life-shift – Page 5 – Mixy's Art Blog

52/3 – Manifestery

manifesto ~ manifest ~ manifestation

What do I want to manifest this year? I forget now where the idea came from, but I was mulling over these words….Yes, I’m still inhabiting that whole new year, new, newy nonsense. Excuse me if it’s beginning to grate. It will wear off (perhaps) ………….. but y’know I started out 2015 with some fairly specific wants which (and this might be why I’m perpetuating the thing) are panning out pretty well so far.

Targetted, focussed, my most defined wish was to deadlift (at least) 60kg, I was doing 30kg at the end of December. This week I did 40kg. The goal posts are closer than I reckoned on. For context, at the start of October 2014 I laughed at the suggestion of doing weights. ‘I’m not sporty, I just want to be a bit stronger, and bit less, y’know… wobbly and pathetic, maybe tone up a little…’ whilst firmly fixed in my head was the knowledge that lifting weights is a thing that other people do.

And then I tried.

And then I switched over to being one of those other people.

Some amount of sweat, aches and grim determination later, I’ve progressed from someone who lifts the tiniest weights available, a bit more each time.

I’m just using this by way of illustration.

Doing something in one area of life can open the mind in all the others.

This is a lesson I learnt in art school: Separating not being able to do something from not having done that something before.

Or not being good at it, to being not good at it yet.

The same thing, but from a very slightly changed viewpoint, is not exactly the same. Subtle distinctions. Nuances.

I LOVE nuances.

So I set about listing (the power of the written word) the essence of my intentions and what I want to manifest.

My manifesto for 2015:

Follow the Signs.
Stay Focussed: One Thing at a Time.
Always Try New Things, Go New Places, Meet New People, Have New Fun.
Have Love, Be Love, Have Fun, Enjoy
Keep Questioning, Keep Learning, Keep Notes, Keep Ideas, Keep Going.
Reach Beyond, Reach Past, Carry on Beyond the Horizons.

Then as an aside……..

I read an article recently, it was along the lines of how the physical act of writing something embues it with a power, seeing those words written in your own handwriting reinforces something at a very primal level, it is exclusively connected to the writer. Darn it I wish I remebered where this was so I could link you. But, in the small search I made for it, I found this instead. If you have any interest in the whole manifestary musings, take a mo to see this.

So my manifesto is embedded in my psyche, and sits on the opposing page to my vision board/bagua map. As I close the book they smoosh up against each other, and can embue each other with magic as the book rests. Meanwhile, watch this space for future manifestations!

52/3, Bagua Map and Coloured Wordery

Welcome to part next of the weekly unfolding of my year…

I was reading this week about Vision Boards. As my MO in life is heavily weighted toward visual inputs I leapt at this new (to me) strategy. In the words of my inner kid: Squeee I wanna make me a Vision Board!

If you’re intrigued, this is where I started out, and I can’t imagine there’s a better place. Jean Van’t Hul’s Artful Parent site is just brimming with all you could want to set you off, and then a list of books and resources to take you on from there.

I especially liked the way Jean sets out her Vision Board as a bagua map. This is a 3 x 3 grid dividing a physical space into sections representing different aspects of life. It’s origin is in feng shui, but it’s been adopted as a tool in various fields of personal development, self care, life training, newage wishy-washery, right across the board to even include more down-to-earth folks like me (ha!).

So this is the layout, the skeleton of the Vision Board, on which to hang wishes, dreams, intentions, ideas, metaphors and so forth. Jean uses magazine snippings – images and text that inspire and illustrate.

Off on a tangent here – I really love the way an act of creativity shows up so many metaphors for life, cos right off my brain is spinning out: I don’t need all those categories… some just don’t apply and some can be lumped together. (Follow that to it’s natural conclusion and yes, my bagua is just one box with a confused, homogenised version of me sat in the middle, puzzled and pissed off with the whole business. Ok, so I’ll go with the boxes…. But I wouldn’t choose those colours. So, which colours would I choose? where do I find the pictures that are the right colours for each box? or do I find B&W pics that I can colour? or should I do it all in photoshop and fuck it, I can have a digital one as a screen saver instead… <some more time passes>. FFS, brain, take what you’ve got. You can’t afford to dwell on all this not-knowing when there’s a thing to be done. Get on with it!

Life lesson: Just get on and do it. I was pretty certain in the early stages I wouldn’t know what I wanted in each box, or how I was going to set about acheiving it. Also, as it was the thing I wanted in this week’s page, and that’s a fairly rigid time limit, if it spills beyond its alotted time the whole thing will unravel and fall down the rabbit-hole of what am I doing, where am I going and a great big enormous whole what’sthepointofitall. And that’s a place I avoid at all costs.

So I left that part of my brain running round with all the I don’t know what’s going to happen while the rest of me got down to drawing the boxes, writing the words, colouring the colours, and accepting it will probably turn into something, even if I don’t know what (yet).

And, as suspected, it did.

I’ve come to find, if you let go of the wanting to know, the what it is will show up. And often in a surprisingly pleasing fashion.

The words and phrases defining the grid were down: ‘Power, Abundance’, ‘Health, Well-being’, ‘Career, Work’

Curously, just the act of writing these out – and once I let them settle – they began to spawn new words and phrases. Ones I’d already been playing with in the quest to find my Word for the Year, words that encourage possibility. Some of them cropped up again and again (Relax, Nurture, Nourish, Enjoy, Strengthen, Develop…). And magically the crossing over of categories adjusted from the chaotic blur as I had previously seen it as, into a self-supporting web.

Pedantry and Pointlessness

Exercise for the soul:

I notice how I have to disagree so fundamentally with you.

What u say is so utterly wrong.

Your black is my white.

Your down is my up.

So utterly different, so poignantly opposed. Taken from one extreme limit to the other where they almost meet again.

2015: Setting the Scene

Striding into January, this first Monday always has a first day back feel. Back to school, back to work, back to routine… and I love it. That fortnight of chaos just makes me relish the normal I’m all amped up and ready to run. Sure, I’ve got dull stuff to contrast with the fun, but it’s all in balance. The yin makes no sense without the yang, and flat-lining is no fun at all. And this week is so full of great intentions, which although they might not all last the course, I feel like if I run with them fast enough some will stick with me.

A little while back I was telling you about my Word for 2015 which at the time was Reach Beyond and the associated frustration that my word was in fact two words, and I was struggling to come up with a snappy substitute.

I pondered long n hard.

The Facebook group of some >1200 or so folk on a similar quest have been amazing – super supportive to each other’s stories and full of enlightening thoughts and amazing links off and about the internets to like-thoughted places. And helped me add a bunch of other contenders to the list of words.

I settled, finally, on Focus.
focus

My intention is to:

Focus on what I am doing at any one time – I am typing this post, I am mindful of my fingers on the keyboard. It’s all a little brighter and sharper when I’m just considering these words, nothing else. I’m not eating, not fretting, not rushing up to do the thing I forgot earlier because I was only part-minded on the thing I was doing then – part-minded on the previous part-minded task – and so on….

Focus on the bigger picture. Is what I am doing now contributing in a positive way – to my well-being, health, happiness, or is it a foolhardy shortcut, an excuse, another getting away with it? Does it matter? Can I be wiser? Can I act more in tune with this bigger picture I’m compiling, the picture I call my life?

I’m focussed on my path. I’m there in the now after now after now, footfall after footfall, mindfully aware. Moment to moment to moment. It’s all a bit Zen.

Of course it flickers in and flutters off – my concentration is a butterfly – but my intention for the year is to come back to the focus every time I remember.

Unstuckness

Do you guys know Jane Davies? I’ve just watched this video of hers. Really simple black and white mark making, so vibrant and lively and really ‘in the moment’. It made me think how great this would be as a kick-start when I can’t get going. A reminder: don’t try and make something just do.

I was reminded of the stuckness all us artistfolk get somewhile.

It’s a bitch: that art-void head space. Can’t think, can’t make, creatively constipated.

It’s tiresome, it’s draining, it’s vexacious, and until you’ve gotten through it a few times, it can scare the pants off you: “What if it’s all gone? Dried up? Never coming back?…”
When I finished school last June I got struck down by it big time, and it didn’t let up for AGES. Months.

I tried to to coax my mojo back into being by sorting out my art making space. I tidied and reshuffled and organised… I even had a fantastic commission to get on with, but I was stubbornly standing in my own way and refusing to budge.

So I waited it out, I lined up ideas in my head and on paper and physically in little heaps about the place. (I think the 2 years of intensive study and practice running in parallel with some big life shifts in my personal world had just run the tank dry and I needed this long while to regroup.) So I used the time to seek out and absorb new influences. I played more with words than colors. I began to enjoy the world outside the confines of my head.

I haven’t entirely got back in the art-swing still yet. Doesn’t seem to be an ON / OFF, more a growing appetite. But everyday I’m feeding the spirit with the nourishing goodness on tap here in the online community and in the books I’ve acquired over the years; The simple beauties around and about in nature and people-made-stuff.

Today I’m beginning a new year long project – a page a week art journal/sketchbook. I feel sore and rusty in the art-muscles, but it’s coming back. (I also bought a bunch of new colours to play with in the sales!)

Resolutions or Wishes

NY Resolutions with a subtext: I must try harder, be this-er or that-er. I’ll do more of the things I don’t want to and less of the things I enjoy. All those unrealistic, unwanted demands pinned to a future version of self. So often they’re rolled out – same every year – safe in the understanding it’s just empty words that can be consigned to oblivion by the time you go back to the usual routines next week. Do you do this?

Fuck it, yeh? Never really meant it anyway.

And we begin this dramatically different, new phase of life with indigestion, a banging hangover, the tormentful regrets of the hazily recalled night before….

‘did I really say/do that? did that happen? what did happen? …..?’

Cos that makes sense, doesn’t it?

….so it’s just another Wednesday night in my world, then?

Heck NO!

Like the New Moon on the Winter Solstice just 10 days ago, like every New Moon, New Month, Birthday (personal New Year) I like to set New Wishes. It’s punctuation in my life: a pause for consolidation, review, and rev up for the next phase.

Tomorrow I’ll share with you my first Wishes of the New Year.

Meanwhile I wish you all, dearest digital friends, the happiest of beginnings to this new phase. May it bring you abundance and joy beyond you expectations. Love to you all X

2015 in words

I often find I have a word in mind for a period of time – I’ll jot it in amongst diary scribblings. Earlier this year was a period I called transition – it named the phase I was finishing up my studies and also handing over a bunch of my work to someone else. A release of the old and opening to the next – in sure and safe knowledge I had no idea at all what that next would entail! I named other months consolidation, transform, and flow.

Recently I fell across Susannah Conway’s Find Your Word for 2015 which seemed to pick up on this theme I’d unconsciously begun.

The process sets out to imagining and exploring possibilities, dreams, aspirations and desires for the next 12 months. What’s the overarching feel for this year? What’s the biggest wish that will help the smaller wishes come to pass? What’s the magic guidance to hold my hand into the coming year?

Like a few others in the group, no single word that expressed the exact what-I-wanted-ness of it showed up. It was a bit like Stretch, or kinda like Explore, or something…something… that sounds like horizon but not so literal and feels like limitless but phrased in a positive way. So I settled (for now) on the two words: Reach Beyond.

I’ve got ideas, I’ve got aims and targets and goals to strive for and stretch toward but not to be limited by, I want to Reach Beyond them.

Part of the process is using a Pinterest board to gather imagery, memes and themes, words and whatnot, that embody the essence of the word(s) for the new year.

I don’t know where this will go – it might just sit here forever or it might add something to the way the months pan out, I can let you in a year!

It’s a fun and harmonising process – if it sounds like your kinda thing I heartily encourage you to spare some thought, if time allows, what will your 2015 feel like?

Life…

The quest, should you wish to undertake it.

DIY-TV

A big life shift contains and consists of many minor life shifts. A happy change I’ve made is I now live in a house without at TV.

Seriously? Yep!

‘But you’re gonna get one, right…?’ Nope!

But hey, I got music, radio, podcasts, I got the all-encompassing-web. I got you guys! Most of all, I got way to much to do and think and make and be … TV’s a thing of the past in my world! ……… well, except for ……….. I have got my own special variation that came about through serendipity.

As I unpacked the boxes of belongings, I kept the strong n sturdiest for future use.

I’m not gone get rid of this, now am I? Double walled = super tough, it’s a big flattish box I used to move biggish paintings.

When I noticed its original use, its next incarnation began to enfold in my head. My very own better-than-a-tv…

messy glue-y icky… not a neat corner in sight!

The big flat sides glued together (the smaller side edges will come into play in a future project, doubtless) Covered in a layer of paper and another of sheeting for a clean flat white drawing-pin-in-able surface. (but could equally be something bright n cheery, or mixy-matchy with furnishings – and is infinitely changeable too)