week by week 2015 – Page 5

Grace (14/52)

Have you ever been followed about by a word?

Not a new word, just a word you haven’t noticed much before… then it seems to crop up all over the place? It keeps dropping into conversation and reading.

See, there she is again. I wanted to check against my imagination… is this really happening?

But when she’s there again, on the facing page when you open up the remains of a dictionary you began to dye and dismantle more than 2 years ago.

Well ….

So there she is, Grace, large as life. She was part of my week in all senses.

Long Time Week (13/52)

One quarter of the year through: meet week 13.

Compared with the last few, this was an uncomplicated page: dragged paint and organic in its making, a lightly tribal vibe. Muted.

But as a collection of 7 days in my life it’s been brimming to overflow (hence less time to spend in this book).

I’ve been reading Caroline Myss. She’s directed some of my thoughts to a place I haven’t visited in a long while, it’s been both refreshing and nostalgic.

It’s a page that crossed months: March over to April, so has the intentions I set for April. This time open ended wishes, based around the tone of climate I’m wanting to head toward next: Contentment, Progress, Stability, Fun, Restfulness. I think that has it covered for the immediate!

From Early Circles… (12/52)

When I set out on this page a week journal at the start of the year, I didn’t know what insights it would throw up. And just 12 weeks in, I’m sure there will be many more yet to surprise me.

Like, how much transformation can take place, in little bits of time, in some oddments of just seven evenings.

Beginning with no fixed picture and letting the ideas percolate silently round the back of my imagination. I don’t know… maybe just loads more circles? Keep doing circles til something else happens. Cos it will. Something will always happen.

Last week the New (Super) Moon, Vernal Equinox and Solar Eclipse all happened on Friday. There. See what I mean?

Another opportunity (if you’re that way inclined) to send wishes out to the Universe. Planted under the word Wish.

Reiterated in Big Bright Blue.

And surrounded by the meme I attached to my week.

And then an explosion of not-just-circles amid more spirals and scribble and circles.

That Big Bright Blue of the wish was the catalyst for the page to take shape.

My week began with a gathering of a newly formed tribe of creatives. And it closes today having taken up an extraordinary wealth of new doings and thinkings, which I’ll share with you in future postings.

From the sublime to the magnificent. Life is Love.

Dive in: Reach Out 11/52

We all face bravery in different ways.

It isn’t always a visible show of courage

oftentimes nobody else knows quite how much it took

We all develop our ways of stepping forward, facing up.

Bright, bold, audacious.

Then what?

Then you have no choice, you gotta jump:

This week, in my little way, I faced a bravery. And I dived in to a new phase. And it’s gonna be BIG

Full Moon Everything 10/52

Week 10 began on a full moon. It was a big full week.

Tidal changes of hope and spirit, plans formed and crashed with barely time to get a good grip on them.

It’s the first week I’ve really found difficult to ‘make’ – in terms of the page, but also I guess in terms of making sense of myself as well. Massive overwhelms kept colliding – giddy highs and their plummeting opposites. It was minimal in comparison with the other weeks in terms of word-spew. Just summed it up in a big fat EVERYTHING.

Again with all the eyes peering out at me. Even they are looking a bit more deranged than usual this week.

I can’t tell you how many layers of mismatched colours and unhappy paint coated these pages. It was a nothing’s looking right covered with another no that’s still not it under a coat of wtf really? And then some.

Then the Wednesday came to a close, and that was that, turn over and start again Thursday. Glad to report, this week’s looking more harmonious!

butterfly overflow (9/52)

Week 9 of this year is made out of the colours of Spring, honoring the sense of Spring as the world comes back to life after her quiet dormant months. And some of last week’s butterflies have flitted across into this week too. I had a big old tidy up after finishing that project and all the left over butterflies have landed here. (I say all of them… a few got away as you’ll see on the next page).

The week fell on the crossover from February to March, so warranted another list. Seems like there’s a reason for a list pretty much every week now. It’s in the background, but it can germinate there. I’ll patiently await the first shoots of development as the month wears on.

Another week, another meme:

When you do what you fear the most you can do anything.

Ok, yeh, I can take that on as a challenge. I’ve crossed some metaphorical bridges lately, and my metaphorical-bridge-crossing skills are notably sharper as a result. I’ve also come to realise I can’t always tell the difference between the pit-of-the-guts anxiety feeling and its close cousin, the visceral buzz of anticipation feeling.

So I’ve actively decided that henceforth, if I’m in any doubt, I’ll assume its the latter.

It is the feeling of butterflies.

Shadow Monkeys (8/52 cont/d)

Week eight of 2015: a busy page that’s warranted 2 posts…

And that’s without any mention of the butterflies.

Or Steve Jobs. But that’s all for another day…

The thing I wanted to tell you about now is monkey related:
Since I spent a weekend in conversation with my daemons, they’ve been magicking themselves into apparency here, there & all over. This week they’ve manifested in a semi-Cubist, heavy handed biro scrawl, merged, their tribal Día de Muertos faces peering out from the recesses of the page.

We’ve been sharing the available space in this mind for a few decades. It’s refreshing to shift the power balance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (for want of better terms).

So when I read the post from Danny Gregory this week, asking for tales from our Monkeys, another bunch of dots connected: Monkey minded me, the battles with my daemons, and all the reasons it took me so long to go to art school.

I dedicated a corner of a page to the Monkeys (they were chief trouser-wearers and direction-choosers in my life for way too long. They get a corner to play in now. I get the rest of the page. That is ALL) A place to start unscrambling some thoughts:

These are the bare bones of those thoughts:

My monkeys bewilder me with their faultlessly formed logic.

They have faith only in the opinions and the hard-hearted snipes of the the hardcore cynics. They know why I can’t and what I can’t and all the reasons why.

They will poke at me with pointy sticks if I turn my back on them for long. They stand in my way. They say: don’t show yourself, not your real self, cos then the haters aren’t hating the real you. You tricked the haters, the mean kids, the ones who know. You win. See?

The monkey’s logic is flawed at a level so deep I sometimes forget : Do not trust the monkeys.

It was the Monkey’s determination that as art isn’t a real job, and work isn’t supposed to be fun, and all the associated hooey, that defined my existence until quite recently. A large part of life (by my reckoning) is unpicking the knots that we spend the preceding years tying ourselves up in. Unattended monkeys will continue tying knots.

An Unintentional Mermaid (8/52)

Week 8 of the page a week looked like this:

And it must be the most colourful yet. It’s also the most full of subconscious tells – I’m only starting seeing now I look back from a few days later. Like the green mermaid/peacock – I didn’t draw her but she emerged from a funny little cross-leggedy figure and the phrase ‘move toward’ and some doodles.

I’ve got no idea at all what that means (yet).

There’s a lot of scribbly writing on this week, from an outpouring of encouraging words & phrases I was trying to sooth my brain with. You’ll catch glimpses of them here n there altho a lot are now buried under drawing.

She believed she could and she did.

Cos gosh darn it if that hasn’t been the case recently! And I’ve still riding that wave, so it goes down in the book as a marker of the time I’m in.

Move Toward. If I had a strategy for life, it would be that. As opposed to the alternates: running away from, or worse: sitting in stagnation. I’ve tried both of these approaches in the past. The results haven’t been so good.

Since I began this page-a-week game I’ve become aware how often the opportunity for another list of intentions comes up – it’s almost weekly!

Since forever it’s been a thing I do at the start of a month, and on a New Moon. The big ones are New Year (often I begin this at Winter Solstice), and there’s Chinese (Lunar) New Year which fell last week.

You see what I mean?

No wonder I’m so often listing the same things.

So for the record, here are my intentions for Year of the Goat/Sheep/Ram/Ovicaprid

Raise my vibration – belong
Use my time – spread my thoughts
Make more – share more
Love more – Read more – learn more
Collaborate – Assimilate – Consolidate
Stretch out – Drink in
Sleep well – Eat well
Trust the process
Find my tribe – Share stories

These flooded out in a sorta stream of consciousness so I can’t offer much by way of explanation for them. More I hope will become apparent in the course of time. Hey – they’ve got a year to puzzle themselves into fruition!

Wordful Week 7/52

Week 7 turned out to be a wordy week. And full of stuff : New (super) Moon, Valentines, I hit my weight lifting target that I set at the start of the year…. All in all, a week of giddying goodness. And…..

My Birthday, which involved coffee, cake and kitties at Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium in Bethnal Green. I am soppy in the extreme about cats and since my home has been empty of furry friends for a few years now… you can imagine this was like the ultimate in birthday fun for me!

When I saw this list I knew right away it had a place in the book of 2015 : these are the things that matter to me:

To Be An Explorer of the World:

Always be looking (notice the ground beneath your feet)
Consider Everything alive & animate
Everything is interesting – look closer
Observe for long durations and short ones
Alter your course often
Notice the stories going on around you
Notice patterns: Make Connections
Document your findings (field notes) in a variety of ways
Incorporate interdeterminancy
Observe movement
Create a personal dialogue with your environment: Talk to it
Trace all things back to their origins
Use all of the senses in your investigations.

It sits neatly alongside the list of new moon intentions (which tbh are not much different from the last few intention lists. Basic stuff I’m trying hard to hammer home in the subconscious).

Love is in the air: Love and Be Loved

I guess it’s fitting that my love of words and lists is really prominent this week! These things that bobbed up on my horizon this week (would love to credit where they came from, but only there long enough to scribble down before getting buried in a million tangential thoughts and surfs and immediately-pressing-need-to-knows that the www sends my way.) The second one is more mantra/affirmationy:

I’m neither doomed nor completely free
But I’m creating my future with every word, every action, every thought.
I find myself in a very dynamic situation with unimaginable potential,
I have all the support I need to simply relax and be with the transitional, in process quality of my life. I have all I need to engage in the process of awakening.

Thank you to whoever put those words together and sent them into the internet ether. I get where you’re coming from and I wish you happy adventures.

So that was last week… a scattering of butterflies (more next week – new project I’m about to launch into later today), and again with the eyefish. What’s with the eyefish? Srsly?! X

Week 6: Confusion sets in.

All that about loving weeks beginning on a thursday…. what was I on about?! I’m not embracing this self-imposed confusion right now! (I’d meant to type I’m NOW embracing, but clearly I’m not, that’s a subconscious truth leakage!)

SO quick before this week’s gone as welll … Week #6 of 2015 looked like this:

The week that my daemon manifested himself in glorious turquoise velvetty form.

See, he did look a bit more cat than dragon in the planning stages… His early plannings are nestled up with left over fabric (sorry, fur – feathers – scales??) snippets