I've been reading a lot.
It's what I tend to do when I'm tired, overwhelmed, or not feeling good. I've been all three recently.
I have a coworker who is struggling through the third health issue in a row. She wanted to know what the universe was trying to tell her. My response was that I didn't know about the universe but what I did know is that once we catch virus #1 our immune system seems to get down and then we are open to more things that come along.
It occurred to me that our mental health can be the same way. So to shake myself loose I signed up for an art class (Faces with Lynn Whipple/Carla Sonheim)....
Last Sunday I spent 2 hours with crayons, paints, pens and I played. And it was fun.
Another conversation I have been considering: a coworker and I were talking about singing with children. About how they don't care whether you are good or not, they just love it. My running joke when I try to encourage other adults to sing with children is that I sing with more enthusiasm then talent and that they can too. And the funny thing is, the more you sing the better you get.
It's so easy to get caught up in being good at something. Good enough to share with others, good enough to sell. So easy to compare. To look for validation. It shuts us down, keeps us from doing things that I think that humans are intrinsically drawn to: drawing, singing, creating, telling stories or playing for example.
As I periodically do, I've been caught in the why am I blogging? What I am I doing here? This week I've remembered that I started because I wanted to participate. There is something in the act of making, writing, capturing a thought or idea that brings me joy. That adds magic to my world. Not everything is good but that's not really the point. It's the process, the participation...
Just putting that out in the universe.
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This morning I went looking for something to consider and found an interview with Enrique Martinez Celaya (On Being):
"There’s an intelligence at play in the work itself and a sense of something I can only describe as a consciousness in that work that engages me, forces me to be a witness, forces me to be a conversation partner, places me in a very unstable place. And there’s an instability in that exchange that is more, simply, than just looking at a bunch of marks and thinking of how Vincent might have made them or something like that. And this is a rare thing, I think. But I will suggest that somewhere around that, one could construct the definition of what art is, as opposed to an art activity. It’s when something has the capacity to embody consciousness in a way that it can be unfolded."
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I went looking for a bit of joy and found this...