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?

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?
 

Autumn…makes a double demand.  It asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping.  But it also asks we learn to let go…” Bonaro W. Overstreet in Meditations for Women.

Living in the northeastern part of our county, I’ve always loved autumn because of the intensity and clarity of color that the season brings.  The air is crisper, less humid, so the sky is a metal-bright bowl of blue arching over me.  Sugar maples are show-offs in their bright shifts of orange and red, especially next to the deeper, quieter black-greens of the pines.  Wild asters and grapes compete to define purple.

While reveling in the elixir of color that autumn brings, I can’t help but hear the footsteps of winter approaching, reminding me that all this piercing bright beauty will not last.

Just as the sugar maples and oaks let go of their leaves to make ready for their deep sleep beneath winter’s blanket, I am challenged to let go as well—of the weeding I didn’t complete, the plants I never planted, the vacation I didn’t take, the creative projects I didn’t finish, some I haven’t even started.

Autumn has also been a time of letting go of those I love.  My mother died 24 years ago this past September.  My paternal grandfather died six weeks after her.

And early yesterday morning, as the day was just being born, as leaves dropped silently and unseen in the night, I lost a sister of my heart—author, writer, and teacher, Liz Aleshire.  Liz was (and how hard to use past tense in this sentence) a woman of great courage and determination, of bright intelligence and wit, of fierce loyalty and friendship.  We’ve only been close friends for about seven years, but we traveled many creative and spiritual roads together.  It is hard to say goodbye.  To release our clasped hands.  To know she is no longer just a phone call away.  That she will never again sit on my patio looking out over our yard, smoking a cigarette while our dog, Duncan, keeps her company.

This is the challenge of autumn.  In the other seasons there is a looking forward to new growth, to warmth, to harvest.  In autumn, we look back, not forward, with the desire to spin out time, to slow the relentless fall of leaves, to push back the dark that arrives earlier and earlier each day.

But we can’t do it.  We can’t stop the trees from letting go of their leaves, we can’t slow the earth in its path around the sun.  We can’t stop Death in her tracks.

So we put mulch in the flowerbeds and stack wood for the woodstove, raising our heads to the sound of honking Canada geese as they wing their way to warmer climes. 

I whisper goodbye to Liz as she heads for her own Summerland of sunlight and flowers, where Nathan, her son, waits to greet her with both arms spread wide, laughter in his eyes and voice.

And my tears fall with the leaves.

Summertime, like Sundays, used to be a time of rest and relaxation. Of renewal and restoration. Of recharging batteries drained by the demands of the year.

Not anymore.  We don’t know what it means to relax anymore.  We have to take classes on relaxation so we can learn how to stop our endless, and sometimes meaningless, motion.  So we can learn how to breath deeply from our bellies instead of only the upper third of our lungs.  So we can learn how to unclench our muscles and our stomachs and our jaws.

Our advanced technologies bring us so many advantages, but they also sabotage every effort to unwind, to get away, to get quiet.  They sabotage us because we let them.  We feel compelled to stay tuned in, turned on and accessible—afraid we will miss something important, earth-shattering, life-changing.

It is that accessibility that is life-changing, however.  When we fail to give ourselves time away or alone without distraction or interruption, without any intent or purpose other than to have none, we fail to nurture our souls.  And we definitely fail to nurture our creativity.

One of the hardest things for artists, writers, and other creatives is the ability to get away from our creativity.  So many of us work in studios in our homes where our work constantly calls to us.  Others have such limited time for creativity because of demands of work and family that each free moment becomes a challenge to fill it with our creative work.

Yet empty moments and time out of the studio are necessary to refill the well of our creativity.  It is in the silence and stillness that our spiritual and creative batteries are recharged, that our creative well is refilled. 

Summer is a good time to slowly sip the sweet refreshment of silence and stillness.  To sit on your patio to watch the birds dip and weave their ways through tree and bush. To float on your back in the water and watch clouds drift by. To stare up at the moon while she bathes you in light.

Be still.  Be silent. Your body, mind and spirit will thank you.  And so will your creative muse.

How will you give your creativity a summer moment?