutes from mouth entry to swallowing final crumbs. I had to work up to it and think I could get to 30 minutes now. I can perfect the technique on the next long drive!

5. It’s always good to be reminded that the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your story, your mind, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. Thank you for your voice Neil Gaiman.

6. Sometimes, reorganising the studio is more important than unpacking.  But because I am learning about these, it was delightful rather than driven!  And not totally finished but good enough to be playing in!

DSCN06797. Visiting the remote  Solu Khumbu home and family of my dear bhai (and Colourful Journey co-leader) Bishnu Rai was one of the most amazing things I have ever done. A joy and a privilege.  We could have done without the earthquake in Okhaldhunga (5.9 on the Richter Scale) but it meant I was all over the earthquake drill when we had another one (tidily at 2.9) in Broken Hill the night we got home!

And who said you can’t maintain a unique sense of style in tiny Himalayan villages? I can tell you where to get the sparkly pink rubber chappals I was wearing with my thick purple socks.

Happy New Year. May we cultivate open, inquiring minds.

Teach Now, she said. So I did….

I can’t say what the impact of doing Jen Louden’s Teach Now course was on my IMG_0018students* but for me, it was profound.  Yup, that good.  And let me say right now that I don’t get commission nor am part of any plan when I rave here. This is pure I really loved it raving!

I’ve taught quite a lot in different capacities and love doing it.  I teach for months each year in Nepal and am doing more and more teaching here in Australia. Teaching/ sharing is becoming more and more part of what I do and I want to do it as well as I can.  As a chronic over provider and an introvert, I also wanted to teach well without feeling very anxious and exhausted afterwards.  And without exhausting or overwhelming students with my excitementIMG_0026 and passion!

When the 2014 Teach Now course started I was in Nepal with unreliable internet, no hope of being around for phone calls and months of travelling ahead of me.  Was the timing right I wondered? And yet, inside me I knew it was and even when Jen Louden sensibly replied with Only you know that to my Is this timing crazy? email, her realistic description of expectations and time required meant I knew I could embrace this.

I’d spent some money previously on some on line training and was very underwhelmed. This made me fearful to spend more but Teach Now was a great investment. It’s worth so much more than you pay and the results far IMG_0019exceeded my expectations.  It helped me so much as I prepared for perhaps the most ambitious teaching I have done (the 6 week course) and some of Jen’s thoughtful questions have revolutionised the way I prepare and determine what to include.  And…in my case very pertinently…what not to include.

From my perspective, my teaching was so much more joy filled and energising rather than draining. I knew how to replenish myself after a class but did not have that utterly spent feeling I used to get.  I came home with more and more ideas and I grew to love using my creativity in preparing classes.  I could go on. And on. Suffice it to say, anyone wanting guidance about how toIMG_0023 effectively communicate something they are passionate about should have a look at Teach Now.

*I am blessed with cracker students and they all made gorgeous things and humoured me when I did my raves about creativity. The photos are from the most recent one day workshop! Ola and Tracey, you were blurry sorry.  So nice to have a bloke there Clem!!!!

Lower Your Expectations

Many years ago at the start of a live performance by the gifted comedians Lano and Woodley, the audience was instructed to do something that we were told would magnify our enjoyment of the evening enormously. We were told to join hands, close our eyes and…lower our expectations.

IMG_0921My husband adopted this very quickly as a bit of a mantra for life but I resisted for years, not really understanding the real meaning, the profound truth that was contained in this seemingly comic act. It was only after years of suffering because I didn’t conform to my own exacting standards, or not attempting stuff because it would never be good enough, that I understood how lowering my expectations makes a difference.

In a recent post,  Jen Louden (and more of her later this week) explained what she means by lowering expectations and as I couldn’t do it any better myself, I am quoting her here:

Lowering your standards might sound like I’m saying “go ahead, do sloppy work” or “sure, watch another five episodes of House of Cards.” …That’s not lowering your standards. That’s resignation. Or collapsing.

Lowering your standards means removing the deadly weight of perfectionism, of standards so impossibly high you never meet them or, if you do, you raise the bar and keep going. No rest, no recognition, and forget celebration or satisfaction.

Lowering your standards is remembering that to be human means to be flawed. It is to learn to grow down into the truer shape of your real life, not the glossy fantasy life you keep thinking will arrive… someday. Nor is it to live a stunted life of less than true, less than what you desire.

Lowering your standards fosters progress in a human-scaled, mindful way. “This is what I can do right now and I’m doing it.”

She writes here about Conditions of Enoughness which is closely related.  I also relate it to Brene Brown’s wise counsel to embrace self compassion rather than setting ridiculous standards of perfection.  And my experience has been that practising more compassion towards myself has really helped me to be more genuinely compassionate to others.

It’s hard to know how to pictorially illustrate lowering your expectations so I am just including this photo of something that totally exceeded my expectations – our wonderful Lake Mungo National Park!

 

Don’t do the habitual thing….

….and how Brian Eno had an impact on polymer art in Broken Hill!

DSCN5443Recently, a wonderful teacher, Jen Louden*, wrote:

to shape and build more of the life you want, you have to make choices. To make choices, you need awareness. To access awareness, it helps immeasurably to be able to calm down no matter what.

Recognising that moment of choice and being calm instead of rushing headlong into default DSCN5452response is a work in progress for me.  Acknowledging the spaciousness of calm and not doing my habitual thing (if it ain’t helpful) takes practice.

A lot of that practising happens in my art.  And naturally it spills into my teaching.  In our classes we’ve been talking about being open to new things, taking risks, doing something that breaks a creative deadlock.

DSCN5447In the 70s, musician Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt developed Oblique Strategies -a set of cards used to break deadlocks in creative situations. Each card had a remark to ponder and think about how it might apply to your situation. Sometimes the remarks are cryptic and many of these related specifically to music  but can be reinterpreted to any form of creative endeavour. Here are some examples (with more here):

Use an old idea; Think – inside the work and outside the work; emphasise differences; tape your mouth; use the simplest idea; honour the error as a hidden intention; ask advice and many others.

Another version of this is Dayle Doroshow and Cynthia Tinapple’s Chaos Cards.  I have been making my own Oblique/DSCN5449 Chaos Cards which include general and more design related prompts like Add Spirals; Make a curve angular; Incorporate words; Add texture; Include a memory as well as more Eno-esque ones!

DSCN5445Last night the ladies made bracelets in an analogous colour scheme using the personal palettes they created the week before.  And they each had to use a card.  There were some groans as they read out the remarks – what does this mean? How am I expected to do that? But with encouragement to risk experimentation, to approach things with an open and curious approach, they came up with some fabulous design ideas.

My latest version of not doing the habitual thing is my response to the challenge issued by the organisers of the White DSCN5455Cliffs Art Festival.  The incredibly creative Cree Marshall gave a bust to a range of people with the instructions that it was to be covered and in line with the festival theme of RAW! I lacked the confidence to take progress shots and now wish  I had but at least I have the finished object! I was inspired by the phrases raw metal, red raw and raw edges. And I set myself the boundary of not buying ANYTHING to complete the task.

Her Teach Now course is simply one of the best courses I have ever done.

Un viaje colorido

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post.  Not too many words…just some pictures.DSCN4926

Loving family mock my repeated comments on the colours of all our trips….the browns (so much more than browns) in Tibet, the greens of the jungles, the reds of the Outback here at home. Oh the colours.

And, Barcelona was no different.  Vibrant, jewel-like, subtle, radiant, natural,DSCN4794 singing….oh the colours!  Look at that fruit mosaic above!

And because if I put pictures with no words they go in funny places, here is a poem I really like (thank you Jen Louden):

Heart on the Mend

You are not here a wise woman said
to fill the hole
in other people’s souls

DSCN4831You are here
to find the joy
in being who you areDSCN4793
and expressing
what you love

You are here to find and Honor
the wisdom of your heart
the knowing of your soul

And in the presence of your living loveDSCN4782
others are more likely to remember
to find and to mend themselves

Nanna Aida Svendsen in Of Water Lilies and Warm Hearts