Week 30: Nine of Muses

Celebrating when my creativity and output are in perfect  alignment with the rest of my life... Yes, that is what the nine of Muses is calling me to do. Well it hasn't seemed like that in a while. <sigh>

Presently I've felt stressed and unbalanced it just about every aspect of my life. Yes, I'd love to celebrate this feat... but I need to get there again.

I have felt like that balance has been there before, but not  for a long time and I can't exactly  put my finger on it and say every thing was clicking like this in August of 2013 or ______________(insert any other date here).

Yes, I want things to flow smoothly.  I'd love to be absent the frenzy. I've never enjoyed drama except on stage or theater.

I know that balance is a good thing. I've actually felt  balance in my life at times and it seems to make things better across the board. At home, at the office.  In family life, artistic life. In terms of how I feel health-wise. My level of energy  is higher then. My  blood sugar numbers level off to be more stable within a tighter range. My emotions are less in flux.

It is at times when things are in balance that I generally  feel better about my writing. My production is up but so too is the quality of that output. I think confidence has a lot to do with it.

I'm a Capricorn and I am not crazy about change. I also always want to feel organized and in control but wanting to will not automatically translate into fining that organized state.  I can do a mean to-do list. Sometimes that list can grow so long and actually overwhelm me.

Oh Nine of Muses, I stand convicted of teetering off balance presently. Let me make October a month that harmony, the stars, the universe all seem point me to a grounding that balances every aspect of my life.

Week 29: Seven of Muses

While I have a dream Journal I've lately missed quite a few entries.
The Seven of muses is admonishing me for the loss of potential writing ideas.

Dreams & nightmares offer a powerful source for artwork, and how many really good opportunities have I let slip by?  I was diligent about it for a while and then I hit a spell where I would wake up and find it difficult to piece details together. It was a little frightening as I thought perhaps it was a memory issue. For some unknown reason this problem stopped about a week ago and I've been dreaming big time the past week but had  gotten out of the habit of recording  the intricate little details of these dreams.

Resolved... I must do better about this.

I must also go periodically to my dream journal and be open to what it asks of me artistically. It is an opening to a place in my soul that is sealed and that seal is not easily opened.

Week 28 - Five of Mentors

For Week twenty-eight I'm back to a suits card. This one, the Five of Mentors.

This card calls into question issues between creative entities.  For example collaborative works of artists. I've not really had a lot of collaborative experiences so this is difficult to assess how I handle these sort of things and maybe more to think about what those possibilities might look like. Could I be congenial under the circumstance?

I think in a joint artistic effort I could a positive contributor. This card reminds me of watching  the TV Runway show and how some of the designers in collaborative works become spoiled drama queens.

Keeping a flexible artistic vision is likely a good practice no matter if you are working with others, work-shopping in a group or working alone. I need to always keep an open mind - especially to things completely new.
   

Week 27 - Edger Allan Poe

Drawing a new card for the week, but one that is being revisited.  Poe first came to me in week 5 and he's back.

In week five working with the Poet Tarot Card Deck it was still pretty new to me. Drawing cards at random is of course kind of exciting but I remember thinking  something like "Poe, really? Why me?"

I've never been a Poe fan. Nor a big fan of rhyme. At least strong repetitious use of it in poems. I've not really been into bizarre or grotesque writing.  So drawing this card I was hard pressed to feel it would offer me positive insight into art/writing. So naturally I had to ask,"What's in this for me?"

The week 5 Poe card did cause me to think about what imprisons me. Do I feel imprisoned by my writing? Do I feel there is something else that imprisons me and if so how might it impact my writing or life otherwise?

I did decide that there were emotional tide swings  between introvert and extrovert tendencies to sometimes held me captive. Here we are 22 weeks later and I feel those some shifts are at work within me. I suppose I should expect that these are likely as much creatures of habit as anything else and as such they will not change overnight. They will not likely change without some thought process taking place about it on a routine bases. Perhaps this is the reason I was to be revisited by Poe so soon.

I need to explore in what ways the introvert/extrovert thing hinders me. That is the place to start because I need to discern if there really is a problem that needs to be solved. For example is it really a bad thing to be introverted?  And if I am able at different times to have tendencies in both directions is there not some balance to this?

So my dear Poe, you've come back to haunt me. I will revisit this week my introvert/extrovert tendencies and examine if they do imprison or hinder me in some way(s).  Additionally, I will examine how I am doing in stepping outside of my comfort zone.

Thank you Mr. Poe, That will be all for now.

Quote of the Day e e cummings

“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.” 

~e e cummings

Quote Of The Day - e e cummings

“I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”

 ~e e cummings

cummungs Quote of the Day

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination. e e cummings

Week #26 - e e cummings

This week I have a return visitor.  Mr. Cummings who I drew on week twelve is I believe the first repeat card for me and I can only include that he has something  else in tor for me to learn.

Cummings was not always appreciated by the public and some felt that childish or foolish with his lower case writing and lack of punctuation. Many felt him simple and yet today I believe we would say these things were experimental and that he was fundamentally a risk taker.

I think there are times I've felt foolish with respect to some of my own work and certainly this has lead to second guessing myself. What if e e cummings had called into question his work? He must have known some were critical of his unorthodox style. Did he care? If there was a shred of evidence that he cared what people thought, he did not let it detract from his work.

• Am I willing to take unorthodox risks with my writing?
• Can I truly not worry about what others think? 
• What if I choose to take ownership of all my work, accepting the bad as an inevitable road I must walk down to find the good in my work. Know that if I keep writing that in the end the good writing will win out and this is what others will remember of my writing. 

Read some more of Cumming's work this week think of what others might have been critical of, but find the good in his work.