Elma Studio

Visions, Dreams, Little Deaths, and New Beginnings

We greeted the New Year with the theme of Visions, Dreams, Little Deaths, and New Beginnings at the January Open SoulCollage® Studio. For some, new beginnings were about making space, allowing old things to die, a kind of pruning. For some, it was about accessing what was already there, in the form of a seed, image or word. For others, it was about letting go what was and moving into the present. All of it was about movement of some sort, as the creative flow is movement.

 

Allen (2005) said "the Creative Source is trying to get each of us to paint our way clear, to learn how to have an aesthetic response to life's challenges, to learn to see everything as a puzzle to be solved, as a opportunity to high-five over and over and stay fearlessly in its flow, like a surfer on a wave."

Nicely said! I would add that the Creative Source is trying to get each of us to create our way clear, whether that is painting, collage, journaling, metal work, etc. 

Jill's SoulCollage® cards created during January Open Studio:

 

Balance 

Death

 
Warrior 

The next SoulCollage® Open Studio at Elma Creative Arts will take place February 26, 2011. Check the following link for details and registration.

  Allen, P. (2005). Art as a spiritual practice. Boston, MA: Shambala. 

Men and SoulCollage®

Lets dispel the mystery here and now. Men will do SoulCollage® and engage in other methods of inner explorations. Not in droves, but they are there and soul tending is something they will do. They might not be so hot about the names, the descriptions that contain words that trigger our gender conditioned selves. So we talk about a collage process that explores one’s identity and that works pretty well.

Here is a SoulCollage® card and description by Elma Studio student (thank you for the contribution!):

 

"This card reminds me that I am capable of being my own best obstacle to accessing the treasures in life; that I should beware of that tendency to internally cage up my true self. Its message to me is that self-expression is what facilitates access to life's treasures, not pushes them away, something that I somehow got backwards from earlier times in my life." ~ Elma Studio student, age 37

The month of the Fool

I have never liked April. It is that being in limbo, being in between, waiting, waiting, waiting for I don’t know what… warmer weather? the sun? to finally figure out the meaning of life? All that while those stubborn hopes of mine start sending out little shoots upward and it becomes hard to be patient. And then one day you get a day where you declare to the world that you have made it, that the winter is over, that you can go ahead and plant your tomatoes and for a moment you believe that your life is all about fig trees (in the Pacific Northwest and why not?), lemons and strawberries, and that you have survived the darkness once again... And then you get this arctic bone-chilling rain, and you remember that it’s the month of the Fool.

However bored I was with the month of April this year, I made three four SoulCollage® cards to honor the Fool. I swear I didn’t plan on it, it just happened. I don’t have 4 cards on any other topic.

  

Here are two of them. The one on the left is my archetypal (or universal) fool, the one who reminds me to lighten up, since we are all going to die anyway. The card on the right, is the silly fool who shows up when we remember to play and don’t worry what we look like. 

Transitions

My Farewell to the Younger Selves collage is the result of my musings on transitions and rites of passage.  We tend to think of rites of passage and initiations as something for youth as in traditional societies.

Michael Meade in his book The Water of Life, writes that rites and symbols of initiation are intended to open the life of each young person to the sense of meaning and purpose already dwelling in them. 

And chronology as in young or old is not important here.  Life's inevitable stages and dramatic events create opportunities for initiation and psychic shifts, by opening pathways to the center of self, where a person encounters the mysteries of life and death and their place in both of them.  In other words, CHANGE. 

" A man's work is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened." Albert Camus

Taking Back the River, Nourishing the Creative Life

Here, a river is a metaphor for the flow of one’s creative life and it is not the quality of the creative product that is of concern here.  The river of our creative flow is always there underneath of everyday things, ebbing and flowing.

What is a creative life? It is the artwork we create, but it is also sewing a cloak for your child’s play, planting flowers around the new patio, writing a journal, cooking up a storm, singing your newborn to sleep, tending a marriage, building a house, loving well… 

Creativity feeds one’s inner life at every level: psychic, emotional, spiritual, mental and economical. Like a river, a single act of creative work also feeds everyone around, it inspires, changes and fills.  Ideally, this river never dries out and never stagnates and is never polluted.

However, how often do we find excuses, how often do we make promises to ourselves that we’ll pick up that paintbrush later, after the house is clean, the closet is organized, that we’ll take out that journal after the kids have gone to bed, that we’ll really start those projects that make our hearts flutter after we’ve had our vacation in Hawaii… We tell ourselves that one day, we’ll learn how to sing and when we are much better, we’ll be real artists… 

What pollutes a woman’s creative life? 

Negative self-talk that questions our worth, intention and talent.
Excuses where we promise time for ourselves sometime in the future but not now. 
Disrespect by those around us, sometimes close to us, that we are not enough.

So here is my invitation to take back the river and nourish the creative life.