Weaving The Dream

Breakfast is done.  The table has been cleared and the dishes washed.  Duncan, our almost 14-year-old collie now knows that hope of more scraps of leftover sausage or French toast is useless.

He and I both know what is coming next.  I wipe down the counter, ready to head to my studio when I hear the thud, pause, thud of his rope toy as he drops it on the floor, picks it up, and drops it again.  This is his way of saying, “Time to play!”

Yes, even at almost 14, Duncan still insists on his playtimes, usually after meals, and occasionally at other times during the day when he might be feeling either frisky or bored, although the first doesn’t happen that often anymore.

Bob and I obediently (Duncan has us well-trained) wander into the kitchen to play Pickle-in-the-Middle.  Duncan, of course, being the pickle.  We take turns tossing the rope toy either to Duncan or each other.  When Duncan has it, we are then expected to fight him for it, pulling and tugging.  When we first started playing this game, we went all out, throwing high, tugging hard.  Now we are careful to not throw too high or tug too hard so that he loses his balance on his not-so-strong back legs.

Still, he keeps his eye on the prize, his tail up and wagging, his body tensed and ready to leap as we play his favorite game…after breakfast, after dinner.  Like clockwork.

Here’s the lesson our wise four-footed teacher offers us.

Play is a necessary and important part of life.  Not play that may occur a couple of times a year when we allow ourselves a vacation, but daily, regular play.  Play feeds our hearts, minds, and souls, and, since Duncan is old for a collie, I have to believe play nurtures our bodies as well.

We all know that old adage, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  The dull is not just as in boring to everyone else.  Dull means Jack himself can suffer from depression, boredom, creative blocks, frustration, body aches and pains, a sense of loneliness and isolation.

Creativity thrives on play.  Our spirits are made for joy and laughter, for surprise and discovery, which most often happens when we play.

So get up from your computer, your easel, your piano…regularly.  Get up and go play. 

And if you’ll excuse me, I hear a rope toy thudding to the floor.  Duncan—and play—calls.
 

My recent trip to Las Vegas was quite an educational experience. 

As I stood in the lobby of the Palazzo to check in and stared at the vaulted ceiling, marble floors and walls, and a sculpture of three female forms larger than life surrounded by a gigantic swirl of vines, I could only think, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I imagine that Dorothy in Oz felt much the way I did in Vegas.  Country girl plopped into the land of glitz and glamour, of celebrity and the fantastic, standing with eyes and mouth wide open and with her mind stretching to encompass and adapt to what seemed unimaginable and impossible only that morning.

Yes, I’ve traveled—in many parts of this country, in some of the major metropolitan areas, and to Canada, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands—but for some reason, up until Vegas, I really had not grasped how big the world is in terms of business potential and possibility.

I thought I was dreaming big, reaching for the stars in my vision of my work, but the megawatt lights of Vegas illuminated for me that my ideas of BIG were limited by my experiences and therefore my beliefs of what was possible.  I didn’t have any concrete images to put in my head about what being BIG could really look like.  And, baby, Las Vegas is all about BIG!

Because my community up to this point was made up of a great group of writers and artists, most of whom struggle with limited budgets and incomes as I have, my idea of what I might earn and create with my business was limited by others’ limitations.  Not a good thing.  My smaller vision kept me from not only daring to dream BIG but also kept me from thinking creatively.  Ironic, huh?

But my ability to dream bigger, to dream BIG, wasn’t changed just by the place.  It was also changed by the women I met at the entrepreneurial conference, SHINE, organized by Alexandria Brown, an event that drew many women making high five- to high six-figure incomes.  But it wasn’t just the size of their incomes that had an impact.

Many of these women—from England, Australia, Norway, and the Netherlands as well as from across the US—were successful women entrepreneurs who helped, coached, guided or served others, whether their clients were people struggling with English or health or parenting, or discovering their souls’ purposes, or creating businesses of their own.

Seeing what they were accomplishing in their corners of the world, how could I not dream bigger?

So now I know.  It is important to put myself, periodically, in an environment that makes me stretch my vision of who I am, what I can do, and how I can serve.

We too often limit our creative dreams and visions based on past experience.

Time to stop that.  Go someplace where you can dream bigger.  Then dream BIG.  Paint a bigger canvas for yourself.  Write a bigger book.  Dance on tiptoe.  Reach for higher notes…or the stars.

Go ahead…reach.  Dream BIG.

I just returned this past Tuesday from a trip to Las Vegas to attend a conference for women entrepreneurs from around the world.

I’d never been to the city of stage shows, slot machines, and strip joints before.  I’m a country girl who only in the past ten years has come to appreciate the excitement and opportunities of metropolitan areas like New York City and Washington DC.

So you can imagine how wide my eyes were as the airport shuttle drove us down the Vegas strip at 12 o’clock at night with all the resort and casino lights flashing.  If New York City is the city that never sleeps, then Vegas has to be its western sister.  Late into the night, crowds walk the streets, moving from casino to casino, from nightclub to nightclub.  And though I wasn’t up to verify this for myself, my impression was that there were people gambling at the machines and the tables around the clock.

Everywhere you looked there were billboards or video screens promising excitement and entertainment along with the chance to risk or spend your money. And while you do that, they excel at distracting you from your hunger, your thirst, your fatigue, and, most importantly, the fact that you are spending that money.

Their law of attraction is a law of distraction.  If they can distract you from your worries enough to live on the promise of what MIGHT happen, then you will stay and stay and spend and spend.

This law of distraction leads us away from where the real wealth is, the real possibility for living our dreams.  Their distraction leads us away from ourselves and from our creative possibilities.

Yes, it is fun to enter a land of pretend and possibility as long as we realize it is their land not ours.  Yes, it can be a vacation to put our own creative endeavors to the side and be entertained by someone else’s for a while, as long as we remember to value and return to our creative projects.  And yes, it is wonderful to believe that the dreams of wealth and prosperity might be ours someday, as long as we are willing to take more creative action today than pulling the arm of a slot machine.

Distractions abound at home as well—worries and responsibilities, TV and food, and even our nice soft bed.  All things that can lead us away from our inner world and our creativity.  So we get to choose each day—will I let myself be distracted or will I get busy attracting and creating what I want to have in my creative work and in my life?

It is not always an easy choice, especially when we are tired or discouraged.

But today I choose to take action.  What about you?

Several years ago when I was doing one of my annual studio clean-outs and clean-ups, I decided to try using some feng shui principles I’d learned.

So I put purple in one corner, red in another, hung a bell between my cones of yarn, and made sure my fountain was in a good location to keep the energy moving—my creative energy and the energy of abundance—for my weaving business.

Did my efforts produce any change?  I don’t remember.  If they did, I didn’t make note of it.  Like a diet we try for a while and then abandon when we don’t drop 20 pounds in three weeks, whatever happened wasn’t enough to keep me mindful about maintaining order and energy flow.

Now I need to clean my studio again, always, every day.  Between paperwork, weaving yarns, books on writing, dreams, oracles and myths, packing to go away to teach and consult, and unpacking when I return, my studio manages to be in a steady state of chaos.

But while talking to a friend the other day, I realized I wanted to re-instill a sense of the sacred in my space, to both honor the work I do there and to remind me of my purpose.  Since I am always urging other creative women to do this, I need to practice what I preach.

Owl figures, fairies, candles, crystals, and inspiring images sit on shelves, windowsills, and desktop, and even hang on my limited wall space.  But too often my work, my materials, and my piles of books surround or bury them.  (Put a writer in a cave and in no time bats and stalagmites will give way to piles of books!)
 
If I can’t see the small sculptures of owls that remind me of my dream work with people and of my own inner wisdom, then I can too easily forget the sacred dimension of my work and the why I do what I do when I am caught up in the what and how.

I need to clean my space.  I need to create small altars for the four directions—east, south, west and north—to honor inspiration, will, creativity, and manifestation, to honor my words, my visions, my passions, and my efforts.  And to create sacred space for the Muse.

I need to create sacred space for sacred work.

How about you?  Does your space honor the sacred dimension of your creativity?

Less than two weeks ago, Bob and I returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh to join in the celebration of his oldest sister’s 50th wedding anniversary.

Weddings are about a couple making a (usually) sacred commitment to love one another through thick and thin, through the ups and downs of life, love, and, for many, through the challenges of parenthood.

50th wedding anniversaries are about honoring and celebrating a couple for making those long-ago weddings vows a living and lasting reality.  We share with them the recognition of the rewards and satisfaction of fulfilling that commitment.

At a wedding ceremony, we honor the romantic and sacred dimensions of love, and the courage of each partner to commit to one another, ideally, ‘til death us do part.

At a 50th wedding anniversary, we stand in awe at the couple’s achievement—to work, to sacrifice, to grit teeth, to dry tears, to support, to believe in, to have and to hold, even when the polish on the romance gets dusty and courage flags…

Sometimes when we commit to something, like a relationship, a job, writing a book, we do so with the naiveté of the untried and the untested.  We commit with optimism, with hope, and with faith in happy endings.

Then we experience the work that the commitment requires.  The true grit. The getting-up-every-day-and-working-at-it-no-matter-what determination that a job, a relationship, or our creative work requires—even when our romance with the project, or relationship may wane, and our courage for seeing it through may weaken.  We may wonder, “Is this really that important?  Is this really what I want?  WHY AM I DOING THIS?”

We have our reasons—supporting ourselves and our children, having a career, leaving a legacy, making a difference in the world, keeping our word.  But bottom line?  We do it because something in our hearts and souls long for the deepest satisfaction of knowing we honored our commitment and ourselves by following through to the happy ending.

I watched Bob’s sister and her husband view a computer montage of photos of their years together, of their kids, and grandchildren growing right along with the marriage.  I watched—as she leaned toward him to whisper something, as he reached out to pat her arm, as she shared a tissue for a shared loss—and I mused on their triumph, on how wonderful, how rewarding it is to have the strength and will and faith to follow through on the significant commitments in our lives. 

Bob and I will celebrate our 36th anniversary in a few weeks.  So I have a sense of what is required to honor significant commitments. And how rewarding it can be.

I want to have the true grit to honor my commitments to my writing and to my coaching as successfully because…bottom line?  My heart and soul longs for that deep satisfaction of honoring myself and my work—all the way to the happy ending.

What about you?  Is there a creative commitment your heart is longing to make and, with true grit, follow through with all the way to your happy ending?

In the early morning after the conversation with my husband about contribution, I had a dream. Here it is.

Six of Wands:

 I am in a school gymnasium at a concert.  The music director, the man that directed our two younger sons’ high school band, is acknowledging several students who performed well, along with a teacher and another adult who are successful in music.

Finally, he speaks about a student who tried to be part of the jazz band when he was in high school but wasn’t because at that time he was too shy, too intimidated.  But because he loves music, the student majored in guitar in college, developing his skills and performing jazz and rock.

 Suddenly, I see our oldest son, who was sitting next to the adult woman who had been recognized, get up and descend the bleachers toward the back because he knows the director is speaking about him.  I watch him descend and as he does he becomes the shy, sensitive young boy at 7.  But he swings around the bleacher support and heads for the director who announces his name.  It is not the boy but the adult who climbs up onto the stage to be recognized.  The audience claps and yells, and then rises to their feet, clapping and stomping and yelling.  Our son is at first stunned then delighted to the point where he sits down laughing and looks back at me with such pleasure.  And I am so happy for him.

Still in the dream, we talk afterwards and he is amazed and unable to figure out why he was so acknowledged and praised when he isn’t doing anything public with his music right now.  I answer that it is because he is still works with his music, composing and playing.  That he didn’t just play an instrument for several years in school so he could play John Phillip Sousa’s March in a school parade and then abandon it, but that he took a creative passion and continues to work and grow with it.  End.

I call the dream Six of Wands because in the tarot, that collection of 78 cards dealing with archetypes, elements and other symbols often used for divinatory purposes, the card implies victory, outward congratulations, and accolades.

Our son received accolades in the dream not just because he was successful in his music as defined by the director (and me), but also because he was a role model for creative achievement for others (and thereby made a contribution!). In other words, we give and receive accolades as a measure of our achievement, that what we set out to perform or create is a success and even…a contribution.

Receiving accolades means that others value what we offered in our performance or creation. Those accolades often help us move into and through the next creative effort.  But giving accolades is also important…to the giver.  Because, in addition to gratitude for the contribution of the performance, our cheering and clapping also signifies our, often unconscious, acknowledgement of what is also possible for us. We cheer others on in order to cheer ourselves on.

Not necessarily in the same venue—I do not desire to play jazz on the guitar—but with the same commitment to a creative passion.  With the same level of desire and joy and for the too rare experience of complete surrender to that transcendent creative moment that takes us out of ourselves into the greater Soul.

So cheer..and clap…and praise.  And may victory and accolades be yours.

Last night while walking our dog, my husband and I had a discussion about what it means to make a contribution to the world.

The automatic response from some people might be, “Solve world hunger.  Make a medical breakthrough.  Work with the poor.  Start a charitable foundation.” 

I understand why those would be the first responses.  Those are very public ways of contributing to the world.  Those ways would affect many.  Those ways would be seen and acknowledged by many.

And yet…

To contribute means to give—an idea, help, money.  The challenge for most of us who contribute is that our contributions seem too small, to affect too few. 

For instance, perhaps you have parented a son who will, in turn, become a wonderful father.  But if you are a parent who raises your children with love, respect and commitment, it could be years…and years before you have any clue as to what effect that loving parenting will have on the world.   

Or, if you are an employee—whether at MacDonald’s or MacDonald Douglas—and you work with commitment and responsibility and to the best of your abilities, can you imagine how that might improve morale and quality of work within the workplace?  But we don’t always get to see how good service and a quality product improves the lives of our customers.

Or, if you are a writer or painter or musician—you get the idea—who creates with commitment regardless of whether you are writing the music for your band or a symphony for the London Philharmonic, how do you measure your contribution?  By the size of the audience?  By the number of recordings sold?  By the money you make?

The idea of contribution, I think, becomes of greater concern the older we get, probably because we want to feel that we have meaning and purpose in our continued existence.  And yet, isn’t living well and role modeling how to age with wisdom and charity enough of a contribution?  Especially since so many of us struggle to do just that.  But it is hard to see if the role modeling we do has any long-term or widespread effect.  And yet other cultures value their elders because they hold the wisdom of lives well-lived.

If we are living our lives day to day while giving our help, our ideas, even our money with integrity, with commitment and consistency, with love and compassion, with imagination and joy, isn’t that a contribution to the world?  Isn’t that enough?
 

When I was in high school, a young folk music group out of the University of Colorado was making the rounds of college campuses and was appearing at the college my mom was attending.  She invited me to go with her to hear the group perform.

The name of the group?  The Serendipity Singers.

I don’t know whether my mom liked the word “serendipity” first and then the group or vice versa.  All I remember is that because she was taken with the word and liked to use it, I added it to my vocabulary and always think of her when I hear it.

Serendipity means making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. My mom, as an artist, liked the idea of happy accidents.

Serendipity is what happens when we are in the flow of our creative process, writing, painting, composing, or dancing.  We are working in our studios—practicing scales, researching a topic, or mixing paints—and suddenly a new juxtaposition of ideas occurs, or we play a sequence of notes a certain way and it catches just that nuance of meaning we were striving for, or the light falls on the rose in a way that has us seeing more than the rose we are painting.  Delightedly, our work takes flight.

Serendipity is a wonderful guest to have visit in your studio.  She gives you lovely gifts for your work wrapped up in pretty paper and tied with sparkly bows.  She makes creativity fun and exciting.

Years after listening to The Serendipity Singers with my mom, I read Carl Jung’s “Man and His Symbols” and I serendipitously discovered the idea of synchronicity.

Synchronicity means meaningful coincidence, or two seemingly unconnected events occurring at the same time in a meaningful manner.

You know, like the book that falls from the shelf in a thrift shop and has exactly the information in it you needed to provide background for your story, even though you were really there to look for a doorknocker.  Or like when you are driving to the gym, thinking about how the introductory measures of a new piece you are composing reminds you of a section in Beethoven’s Ninth which you’ve always enjoyed, and suddenly your car radio is playing Beethoven’s Ninth.

Synchronicity as a guest demands more attention than Serendipity.  He doesn’t wrap his gifts prettily but instead takes great delight in just plopping them on the table, or disguising them as something else, creating puzzles for you to ponder over and solve. But if you don’t get it, if you don’t take the gift to heart (while you try to figure out how to use it) and say thank you, chances are he will leave in a huff taking his gift with him.

Whether they are wrapped in pretty paper or disguised between the covers of an old musty book, the gifts from Serendipity and Synchronicity are treasures.  Leave the door open for these two inspiring guests, have tea and cookies waiting for them—and say thank you!

Oh no!  Not more football mania! 

I can just hear you moan.  But hey…I am the mother of three sons and my husband is a former Pittsburgher.  I’ll just have to be excused on the grounds of unavoidable indoctrination and defensive assimilation.

So…I watched most of the Super Bowl Sunday night with my husband. We knew that our two younger sons were also watching the game in their apartment in LA while our oldest son and his wife were watching the game in their home in Virginia just outside the nation’s capital where even President Obama was rooting for our team.

Usually, I hate watching the Steelers play because I am just not an adrenalin junky and, as their coach, Mike Tomlin said afterwards, Steelers football is never pretty–as they proved last night when it seemed all was lost until Santonio Holmes made a pass reception in the end zone that was unique.

And here’s the thing—as I watched the slow motion replay of his catch over and over, I watched his determination and his awareness of the ball and his position just this side of out-of-bounds.  I gaped at his self-control as he kept both feet on tiptoe firmly planted as he first caught the ball and then allowed himself to fall under a tackle. 

Since most of us would have instinctually moved one of our feet out to keep our balance, I admired Holmes’s ability to be so focused on what he needed to do that he could control his body’s own instincts. 

I thought, “Geez, that must have taken hours of training and preparation to be able to do that.”  Not to mention hours more experience of failing and succeeding to bring him and his team to this defining moment of success.

Here is a guy who sold drugs in high school to pay for shoes and clothes but who found something that was his heart’s passion—something he could give his all to in terms of commitment and work—to move him off of a path of self- destruction and on to a path of creative success and fulfillment. (And you can bet that, for Holmes, running and catching footballs is his form of creative expression.)

Holmes is very conscious of being a role model for young kids and their ability to move out of poverty and crime into a life of achievement.  What he probably doesn’t realize is that he is also a role model for creativity in three important ways:

1. Dream the impossible dream and then take action.  Holmes made the decision in high school that he didn’t want to spend his life standing on a street corner selling drugs.  He wanted something more…he wanted to play football.  So he stopped selling drugs and put his time and effort into playing on his high school football team, and then his college team.  And he did it so well that he was a first round draft pick for the NFL.
2. Be prepared and practice, practice, practice. Being successful creatively, whether we are writers, dancers (and Holmes appeared to have mastered ballet last night), singers, or painters, requires hours of consistent training.  That is, with rare exceptions, before we can move craft into art, before we can successfully express our ideas or visions, we first have to develop the necessary skills and techniques.  We know that Holmes spent hours in practice and preparation both on and off the field.  My mother was an artist in watercolor and colored pencils and in addition to years of schooling, every time she worked on a new painting or picture, she did study after study of the images in the picture.  She didn’t just sit down one day to paint and it was a success.
3. Be willing to fail in order to succeed. Holmes didn’t catch every pass made to him Sunday night.  But he didn’t give up and decide he couldn’t do the job when he missed a pass.  Instead, he believed in himself, and with 35 seconds left in the game, he asked his quarterback to trust him, to give him the chance to make the play.

I lied…there is one more important thing that Holmes did that we as artists and creatives need to do.  He put his whole being into making that catch.

Put your whole heart and soul into your work.  Create with passion and joy.

And then, when that work, like last night’s game, is over…

CELEBRATE!
 

Aaaaagh!  Gasp!  Cough!  Choke!

Procrastination has its hands about my throat once again!  Peeling back its fingers one by one, I am reminded that two years ago, just about this time, I wrote another post on procrastination.  In that post, I championed procrastination as a way of eliminating those things that are not worth doing.

However, this time procrastination has gotten such a firm grip on me that I am turning blue with all the unwritten words of blog posts and book projects.  Time to let me—and my creativity—breathe.

Just today, I read a quote that said, “Perfection is just another definition for procrastination.”  As I loosen procrastination’s determined fingers, I manage to nod my head in agreement.  After all, I want my posts to be perfectly written, perfectly grammatical, perfectly meaningful and perfectly…well, you get the picture.  Writing a perfect essay on some meaningful topic can be both fun and daunting.  So I procrastinate.

And then there is the issue that Steven Pressfield talks about in his book, “The War of Art”(more on that in future posts)—resistance.

Resistance teams up with procrastination, tripping us up or distracting us, while procrastination pounces on us and holds us immobile.

Resistance distracts us when we enter the studio with the sudden urge to clean up, or check email, or call a friend.  Or he sticks his big foot out every time we head to our studios or workspaces, keeping us from even entering, from even getting close to working.   And the deadly thing about how the two work together is that the longer we allow resistance to make us procrastinate, the less resistance has to work on us to get us to do it.  It’s kind of like that law of inertia we learned in high school science—that it takes more energy to get a body moving than it does to keep that body moving.

There is a secret there…if we can get ourselves moving on our creative projects, resistance and procrastination will have a bigger fight on their hands.  They will have to work harder to get us to stop.  And we’ll have to work less (hopefully) to keep going. 

That is the catch, though.  We have to keep going.  Today, tomorrow, the next day.  Because it is easier to win that battle with resistance on the first day than it is after a week or two or three of not doing our creative work.

So, hey.  I’ve pried procrastination’s hands from around my throat.  I’ve broken the resistance spell—for today.  And if I keep writing on my other projects today, maybe I will work up enough momentum that come tomorrow, resistance and procrastination will only get in a swing or two before they are trampled under my feet as I head for my studio. 

And no, I won’t give them a hand up.