You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘making stuff happen’ tag.
Somehow the Christmas tree escaped the attic and showed up in its usual spot the day after Thanksgiving. I did not put it there and I was surprised to see it. The sight of it inexplicably infuriated me. Last year’s lights were still on it, but otherwise it stood unadorned. A week passed. Every time I walked by it, fury. November passed into December, as it does. The tree stood undecorated as presents came and went beneath it. Christmas came; Christmas went. The tree shined its naked light. Then it was January. January kept happening – day after day after day of it and the tree stood in stark indifference. Then suddenly and undeniably it was time to decorate the tree, so this happened…
It feels a lot better now.
So far this is how February is going:
I recently went on a job interview that was conducted with a considerable degree of gravitas. It was an affair that required metered parking, a conference room, and an entire assembled committee present to ask questions. This is exactly the sort of thing I have been doing my best to avoid for the last decade of my work life. Yet, there we all were sitting at the table with all the questions. One of the questions posed in the interview was an unexpected delight:
How do you do the work?
That’s it.
That’s the whole vague and fantastic question.
At the time it was posed, I was confounded. I had never given voice to my process. How I do the work has been a very long and winding road across time and country, over the river, and through the woods. While the answer I gave summarized that journey, there is something about that question that has been revving and honking (with a Klaxon-like “AHOOGA!” sound) at me ever since it was posed. That question feels like a tiny clown car that I could get inside with twenty friends, and we could go anywhere in it.
So today I am here still mulling over that question with the intent to share some thoughts and scenes from my everyday work life that may help shed additional light on the answer as it continues to unfold. As Rainer Maria Rilke has written,
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
How do I do the work?
First off, there is a generous supply of silliness in my work, and that is by design. I have to do quite a bit of work on myself on a regular basis to get my mind-set right. That work begins with Shakti-building exercises and intentional goal-setting to keep me a happy, healthy human. I guess other people would probably call this “planning” or maybe “self-care.” Anyway, the way I do it looks like this:
Having the right mind-set prepares me to deal constructively with the obstacles and menacing hindrances that inevitably present themselves as I’m going about the work, whatever that work may be…
When working through problems and I get stuck, allowing time for conscious play, or blending the lines between work and play does wonders for unsticking the stuck.
A lot of the work I do is setting the stage with the right props and providing the space, time, and encouragement necessary for other people to play and learn and express whatever it is they want to say. Serving as a witness for this self-discovery is one of my favorite things about my work.
It isn’t all fun and games. Yesterday morning’s work was a frenzied internal battle to get idea from brain to paper. When the dust settled this was the scene that remained:
There have been times I have been crushed by the work and fellow passengers pulled me from the wreckage. Other times, Good Samaritans have come along to fluff me back up when I’ve gotten deflated. Never underestimate those singing spirits of the world who hide right out in the open.
~*~
How do YOU do the work?
What questions are you loving and living?
…a great deal of real art is made under the radar. We barely know we are working. We just suit up and show up and grab what moments we can, and it is only in cozy retrospect that we can see the level of skill we were able to muster. It is humbling, the degree to which we are like automatons. Our art moves through us despite us.
–Julia Cameron, Finding Water
The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.
–Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse
Today’s retrospective analysis of the last 10 years of My Little Spacebook revealed an overarching theme running through many posts. Since the beginning, that theme is showing creative work – my own work and other people’s work that I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with or to witness.
In the last decade there has been a lot of work shared and a lot of shared work!
There’s been knitted work, decoupage work…,
…messy work in progress,
…incredibly weird work,
Herman the Hypertufa Planter
outside work…
messy inside work…,
mosaic work….,
…and exhaustion from the work.
(You know, because accessorizing is soooo important!)
Here’s a study showing home-made masks reduce exposure to respiratory infections to some degree: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/
And here’s the tutorial I used:
I made a couple changes to the design to improve the comfort and aesthetic. I used a couple of soft pipe cleaners for fitting around the nose bridge. I used torn-up t-shirt material for the ear loops because they are more comfortable and durable than the elastic kind. Mine is also handsewn because machines are complicated and noisy.
When she appeared swaying
The beauty of my lover infatuated us.
No one can relieve my suffering from my love sickness
But the queen of beauty.
†
Lamma Bada Yatathanna, Translated to English, Author Unknown
†
The celebration of creativity continues.
Some songs and stories are so powerful they grab our imaginations and bodies and continue to reverberate through us. Today, I’ve been wrapped up in a song that’s drifted across centuries and oceans and I’m pondering the notions of songlines and stories of the Dreamtime.
In Braving the Wilderness, Brené Brown describes art as a “shared expression and a deep collective experience.” The performance video below fits the bill. In it, the lovely Jasmine performs an improvisational dance to Joe Michael’s modern instrumental twist of the classic Lamma Bada Yatathanna. Enjoy!
The last few days have been full of silly. A few highlights:
Grown up girls playing dress up with lace, leather, feathers, sequins, masks, buttons, and baubles;
Dreaming up costumes;
Continued choreography development with silken raven’s wings;
Experiments with the iPad pencil:
My Little Spacebook 