everything feeds process

The root of mindfulness in a creative practice, in my mind, is in sensory awareness. For the next five days, I will focus on body awareness.  While body awareness is rooted in many of the senses I have already covered, I think it is most often captured through touch.  As someone who often lives in her head, this is the most challenging sense to articulate.

This year, I have written a lot about my legs. To be fair, they have been a central part of my last year. I dislocated my left knee last July while on vacation, rehabbed the knee through the fall and early winter, had knee surgery in December, and rehabbed the knee again through the winter and spring. Now, I am on the other side of the experience. I have working legs again, after a lot of effort.

For today’s exercise, I will be focusing on my legs (again), but I want to add an extra layer of direction. I have to write (or create) a praise song to my legs. I cannot write about pain, weakness, or deficiency. I have to somehow express my renewed sense of strength in my legs.  I think, for me, that’s a step towards accepting my legs in their new state.

The root of mindfulness in a creative practice, in my mind, is in sensory awareness. For the first five days, I will be focusing on visual awareness. In this week, I will be making postcards, inspired by the work of Dave Bonta and Dana Guthrie Martin at the now defunct Postal Poetry and the many creative folks who collaborate at habit.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had incredibly vivid dreams. Several times a week, I am able to recall my dreams as if they really happened. Despite this talent (or curse depending on the dream), I have rarely used visual dream imagery in my writing or art. I would like to stretch my awareness into my subconscious, just for today.

For today’s exercise, I will create a postcard from my sleep or dreams. Since I can’t take a physical snapshot of my dream imagery, I will have to create it using any medium at my disposal.  While the medium does not have to be visual, per se, the resulting product must be visually-oriented. In other words, image must be the central technique.

Whenever I start a new project, I feel like I balance between success and failure. Unfortunately, I can often envision the failure much more clearly than I can envision my success.  For me, mindless-ness is much easier to slip into than mindfulness.  I can dilute my focus on awareness, through the million distractions I feed myself daily.  In order to put my best foot forward, I really need to make a commitment to my month of creative exercises.

This month’s first exercise is to articulate a commitment to mindfulness, in whatever medium feels the most comfortable. This commitment will include a definition of mindfulness, what it looks like and feels like.  It will also include a description of creative goals for this month. Finally, it will include a promise to intentionally engage in the creative practice for the month.