Intentional Creativity

Voices from the past…

Posted on February 18, 2018by sue boardman

If you’ve been hanging around for a while you know that when Dave was about four — the same Dave who just turned 38 — I wound up, kind of accidentally, in a parenting class called Developing Capable People.

To make a long story less long, I’m so glad I did!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until the cows come home…I’m not sure Dave and I would have made it if it weren’t for the author of the course, Steve Glenn.

Skipping along a bit, I wound up as a certified DCP group leader and, for many years, could practically recite the audio stuff by heart.

Literally, by heart.

This weekend, I’ve been pondering one of the best (and possibly most subversive) things I learned from Steve:

There’s no such thing as failure. Only experience to be learned from.

Read that again, please.

I’m not sure about you, but this is not what I grew up hearing!

I grew up with the notion that failure was shameful and made one somehow less than expected.

And, just between us, I was more than ready to trade that particular perception in for Steve’s considerably more radical notion.

In case you’re wondering why Steve is sitting, psychically, beside me as I write this just now, I have a very simple answer.

Paint.

A very simple answer and a bit of an explanation.

First, we’re pondering oracles in my Legend painting class, and Steve is right up there on the list of the oracles I’ve encountered.

Secondly, I spilled my brush water. Again.

No worries. That’s why my little vintage serving cart on wheels has paper towels.

It’s also why I posted a question for the far more experienced painters in the circle and asked if anybody knows where the cool little beige paint caddies with sides in all the videos come from!

No time for shame and blame or labels like “clumsy”. It takes time away from painting!

Then there were the eyes.

First, let me say that this is only the third painting I ‘ve ever done, and the first where I’ve attempted open eyes. Very scary!

“Not to worry,” insist the experts. “Just paint over it!”

I didn’t really understand.

I just knew the eyes weren’t working for me. I kept adjusting.

For a while they looked a lot like martini olives. Oops!

Finally, it occurred to me that all the fixing wasn’t fixing anything and I could actually start over!

No failure. Just experience to be learned from.

Hence, the rather alien looking being in the photo above. I adjusted the size of her eyes and then painted out the “olives” and, after what I devoutly hope will be a good night’s sleep, I will begin again.

No shame or blame or labels like “totally without talent”.

Just, as the master sculptor of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, would say, “I am still learning.”

What if that was what we were teaching our kids?

And, for that matter, what if we believed?

I believe. (Most days!)

Contemplations Grandmothers

We will!

Posted on January 31, 2018by sue boardman

It’s been a bit of a day. Kind of a walk the talk kind of day.

Deep breaths and dog training when about 350 pounds of rambunctious Newfoundlands bounced through the door, energized by a sunny, cold morning and hopes of treats.

Frustration was tempting.

Using a quiet tone of voice to help them calm down works better.

That and a couple of gallons of water with a handful of dehydrated liver!

Preparing a soup delivery for friends. And thanks to Bill for making it happen.

The usual thrills of the dog walking drama amidst a delivery from one of my favorite farmers.

Big bird has landed and I am reminded that local farm shopping has its challenges.

One of those challenges is that food comes when it comes and sometimes a bunch comes at once.

A bunch came today. (On top of the stuff that came yesterday!) That meant putting on the oven gloves and rearranging two freezers so that I will actually be able to find what I put in there, all with the “help” of said 350 pounds of Newfoundlands, who are experts on the notion of groceries.

Eating real food means there is what there is when it’s ready.

It’s a good thing we like turkey!

(Now thawing in the bottom of the fridge.)

All the while, checking my phone obsessively, looking for news from home on a day with a bit more adventure than might be optimal.

And remembering that leaping over dogs is good exercise.

And taking time out from calculating the magic timeline from here to fabulous roast turkey to make some more prayer dots.

It’s a paint thing that’s so much more than paint. Today, prayers of thanks and prayers of petition.

Spiritual and neurological magic.

A bowl of soup for lunch.

Things to thaw for dinner. Real food is a challenge, for people and dogs!

Lots of homework. Some of it kind of scary. Today is the day to “glaze” over about 10 layers of meaning in the beginning of my Legend painting, which basically means making those layers visually disappear despite how hard I’ve worked to get them there.

It’s a process thing and I believe, but I need a bit of reminding on days like this.

Along with more checking the phone.

And more laundry.

And more soup.

And even more dots.

And a reminder from one of the true oracles of our time, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes:

Kind of a walk the talk kind of day.

We can walk together!

Contemplations Grandmothers

Then the spider started whispering…

Posted on January 21, 2018by sue boardman

Imagine that you inherited a large box full of fabric scraps. One of those plastic boxes with the flaps that fold together to make the lid.

The box spends years sitting in a corner while you try to ignore it but it will not be ignored so, one day, you open it.

After the dust clears and the sneezing stops, you begin to pick out some pieces.

Soon you have three stacks of scraps.

Pretty. Ugly. And, I can’t decide.

You continue to explore and sort. Perhaps for a long time.

The more you sort, the harder it gets.

Some of the Ugly scraps look better next to some of the Pretty ones than they did on their own. Some of the Pretty ones are nice individually but don’t get along too well in the stack by themselves. And the I can’t decide stack gets larger.

My week has been a lot like that.

Except, I’ve been sorting stories.

Intentional Creativity homework.

The more I sorted, the harder it got.

Write said the teacher. Listen. Paint. Imagine. (Also, eat and sleep!)

I got stuck. More than once.

Then the spider started whispering to me.

Mostly, she seemed to have questions.

What if, she asked, we put this one next to that one?

What if that one came before this and after that?

What if we use more rather than less?

Suddenly, sorting stories got easier. And the stories began to become one story woven together by the unseen spider who had been weaving my story since that first summer at camp when I began to see that we are all connected. All part of the one story.

I got a job that summer. I was in charge of remembering all the words to all the songs until we gathered around the campfire again the next year.

I still remember.

And the spider still whispers while she weaves.

Contemplations Grandmothers

Many dreamers dreaming dreams!

Posted on January 14, 2018by sue boardman

I don’t remember my life before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Well, I do. Glimpses of this house or that puppy. Snapshots of my family. But not life as an American. Or life as anything other than a Boardman.

I’ve been sitting, these last few days, in the shadow of a tree and pondering the impact of this man on my life.

Actually, I’ve been sitting under a picture of a tree which is mostly still a sketch and, oddly, a revelation.

My nails are splattered in brown paint and the dogs are beginning to grasp the notion that they need to stay out from under my feet while I paint.

I am still learning.

My Intentional Creativity friends and I are painting trees of life.

Well, we’re painting lots of things but this seems to be where I am just now.

One day, back in December, the notion came to me that my tree would want to be a Banyan tree.

An enormous tree like the ones where I grew up in Florida, systems of branches and roots and trunks, communities of breathing life.

I visited a few of those trees in Key West and they kept whispering to me.

Kelly and I took some pictures. Mine were mostly roots.

Roots that reminded me of the ancient wisdom of elephants.

Then, we came home.

The time to paint came closer and closer, and the Banyan tree kept tugging at me.

Then, I found out why.

In the online newsletter, Aeon, Jonardon Ganeri, a contemporary philosopher whose work draws on a variety of traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, writes that:

…knowledge should be pictured as a banyan tree, in which a multiplicity of aerial roots sustains a centerless organic system. The tree of knowledge has a plurality of roots, and structures of knowledge are multiply grounded in the earth: the body of knowledge is a single organic whole, no part of which is more or less dispensable than any other.

Dr. King is one of those roots in my Banyan tree. Justice. Equality. Community.

His tree had many roots, as well.

The prophet Isaiah. Abraham Lincoln. A dream of what hadn’t been yet but could be.

And his tree is growing still.

Bernie Sanders, perhaps.

We need all the dreamers we can get!

For today, though, I’m sitting with my tree and recalling a wise old friend named Puddleglum who had a pretty big dream of his own. Taking his leave from the Queen of the underworld to search for Narnia, along with his young friends, the Marsh-wiggle said this:

…All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for the Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think, but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say (C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair in The Chronicles of Narnia).

Many dreamers dreaming dreams. Justice. Equality. Community. Hope. Love. All of them feeding the branches and leaves still to come.

I suspect Dr. King would approve. Our four-footed Luther does, too!

Contemplations Grandmothers

2018 : My Year of Beginner’s Mind

Posted on January 3, 2018by sue boardman

Recently, some of my creative friends who hang out in the Planet SARK atmosphere got me thinking. What, they wondered, was my “word” for 2018?

If you’ve known me a while you won’t be too surprised to find out that my “word” is actually two words. But it’s only one idea so I decided it counts because it feels so true.

Beginner’s Mind.

The first time I recall this notion knocking on my brain was at a Qigong retreat, five years or so ago. It was kind of a radical notion for me, that showing up not knowing could be a good thing.

I’ve done a lot of not knowing since then. Blogs, social media, electronic publishing, species appropriate food, and a rather more challenging than usual rescue dog.

My latest venture is, perhaps, the farthest afield for me.

I’m learning to paint! More specifically, I’m learning the process of intentional creativity which is both ancient and really new to me.

First, in case you’re new around here, let me be clear. I am not “the artistic” kid. A maternal pronouncement which I grew up believing must have been carved on the flip side of the 10 Commandments.

The process of following a call to actually pick up a paintbrush and create something more artistic than really great wood work was a huge deal for me. And it’s happening!

One of the things I’m working on at the moment is a Tree of Life painting. It’s all very primal and mythical in the most true kind of way.

Well, in theory. In actuality, it’s a couple of really rough sketches and several layers of background work.

But, I know where I’m going.

Sort of.

The first thing my tree decided, after the initial background layers, was that she prefered a landscape orientation to the portrait one that seemed more tree-like to me.

In the midst of not knowing, I went back to my source and watched the next video step of the process, even though I wasn’t quite there yet.

That’s when I learned a major miracle for fixing things that aren’t working! (Thank you, Shiloh Sophia McCloud!!!) It has a lot to do with using the negative space, which I wouldn’t have thought of but changes many things.

Then the dream arrived. An actual dream.

Tree of Life. Tree of Knowledge. Banyan trees. Many trunks and roots.

Philosophy. Quantum physics. Community. The things that connect us, one to the other.

A whole new world, rather like the one through the back of the wardrobe C. S. Lewis made famous.

And a realization. Not new, so much as deeper.

It’s all energy.

From the clean, sustainable broth simmering on my stove that warms me even hours before dinner will be ready, to the message of the Tree of Life, it’s all energy.

Energy which cannot be created or destroyed, but which can only be transformed.

Transformed, in our world, through intention.

Intention, I hope, in this New Year, for good.

Good for me and mine. Good for you and yours. Good for us, in the sense that there are no others.

Which sounds a lot like fixing things in the negative space!

And may be an even bigger story…

Contemplations

The Perils of FOMO

Posted on November 12, 2017by sue boardman

It’s amazing how fast chaos can sneak up on you!

Or at least how fast it seems once we begin to notice.

I got pretty busy over the last year or so. Mostly good stuff. Learning. Writing. Traveling.

Lots of it was awesome!

Then I came down with a big case of what my wise (and really talented) friend Yasmin Nguyen, at Gratitude Inspired Living, calls FOMO…Fear of missing out. (Which feels rather like fear of not being enough.)

I signed up for way more learning than I could keep up with. My e-mail was overwhelming. I wanted to sleep. Or watch Grey’s Anatomy re-runs.

Then, in July, I fell down. Literally. I’m ok, but at the time it was a fairly big deal.

In August, I did it again. Much less of a deal, but still not at all helpful.

About that same time, I began learning about Intentional Creativity. And painting, which is something of a miracle in my world.

Then my friend got sick and I invested a whole bunch of September and October in prayer and presence.

All that learning I had signed up for pretty much went by the wayside. Technically, it’s still there but it has felt buried under all the overwhelm.

Except for the creating and painting. That happened. Slowly, but it happened. And as I painted, I began to learn new things.

My butt hurt less. I found new parts of me.

I woke up. (Though I’m still a fan of napping.)

One day I opened my eyes and realized that a lot of things had gotten away from me.

My sewing table was buried in miscellaneous junk. Dusty miscellaneous junk.

I couldn’t find the tape measure. Or my passport.

My closet was running over with artifacts from lives past.

You get the drift.

It’s getting better these days.

I can actually see the sewing table. And, Wednesday, I’m giving a friend a sewing lesson!

I have a new passport.

A bunch of the old stuff in my closet has been promoted to the “paint clothes” department. A bunch more is headed out the door to new lives in other places.

My freezers are full of bone broth.

Mostly, though, I’m recovering from the fear of missing out.

I have a plan. I’m going with things I believe in. Following my heart kinds of things.

I’ve dumped a bunch of email. My recycling basket is full of catalogs which are full of shiny things I don’t need.

There is space in my world. More would be good, but it’s a start!

There is meditation music playing in my house. The dogs are more relaxed which helps me be more relaxed.

Most of all, I have a sense of where I’m going. I suspect it’s like nowhere I’ve ever been before and that’s ok. It seems a little less chaos makes me feel a bit more brave.

I’ll keep you posted.

Tomorrow, chalk board paint.

And, Wednesday, meet me back here. It’s all about my super simple dry brining process for a fabulous, juicy turkey!

Contemplations Grandmothers

Flashback to the Rabbit Hole!

Posted on September 4, 2017by sue boardman

Once upon a time, quite a while ago, when I was about two years out of nursing school, I got a new job. In surgery!

This wasn’t an entirely novel concept for me.

I’d worked for our vet when I was in high school. I started, as one would imagine, cleaning runs and scooping disgusting canned stuff into bowls.

By the time I was a senior, I was assisting in surgery. Among other things, I learned simple sutures and how to retrieve our feline patients from the top of the x-ray machine.

People surgery came complete with x-ray techs so the retrieving was less necessary.

Knots, however, were quite necessary. Years of Girl Scouts had not prepared me for tying square knots one-handed with my non-dominant (left) hand. It was one of the first things we learned.

I practiced incessantly. Knitted afghans with fringe were especially helpful.

I’ve been reminded of this learning experience lately, as I try to develop some muscle memory related to painting.

Thus far, I appear to be an almost totally right-handed painter!

I’ve been reminded of other learning experiences with the painting, as well.

One that shows up often is my recent trip down the mythical Rabbit Hole in Portland, Oregon.

The primary purpose for the trip was exploring some familiar perceptions and skills grouped under the new-ish label of Transformational Coaching.

The workshop was great!

The physical comfort factor, not so much.

This was not a huge surprise for me. Between long flights, the knees, and the back, spending hours a day in a rent-a-chair has been hard for me for a while. And it tends to get harder as one day rolls into the next.

I did my usual adapting things. Nesting in a corner with a spare chair to prop my feet on. A pillow or two. Qigong during coffee breaks. A bit of self-hypnosis.

And then, on the last day of our time together, when I could barely confront the rent-a-chair again, something different happened.

The amazing Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, who writes fabulous, colorful, important books and is known to many of you as SARK, fussed at me. “Get one of those upholstered chairs over there,” she said, “and get somebody to drag it into the circle!”

I demurred. “There are people sitting in them,” I explained.

Before I could take a breath, Susan had a couple of people toting a chair into the corner where I had camped, trying to stay out of the way.

I actually had tears in my eyes when I sat down, feeling conspicuous, but definitely more comfortable. And present.

The next thing I knew, dear Susan was in my face. I’m not exactly sure what she said but I can tell you what I heard:

This is bigger than a chair! Don’t endure what can be fixed, just to blend in!

It’s been a while since June but those wise words came back to me today, complete with a bit of Susan-esque glitter.

You see, I was trying to do a bit of editing on my painting. I needed a fairly smooth, thin line and I was having trouble getting there with my right hand. I tried the left. I leaned. I moved. Several times. I even tried to do it upside down.

And then, wonder of wonders, I moved the easel.

It worked! And, in the midst of my happy dance, I heard Susan applauding.

There are times, especially when I’m tense, that I still tie left-handed square knots in whatever fringe-y things are handy. I’m learning new options, though, and today I’m giving thanks for an amazing teacher.

There’s a lot to be said for not enduring what can be fixed. And moving the easel.