Beautiful Gratitude....

I found this beautiful video on youtube by Louie Schwartzberg. I found his work very wondrous and his talk very inspirational. May it lift your heart and your day!

Filling the Well....



Filling the well is a term Julia Cameron uses in her book, The Artist's Way. The well is your pool of creativity, your dreams, ideas, inspirations, images and so forth. As your creative juices flow with tasks, projects, ideas you deep into that well or pool and start emptying it out. One must refill this pool otherwise you will be empty. I have been feeling like that lately with all the blogging activity I have been engaged in since I committed to the Ultimate Bog Challenge- 30 blogs in 30 days. I also find myself working on empty when my day job ramps up gets busy beyond belief and I need to come home and work on Ritual Waters - my real creative passion. So here I am in front on the computer and wondering what to write as I feel I am on empty and the bottom of the well is feeling abit crusty and damp instead of overflowing with cool water.

So one thing I did tonight to help settle my "monkey mind" that keeps interrupting me was to take a nice long hot bath with just a candle for company. This seemed to help me slow down somewhat and settle. Another thing I could have added about 10 drops of Lavender or Chamomile to the water which I thought about now instead of when I was in the water.  LOL

I also need to take the time to start writing morning pages again and dumping all the stuff on the page so I can get down to the good stuff. Like clearing out the mud and silt so what water there is will clear up.

One last thing I need to do for myself is to go on an artist's date and do something fun for myself- been way too serious lately. I need a play date with myself.  Maybe go to a nursery and get some flowers or herbs for the flower beds and be outside in the sun to plant them! That sounds like a great weekend project!

What do you do to fill your well to be creative ?

Creativity and education....

I wanted to share with you all a fantastic talk about creativity and how schools are killing that creativity by requiring that we color inside the lines. I have seen where budget cuts are happening all over and the programs that seem to be cut first are almost always the arts and music. The school system seems overly focused on educating the students to pass the tests as that is what provides government funding and are now also the standard for how teachers are being evaluated for their job performance. I feel that the children are so getting lost in this shuffle of grades as being the measuring stick for education. All that seems to matter is that one side of the brain and not the whole child as being important. My granddaughter is graduating from High School this year and wants to become a teacher.Here's hoping things change for the better when she gets into the school system or maybe she can help change it.

I have added a link to a another TED talk given by Sir Ken Robinson and I believe you will enjoy it as he is a great speaker. Please enjoy!

 

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity | Video on TED.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_sa...

TED Talks Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Toward the end of his talk he speaks about a conversation he had with Gillian Lynne who when she grew up was in the Royal Ballet. She also worked with Andrew Lloyd Weber to choreograph Cats and Phantom of the Opera. I think you will find this video fascinating. Thank you for letting me share it with you.

I love hearing the birds in the morning.....

I usually awake early every morning, about 5am during the week and about 6am on the weekends. 7am is late for me on the weekends.  LOL The wonderful thing about waking up that early is hearing what I name as "the birds calling up the morning". I love listening to them which I did this lovely morning. I was hoping to find an audio of this wonderful sound and was very happy when I did. So, just in case you are not early risers please enjoy!

I also find that the best time to journal is in the wee hours of the morning and the birds singing up the morning is such a great accompaniment. I term this writing my morning pages and started doing them after reading Julia Cameron's book  The Artists Way . This is a wonderful book that is a 12 week program to awaken one's creativity and one of the techniques is to do morning pages every day. You write 3 pages in longhand and not on the computer. You need to get that flow of "your hand simply moving across the page." This physical act puts you in touch with yourself that typing on a keyboard does not- at least for me. As Julia has written there is no right way or wrong way to do them, simply keep your hand moving across the page.

I hope you will check out her book as I have read and re-read that book and I think I need to read it again. I picked it up when I was living in NY a long time ago in 1998 and joined a group of women who were reading it. When I moved down to NC in 1999 I was thinking I needed to re-read it again and low and behold I saw an ad for a group at the local art school. How serendipitous was that ? I met a wonderful group of fellow artists and from that group 2 members started working and leading other groups and it spread!

So what's holding back your creativity? Come and fill your well of creativity !