Recharging Creativity ... Mine

     I am not excused from losing my Umph in my studio or between me and pen and paper. I am not excused from not bringing forth and asserting my creative drive  - my log jams between me and creativity are my doing - no person or thing is to blame.  Nope, I am just as human as the next human standing in line for inspiration. Some days I feel as if I am waiting for a special, unique, ordinary moment to move and inspire me. I feel like I wait for that something inside but that something remains elusive, just out of reach. In these moments of feeling flat within, I know I really need my creative switch flipped on along with the dam busted so my personal generative current flows unobstructed - again. I openly admit to experiencing days filled with long moments of sitting and staring at all my artsy, crafty objects/items/supplies and seeing absolutely nothing.  I walk into my gardens void of motivation, unable or unwilling to decide whether to weed or not to weed, or to gently till the earth or not, and the thought of dragging a hose is just too much to consider. I can't see zip or zilch  or zippo or crapo! I am unable and perhaps disinclined to see anything that is inspiring - the world looks flat! I can't make a decision about making a line or how to shade or choose a color or where to make a cut or whether to turn on my wood burners or even pick up a watering can ... I feel frozen inside. In those moments, the moments void of inspiration, where I have lost my creative battery's charge all I know is I am not flowing and glowing and expressing my metaphorical language of celebrating life. I feel heavy inside. I feel like stagnate water - still and murky. I sense my personal seconds slip through my life opportunities untouched and unused and we all know we can't bank our unused seconds, minutes, hours, and days!  Darn it!

What to do? In these empty moments I slowly move toward what I know is my personal anti-creativity antidote. When I become aware I am in the midst of a creative blockage (obvious by my lack of creativity!) I go soak in a wonderful hot bath imbued with herbs and salts.

(Photo by David Mesplé ... Submerged Within Ones Element)

     I soak - I relax. I embrace the sensual wetness of and the tingly sensation of salty water which is perfectly too hot and that hotness creates steamy air that envelops my soul. I submerge my body beneath liquid beauty letting the water's fluid body hold me ... I become weightless. I become void of physical sensation, void of the experience of my heavy body.  I let go and I let my awareness of lightness of being remove the blocks between me and myself. As the salts penetrate my pores and the gentle aromatics of the herbs penetrate my senses I release my physical and mental tensions letting the steamy hot water seduce my subconscious into exposing my pools of creativity and allow the opening of the flood gates. Gates open, soul open, mind open, heart open, the flow of my imagination begins to once again speak loudly to my conscious mind - I feel my switch within flip back on. I feel my creative juices moving, flowing, rushing, like a swift river carrying me back to where I forgot I was.  By the time I am done soaking in the hot fragrant water I am filled with wonderful imagery. I feel renewed. I have story after story speaking to me begging me to take down dictation notes to preserve all the nuances of characters from my past and I see color and shadows and lines and textures and designs and my plants also chime in, beckoning me to come play.  I recharge my creativity submerged within.

Hugs, 

Maryanne

Tending My Gardens

(Photo by Maryanne Mesplé)

 

     In my yard,  Crocus break through the Earth's crust and announce the imminent arrival of Spring and soon after the song of the Crocus, Dandelions join the chorus. I love Dandelions. Dandelions are versatile in that they provide beauty for our eyes to feast upon as well as lending their blossoms to becoming yummy wine and their petals and leaves add so much to breads and salads. Yep, I love Dandelions, especially in my yard where I can celebrate their presence and appreciate the gifts of our earth. Dandelions are free food and I don't have to go anywhere to be served such bounty! That is a big wow! At least it is for me :-) I love to sit and observe the Dandelion's beautiful brilliant yellow flowers that attract newly emerged bugs. Dandelions inspire me to be creative because when I see their yellow heads erupting throughout my yard I want to cook, I want to paint, I want to plant, I want to dance ... I just want to celebrate Spring's arrival and sing along with the Dandelions!

(photo by Maryanne Mesplé)

     I love Springtime. Spring is when Mother Nature shows off her talent for creating beauty out of the smallest of small packages ... seeds.  My creative urges are like seeds within me and when Springtime rolls around I am filled with beautiful imagery of all the things I want to create or grow. For my creative seeds to produce I nurture them just as I tend to my newly planted vegetable seeds. I have many different types of gardens. I have vegetable gardens, and flower gardens, and gourd gardens and paint gardens and gardens of beads and gardens of plastic bags I am crocheting into totes and gardens of books and journals. I enjoy tending to my gardens. I enjoy nurturing my seeds tucked within the loving soil of my heart and soul and I enjoy tending to the the seeds I've tucked into the earth's womb. Today, I transplanted more sweet peas and long beans and lettuce and spinach and beets. I dug into the earth with my fingers and created cradles to receive plant starts that Mother Nature and I have been tending for several weeks. I blessed the baby greens as I patted the soil around their roots and blessed the opportunity to participate with Mother Nature to produce a garden that will nourish me and my family. And I noted that without asking or coaxing my property will produce for our family a copious supply of Dandelions this season.The nourishment I receive goes beyond what vitamins and minerals my body ingest at harvest time. I will be filled with soul-ishous nourishment knowing that I am one with my Mother the earth and that I am loved by her because I am one of her creations that sprang from a seed :-)

(photo by David Mesplé)

Patience Produces

(Image by Maryanne Mesplé 2011)

     I celebrate each second that I am aware of. For me, awareness is being engaged in life as fully as possible while appreciating the little things and being in awe of bigger things. Life itself, I have to believe, is not aware of each second that passes. Life just is whatever it is expressing without the silly construct of time. Only us silly humans cripple our experience by measuring what we do or don't do in a race with the clock. If we fail to produce within a certain amount of "time" then we tell ourselves (or other people tell us) that we are too late and that judgment of lateness colors our experience with ugly dark messy crayons. I received a gentle reminder this week that time, or at least my sense of time, can interfere with my own ability to produce or create. I was filled with self imposed stress while at the same time, I was also filled with the awareness that I have a choice to create without giving in to stress. I don't like the feeling that I must produce or manifest something within the constraints of my own construct of time that tics off seconds like boulders falling on my head. Without intention I had put myself in the clock's box and began to perform like a racing dog chasing a faux furry critter on a stick. Not good.

( Steven Senne, file / AP Photo)

     I received a phone call in the early morning hours (the awareness of time) from my mother. My mother lives with me. My mother has a bedroom down the hall from my bedroom. My mom called me on my cell phone using her cell phone and when I answered her only words were; "Mary, come here" ~ click ~ the phone went silent. I already knew before my feet hit the floor what the day was serving. Within an hour my mom was uncomfortably smushed (my word) atop a gurney in an emergency room and she was being grilled with the same questions over and over and over. Questions like, "your name is?" and "you were born when?" and for the hundredth time, "what are your allergies?" and these questions came in addition to the question asked by every person entering the room, "what brought you to the hospital today?" As I watched the clock in the emergency room I felt agony and frustration filling my body starting at my toes. Soon, after the first 45 minutes I was ankle deep in anxiety. I was chest deep in fear for my mom's condition. On the less than perfect side of who I am there was also the frustration for my day not playing out the way I had designed it the evening before going to sleep. I visualized before going to dreamland all the beads I would be making when I awakened and the gourd designs I would be working on and the planting of my vegetable starts into my garden and ......... I didn't visualize my mom having a health crisis.
     With intention I willed myself into deploying patience within my being and I let go and embraced the moment we were in (one after another). I let go of all my expectations for my day and for my mom's day. I surrendered to life and to just being with what we were being served. I knew my beads would be just fine and that my gourds would not cop an attitude. I felt my baby plants were just being little plants and knew the stress of caring was my own projection. My vegetable starts were not going to be mad at me for not putting them into the ground on a certain day. I witnessed my mother letting go also and embracing the fact that the doctors and nurses and aides and techs were there to help her. I witnessed myself opening my tightly clenched need to control and micro manage my immediate environment and hand over (symbolically) my mother to those who could help her. Patience was the operative word, and our patience produced a beautiful outcome. With technology and quick action my mom did not suffer a major heart attack. Nope, instead she became the recipient of a cardiac stent ... a stent that will increase the quality of her life. A stent that also lets me relax into a deeper understanding of faith and trust and the results of patience.

(Image from Resurrection Health Care website)

     So, what does my mom's health crisis have to do with creativity and time? A lot. Just think of all the beautiful creative energy that helped develop the balloon catheter needed to expand my mom's cardiac artery enough to receive a stent. Wow! I make beads from magazines and I cut and burn and paint on gourds. I plant some plants and get creative in the kitchen with the harvest. Create a stent? Think of all that is needed to develop a balloon that is small enough and strong enough to help expand a stricture within a vessel. I will say WOW again. It takes patience with ourselves, and patience with others and patience with our sense of time to produce anything of value. I am not talking about value in relation to dollars. I am speaking of value of personal satisfaction, the value of adding to the beauty of life, the value of being all we can be, the value of letting go and trusting life. Value. The value of knowing that if we can open our proverbial fist, if we can open our hearts, if we can open our narrow thoughts to letting in who knows what, we can experience life to its fullest. As a side to letting ourselves experience the wonderful harvest of having patience we can experience the amazing wonders of technology that enables our loved ones and often times our own selves to be around this big blue marble a bit longer. Patience does produce more than we can imagine.

Hugs,

Maryanne

A Joyful Creation

Collage Owning My Creativity/My Power by Maryanne Mesple

"This collage is me embracing the flower of life. I own every single petal. I own every twisting root. I own every part of who I am. I know I deserve all the joys life holds for each of us. I celebrate in expressing my soul through my art and I own my birthright of Power in a way that only God, The Goddess, The Intelligent Universe understands. I joyfully create and I am filled with gratitude." My statement of submission of this collage to those who were sharing my experience. I am grateful for being pulled up and out of my hardened shell of denial of my love of translating what I see inside to an outside experience.

Reconnecting to my creative side is a long journey for me. A journey through over grown paths deep inside my heart and paths hidden in the convolutions of gray matter. Through the years I let my heart and soul become overgrown with a seriousness that built a wall between my self and me. Sounds a bit odd but in truth I gave up so much of my creative spark opting to experience the world through the eyes of an analytical left brained linear thinking entity and demoted my creative adventures to inconsequential events that just happened now and then ... like 70 gourds that desperately needed to be rubbed and cleaned and etched and painted :-) I am out of the left brained closet and taking up residence in my whole brain ... or at least giving myself permission to be and express who and what I am without any apologies. 

I don't collage that much, but through the course of creating 11 in three months I fanned my spark of passion for art into a wonderfully warm flame. There are so many venues for any of us to give life to our creative side. We can do collage, paint, draw, make beads, sculpt, garden, cook, sing, dance, laugh, be silly and just give wildly delicious and messy expression to all the joy we feel or all the angst we are bogged down in.

 Free hand drawing of a design onto a gourd bowl that I am currently playing with.

I am wild and all over the place. I am cutting out images for another collage. I am drawing my twisty vines onto a gourd for a beautiful soul in California. I am cutting strips of paper for paper beads and I am starting my garden. I am exploding!

Strips of paper that will become beads.

I can't look at anything without wondering what I can make with it or how I can enhance it. I see myself as a work of art also and feel giddy about all the wonderful creative expressions I can wear or how I can reshape my body or how I can enhance my eyes and hair and the list goes on. I stopped lying to myself and everyone else about jewelery, the lie that I don't really like it. I have claimed to not like the 'stuff' too much but now I want to be a musical instrument when my body moves. I want my bangle bracelets to bangle around and my rings to clink. I want my beads to decorate my body and tell those who look upon me that I am a walking work of art :-)

A sample of my beads made from magazine paper.

Life is art ... have I not heard that statement before? I like the statement; Creative Expression gives joy to Life and gives expression to our natural inclination to create, to make, to manifest. We all take joy in being a force that produces something of beauty; even if that beauty is green and growing or diced up and sauteing in a pan. Beauty expressed gives life to our heart and soul and makes our minutes here on this big beautiful globe all the more interesting. 

The start of something big and beautiful and delicious.

And so I sow my many seeds into fertile soil. I tend to my seedlings and provide what is necessary for the seeds to burst open letting their creative spark create. I feel like one of my seeds in one of my peat pots. I feel the warmth and moisture of creativity. I am a Joyful Creation.

Hugs,

Maryanne

Pushing Up and Out

                                                   

                                                        (image compliments of Google Images)




Spring 2011 has arrived. Green grasses are taking over the earth's brown, prickly blanket of sleeping vegetation. I love witnessing the awakening and spreading of the color green. Green; the color and promise of life and a gift for my eyes to feast upon. Seeing the greens of plant life bursting forth excites me and inspires me. I want to feel the rush of Spring time energy course through my body, awaken my dormant energy cells and push me up and out of my lethargic wintery sleeping excuse for a body. I want to exude the color green!

With  emergence from my winter shell I feel a surge of creative inspiration that yanks at me from many directions. Where do I focus? Does one path of creative expression entice me more than another? No. I need to put my hands into and upon any and all mediums that nourish my spark with life affirming experience and manifestation. My agenda is big and I feel so small and at the same time I feel immense. Perhaps I am but a blade of newly emerging grass and by season's end I will be a field of tall waving seed heads sowing the earth's womb with kisses and a commitment of life continued? Perhaps.

I will stand in the sun and absorb all his loving, life giving energy and then I will transfer that energy into creating my personal joy. I write. I paint. I draw. I collage. I wrestle with gourds and etch them with wood burning tips and cut them with jigsaws and then paint them until they reflect me upon their hard shells. I roll strips of paper into beads and gloss them and string them along until they scream stop! and I see beautiful, wearable creativity. I garden with hands and on knees and  I sow seeds and tend to my garden's growth  as a mother tends to her children in the nursery. I harvest the earths creations, then I create in the kitchen. My list is long. My desire is burning. My hands are itching. My mental imagery is delicious ... perfectly suited for my taste.

I've so much to do, to produce, to experience, to enjoy ....

                                                                    (Gourd Art: Bowl in Midnight Blue. Image owned by Maryanne Mesplé)