Reframe Your Artistry

I tidy as I tune into tidying podcasts.

The Maximized Minimalist, with Katy Wells is a favorite. Her ideas resonate with my own: may we live fully, with less. Minimalism sometimes gets a bad wrap as an elitist trend.

To me, minimalism is the gift to choose what I place into my space, my calendar, and my mindset.

In fact, I see clinically – anecdotally – that the less sense of financial or emotional stability, the greater the need for things. My mom grew up in a tiny house sharing a bedroom with two sisters, her father working several low paying jobs to feed the family…leading to post-depression era clinging by her mother. Sample butter packs or soaps cluttered next to one another, piles too thick to see all she had in the end.

My mom inherited her scarcity habits.

Hoarding has been linked then unlinked over the years, with obsessive compulsive traits. I do believe there is a similar “enough” switch lacking in hoarders and compulsives and many persons with addiction – that those without the trait cannot relate to. I also do not think it’s a pathological trait, rather one that probably was built into us as a certain sensitive and clairvoyant member of the tribe… vulnerable and even exploited by mass marketing campaigns.

We need, we need…more.

I have this vulnerability with work. I feel a burning need to do more, add more – as able. My spouse refers to this as my eight-to-ten minutes behind for life issue. A client teased I will be late to my own funeral and I’ll take that.

Yet, last night’s listen to Katy Wells – reminded me that we have a choice and sense of responsibility to not allow scheduling, and in my case the hyper-scheduling of life, to deplete the savoring and quality of each aspect of life. Sometimes my two o’clock hour looks like my grandma’s bathroom counter, overflowing.

Sometimes my two o’clock hour looks like my grandma’s bathroom counter, overflowing.

Wells phrased it poetically, “don’t prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities.” In the spirit of my Clovering, mental health technique – I started a new day, with clarity, and then the confidence that I will consistently show up for what matters most to me now.

Our dishwasher is broken and we’re on a inflation, summer-camp-rocked limited budget. Very limited budget. These are good dilemmas. That’s the beauty of mindfulness, the prosperity of it, I believe. The how we view something is the variable.

The broken dishwasher reminds me: I use too many glasses in one day.

Coffee, water glass and maybe a new one as not to wake the family while I write to you – grab a freshie. Another glass for bubbly water after three o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe another, by evening, for my (don’t-worry-trending-downward) red wine habit.

The budget is teaching me how quickly I reach for cash for freshie art supplies, when my kid and I have boxes of “awaiting rainy day” trinkets. Beads, we opened last weekend – neglected since last holiday season. Boxes: we manipulated into canvases rather than a quick run to the store to…consume, consume, consume.

On my sister site: @JessHonig – we are celebrating the marvelous book “The (Almost) Zero Waste Guide,” this month as a Mindful Book Club Selection. The read has invigorated my brainstorm – alongside our dishwasher and budgetary circumstances – to practice renewable, less wasteful ways. Here are my personal pivots thus far, and I’d love to hear what others are considering for a world with more renewal and less waste:

• Rinsing my one hot, one cold glasses – using it all week long
• Boxes with sharp angles, cut to attach to flat cardboard, naturally creating framed canvases
• Scraps from school-year kid masterpieces, collaged into Mod Podge abstract art
• During an alleged paper shortage, worried for the future of trees and the carbon drain of mass produced books – perhaps we rethink book production into local, repurposed paper works of art (not yet ready to let go of tactile, non-tech art of the book)
• Share books! Novel…and support the local library
• Nature, as the most wondrous of artistic masterpieces – engage, in impermanent play; sand castles by the sea, muddy puddle hearts, water to pavement. Marvel, let go…
• Turn your non-recyclables into 3-D sculpture magic.

The possibilities are endless. When I was in college, my dear professors at Bryn Mawr – in the Dance Department – Cantor and Caruso-Haviland deserve credit for the roots to my adult artistic perspective. One lesson, I was asked to create a dance in a confined space. I chose a bathtub. Movement choice shifted, a bit less extravagant than open and endless large studio space. Yet, the piece was no less intricate. Perhaps, more so.

I will show you something different from either

your shadow at morning striding behind you

or your shadow at evening rising to meet you…

TS ELIOT, The Waste Land

When we pause long enough, to become aware of our automatic patterns…so many drinking glasses, frivolous consumption, and endless spirals or indulgent sprints to take and take and take and consume…we lose the art of reimagining. I hope to revive my own and do a small part to mend our breaking world.

Tapestry, constructed April 2021

Welcome to my world of art. If I’m lucky, I gather a cohort each season and we immerse ourselves in a process we have coined Tapestry. We organize at a local park with a range of earthiness: dry pineland, soupy marsh, sandy beach, and lush wet creek.

I welcome the guests. We introduce ourselves and a favorite aspect of the season, the season here and now. We range from six months to seventy-six years old. We are ivory, beige, umber, and bronze.

I warm us up, reaching for the sky in a rapid motion. Then we drift, slowly swaying near our midline, side to side.

We drop to the ground and steadily explore. I explain what is about to happen; we just did it after all. We are there to celebrate nuances and continuums inspired by nature itself. Ourselves – part of nature, we are reminded.

Here is what we do: set a beginner’s mindset – see this point in time, this landscape – as if for the first time (go forth as often as possible, with that same spice to life).

Here is what we do next: make your mark, noticing the way a piece of scrappy cloth or paper kisses the earth. Notice the difference if you engage material in wet, dryer, driest ground. Notice the impermanence we wish to have to preserve natural flow after we leave, our wake. Notice the way we may engage with our fellow natural world – the freedom in neither naming things (merely joining in partnership) nor thinking, “What could this wet thing we call ‘river’ do for me?”

Here is how we move forward: reimagine our relationship to oneself, one another, and the natural world. We construct a symbolic tapestry from individual markings – and we marvel. We marvel, just as things situate, aiming to make more beauty (threading different parts together into a new whole).

This was the view from the inside looking outward, last evening. My daughter and I were taken aback, glued to the haze and hue of the sun.

We are in the middle of an unknown length of air-quality risk in Pennsylvania due to wildfires in Canada.

If you hang around my platform or know me well, I have an inseparable relationship with nature. At times, it catches my own spouse off guard. Often, it confounds me. But usually it adds lightness to my being.

My relationship to nature oscillates between awe, guilt, interconnection, and inspiration.

Today, I slipped back outside, walking with my daughter to the bus stop.

“I can taste the smoke,” she said.

With her prompt, while I didn’t taste anything, the smell was palpable. The carriage of smoke from thousands of miles north, passing – literally – through us.

The journalism reports cannot specify when hardest hit regions like Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia will see reprieve in air quality.

I wonder what the risks are – for summer plans, for my daughter’s someday daughters, and my fellow species fighting for survival during these ever-tumultuous times.

Until then, I look outside my window and wonder: how did we get here? And when will we come together to realize, our future depends upon a mindful way of life – simpler, slower, and showing up for what matters most (with compassion for all living things).

Smoke, like wetness, like love, is carried and circulated endlessly (if we acknowledge it). Energy never dies. It is up to us, how we face this radical interconnection.

You, my next gen, are not alone – we are all in this together.

My house is not in order. This breaks my heart, since my heart loves this place. My spouse and I have worked hard for our 1600 square foot paradise. House versus home, let me begin there. House, to me, I think of as shelter. Home is an anchoring for safety and thriving and growth.

There are periods in my creative bursts and spurts—deadlines looming and “gitRdone” militarism is necessary—turning home into wreckage. I’ve learned to live with those weeks, lately those months.

As 2023 moves into its second quarter, I take inventory of the state of my home. It has felt more shelter than sanctuary. And I want to do better by it. I guess it’s similar to neglect people experience by abandoning their bodies or finances. Gradually there is a decline then suddenly, hindsight as glaring clarity, one sees how undone one has become.

Gradually there is a decline then suddenly, hindsight as glaring clarity, one sees how undone one has become.

I’ve lost touch with the declutter bug I used to be…I want to her again. She creates the most amazing open spaces for thinking and intentional vignettes to inspire. She used to make a house a home and keep it that way.

How did I get here? Busy, I suppose. But that isn’t all of it. So much stuff has rolled in as my child is an only grandchild on both sides of our family. My own mother finds it humorous, I believe, that I physically cringe when she brings in…”just one little thing”…every time she visits. Every. Time. She. Visits. My spouse says, “We have to tell her it will have to be donated if she cannot stop herself.”

He isn’t the one who is present when she looks me and my daughter in the eye and creates a story, “I founds this special, and I hope you’ll keep it always to think of me.”

Is this how she wants to be remembered?

Hard to say. Stuff is tangible to some people whereas memories perhaps fade. I am not sure what it says about me now: I value open space more than anything else (including stuff and memories).

I move through this house and I wonder how it got so congested. My mind works fullest with an inverse to fullness of things around me. Marie Kondo brilliantly teaches a methodology of deep detoxification of one’s house to fully revive joy in the home. I listen to her book on audible twice a year while I do a two to three day clean. She says her method prevents rebound. But, she has also retracted a bit once she had her own children (after all, meaning of objects is profoundly more complicated and tender in the developmental eyes of a child). Until I get my house back into a home, I have to carve out more time for deep cleans. Otherwise, I feel like the ocean and the plastic bags are starting to suffocate me.

I’d like to get to a place where my child and spouse are so inspired they want to do small efforts of tidying and take pride in the flow of the home, akin to small increments of cardio I have naturally integrated into my life. For now, clutter continues to add fatty deposits where my health can no longer afford them. I can do better. For now, I scheduled some spa time for the house.

Join me.

This cracked sun catcher makes me smile. We spend Thursdays together. Thursdays are my weekly, for one day only, jaunt into a public space for work. As a full blown introvert who learned to act like an extrovert (or stand by my mom who talked for both of us)…I like my space. I like my quiet space to think, to nest, and to be my (braless) self. I have no need to work alongside people who also want to talk about their lives or people who need people to get work finished.

I’m my best self in a room of my own. I’m deeply connected to a personal life that through clinical insights or patterns and typing fingers to keyboard – I do my best work. I do not need a boss, other than me. Others used to just want to talk to me about their personal life or call a meeting or develop a policy that would curtail quality work. They just distracted personal and collective progress. I do not need friends at work, I adore my clients. We chat all day.

It is hard for me to imagine a time when I felt, for income’s sake, I had to work out of the home some six or seven days a week. Sometimes I’d leave at seven in the morning and return at ten in the evening. I feel privileged not to have to do that anymore. Yet, it was a very conscious process that I worked toward for years before this joy ride. While I cherish the shifts virtual work has afforded me, and I hold the greatest gratitude for days that I no longer set an alarm – moving to my own rhythms and not the industrialized pace of life – I like my Thursdays. It now feels special to leave the house.

My commute is short, heading from a bustling town borough to its neighboring historic village. There are only six or so buildings, here – as otherwise rural life recedes around me. My cooperative wellness clinic situates between an inn, a small business whole foods market, and a garden shop. I’ve been fortunate to live in esteemed and dynamic neighborhoods like Cambridge, Mass. I’ve walked the streets of NOHO, Chicago, and Amsterdam. Today, I walk up creaky stairs in this centuries-old building and I pass by this sun catcher that has (unclear to me) either deliberate or accidental tears. It reminds me of my wabi sabi style: joy in the imperfect, impermanent, incomplete nature of the universe. I look at her each week and I think, if I have to leave the house, I was meant to pass this way.

photography by Shannon McDonald at my beloved Bryn Mawr College

Instead of an advent @Jess-Honig via Instagram this month – I’m gifting the people 25 Days of Mindfulness.

Ah, Mindfulness…What is it anyhow?

Ask a dozen practitioners and you may get a dozen different definitions.

To me…

Mindfulness is awareness of various forces (circumstances, outlook, physicality) in the present moment with a discipline to focus on and follow through on the most productive angles.

Mindfulness is a quieting of volume on the past regrets, future what-ifs – a practice of being here, best influencing your now. Anchored, via our senses:

I see

I hear

I taste

I touch

I smell

I read a powerful Op-ed this weekend (11/27/22 Sunday Times) by Jessica Grose, unfortunately for me no relationship to myself as a Jessica Honig-Gross. Close but no cigar. The title: The Toxic Perfection of Momfluencers

It hit home.

Mostly, it hit at the heart of my own budding self-consciousness and budding social media platform as a budding writer. I’m aiming to grow professionally. But I worry about the ways and pace at which I grow. Might this be at the expense of mindful integrity?

I hope not.

Yet, I am guilty of glossy branding shots with my amazing daughter. I am guilty of selling things.

But what I aim to do, as my own dear literary agent (Bethany Jett) reminds me – sell what is true to you.

I sell ideas.

Bethany also said, “Don’t think so much of marketing yourself,” and thank goodness since that idea gives me hives. “Ask yourself, how may I serve others?”

That concept has made all the difference to me.

This month and always – I aim to serve mom’s like me (with a ton on their own plate, trying to feed their children equal doses of love and compassion). I aim to serve fellow CPTSDERS to keep it real and keep it as grounded as possible, maybe even sparked with joy. I aim to do this with an authentic use of self.

I get Direct Messages (DM’s) to be sponsored for teeth whiteners and anti-frizz creams.

I get DM’s to try and promo teeth straighteners. A besty asks me what will I do about my streak of gray?

I think I’d rather continue to reveal my organic self that I’m quite comfy with.

I’ll leave you with a bold quote from the Opinion Piece by Jessica Grose:

…there’s one takeaway from my reporting on the sociology of American motherhood, it’s that the ideals as they are created may serve industry but they do not serve us or our families.”

Jessica Grose, NYT Op Ed, 11.27.22

Yes, I am guilty of selling something.

I sell ideas.

At this point, they are pretty much free.

A deal, on sale and down from two-cents.

I sell the idea of being more comfortable with oneself; living our core values at a slower, simplified pace.

I am comfortable with myself these days.

Hope you are too.

After all, like the mindfulness that I pitch – being, the act of being, may just be the most priceless, precious, vital way to be.

One of my favorite avenues for art making involves making art like a toddler. They are the royal court jesters of non-representational expression. Splotch here, dash there, anything is a potential material with which to work, feeling and not overthinking.

Let’s get playful with some tips toward expanding abstraction with your artistry:

1. JUST BE: Emphasize making something rather than defining what you are making; hold a chosen tool and begin again – explorative rather than destination based.
2. ABSENCE OF MIND: Quiet the volume on thinking through steps; allow the tools before you to lead your expression.
3. IMAGINE IT SO: Consider that if your tools may create it, it is so; care not what it resembles, care for its originality in this moment.

GO INWARD THEN ONWARD, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANOTHER YOU OR MOMENT LIKE THIS TO SHOW BACK UP TO ART MAKING…

Excerpt from Reframe Your Artistry: Mindful Tools for Art Making at Any Age, 2019 Prodigy Gold Books

Allow nature to model that change is inherent, finding possibility rather than discontent in seasons, stages, and fresh angles.

Allow imperfection to be a state of being that is momentary, disallowing mistakes or artistic bombs from being catastrophic to the lifespan of your artistry. 

Allow impermanence to highlight that our quality of mind, our emotions, and our physical states vary from moment to moment.

Recognize that productivity rides the mind, body, spirit kiddy-size rollercoaster and embrace the comings and goings with flow.

Allow incompleteness of one moment’s efforts to remind us that we care about art making, wishing to continue to carve out more time and place for it.