Kat Eye Studio

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Season’s Change

I know now
why
I did not want
fall
to end.

With the season’s change
I close up,
go inside
and
hibernate.

Dreaming.
Collecting.
Waiting.
To see what is behind
the door
at the next
season’s change.

I don’t know about you, but winter is upon me. I have curled up on my comfy chair with my cat in my lap a lot this week, reading. I have not been very productive, but then I remembered the Spiral of Creativity. Maybe it’s time for me to hang out in the center of the spiral for a while. Go back to the beginning. Allow time for input, for gestation, for the creation of new ideas. Perhaps that’s what winter is all about. It’s time to hibernate. Dream. Rest. I wonder what new ideas will come of this time? I wrap up in my quilt, and wait to see.

Lisa Gordon of The Creative Exchange and I are teaming up this week to give away TWO spots in my January Find Your Eye: Starting the Journey course. Visit The Creative Exchange and leave a comment before Friday evening if you would like to enter to win one of these spaces!

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Back to Balance

Under the Bridge, Chicago, Illinois

Under the Bridge, Chicago, Illinois

For the last half of October, I’ve been focusing on balance in my life. It’s been an interesting period, because for each idea I had about achieving and maintaining balance, there was an asterisk attached to it. It was as if there was a little footnote added in my brain:

*After the website is launched.

Now that the website has been launched, there is this gap in my time. You know that gap, the one that happens after a big project? Where suddenly you have time on your hands and no big overriding goal to fill it? That gap is a critical time. It sets the stage for what is to come. Do you fill it with lots of little things or one new big goal? Normally, I would fill it with one big new goal, or maybe lots of little goals, but for now it’s time to put my plans for balance into practice.

Those plans include planned time for my own creativity and fun. Time for the activities that give me energy. It’s too easy for me to let my project “to do” list take over, which drains my energy. If there are items on the “to do” list, I feel like I should do those first instead of the fun. Before I know it, these wonderful mornings I created by going part time are used up. I know I’m not alone in this kind of work ethic. It’s time for me to change up the dynamic, and I’ll do that by setting some rules about my time. Setting a schedule for creative fun and for the “to do” list. It’s not spontaneous or random, and, damn, if it isn’t uncomfortable! But, it will get me back to that creative play that is so important to maintaining the rest of my creative spiral.

Along with that, I’ll be working to avoid overcommitting, the bane of people with too many ideas. I realized that much of my lack of balance came from commitments I made, mostly to myself, way back into April and May. Yikes! Six months later… here I am recuperating. Can I commit a little less into the future, and leave space for new and interesting things to develop? You bet.

For me, November is going to be a month of focusing on my own creativity and what gives me energy. Photography, blogging, teaching my classes… all of these give me energy. They are part of my core creative processes, so they stay.  Learning gives me energy, so studying Lightroom is on the schedule. Painting is just plain fun, so I need to make time for it. Other than that, I look forward to going with the flow.

It’s time to get back to balance, and see what develops. Want to join me? What things can you do to get back to balance into your life?

PS – Visit me over at Mortal Muses today, musing on some fantastic light.

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The Fruits of our Creative Labor

All life moves in cycles. Whether we notice the cycle of the seasons, where the earth transitions from growth to dormancy across the months, or the cycle within a day, as the sun rises and sets. Our lives are bound by cycles.

It is easy to forget this, as we look at the results of a cycle. In harvest time, we may see the results of the farmer’s efforts in the piles of fruits and vegetables in the market, but we don’t see all of the time and energy spent to get there. Preparing the soil, sowing the seeds, tending the growth, picking the fruit – all happen outside of our realm of vision. We only see the end result, the tomatoes sitting on the table, ready to eat.

Creativity is like this too. I am revisiting my concept of the Spiral of Creativity lately. I have had to remind myself that creativity is a cycle. I remind myself that creating something new and launching it into the world is not as easy as the end result would suggest. Shiny, delicious tomatoes don’t just end up on tables without a lot of someone’s time, spent in the dirt. That time in the dirt is when you “go dark” to the outside world. The time of the spiral where you are acting on and finishing an idea, doing something to make it real. No one else can see the effort you are putting in, to get things launched. They will only see the final result. It may look like nothing is going on for a while, as you create something new, even to you.

It is so much easier to be in the starting phases of the spiral, absorbing, processing and practicing. It’s fun, and takes less time and energy to keep things moving. You can have multiple things going at once. My recent experience suggests it takes a lot less energy to jot down a few ideas about what you would like in a website, than to clearly articulate the details to a web designer. It takes less energy to sketch out layouts and envision them in your mind than it does to populate something real.

When a project is in the “finishing” phase of the spiral, there may not be much energy for anything else. All focus narrows to that one item that needs to be launched into the world. I was reminded of this fact on Tuesday, when I had no words to write here. I had images, lovely images, but no words would come. The creative energy I use for writing on my blog was being used in other ways.

For a short while I thought something was wrong, until I remembered how all things cycle, including creativity. Until I remembered the spiral and how I’m nearing the launching edge with my new website and new classes. At least this time in the spiral, I’ve been through the process before. The first time, as I was creating Find Your Eye, the final parts of the spiral were hard because I hadn’t completed a full cycle before. Now I know how wonderful it is to launch something new and real into the world. All of the time and energy is worth it.

Whether it’s vegetables or classes or websites or art, I’m reminded the Spiral of Creativity applies. You can’t bring something new into the world without an expenditure of time and energy. You don’t get those delicious tomatoes without some digging in the dirt.

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What’s going on around Kat Eye Studio…

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A Different Approach

For several months now, I’ve had a dearth of creative reading. Oh, I’ve been reading a lot, mostly fiction novels. I just haven’t been able to find a book I like for my daily creative reading since I finished Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach at the end of last year. This morning I sat down to read and I find myself with three inspiring books in progress at the moment. It was hard to choose! Times ebb and flow, interests come and go. It’s clearly time for me to focus on creativity again, bring balance to my personal equation, after several months of focusing on primarily on photography.

As I mentioned in my Claim your Artist post the other day, one of the books I’ve started is Julia Cameron’s Vein of Gold, a sequel to The Artist’s Way. She starts out similarly to the The Artist’s Way, introducing her fundamental tools of the Morning Pages, Artist Dates and a few other things. While I have loved her writing and ideas, there is one thing I don’t love about her books: How adamant that she is that you use the tools she gives, in a specific way, on a specific frequency. She’s the teacher, she’s taught this to thousands (maybe millions of people, through her books), she knows it works and that’s the end of the discussion.

But here’s the thing: She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what works for me, how I think, what I’ve tried in the past. She has a lot to teach me, but it won’t work if it doesn’t fit my style. I know me and I know this: Requiring a task be done on a rigid schedule with rigid guidelines flips me right over into the obsessive achiever part of my personality. The part of me that tracks everything as a number and berates myself when I don’t follow it as instructed. The part of me that will kill the emerging artist at every opportunity.

Through my creative journey I’ve learned I need to try out the tools a teacher provides, and then fit them to me. I’ve made journaling part of my regular practice, but I journal probably 4 to 6 times per week and don’t require a certain length. The requirements of “Morning Pages” never worked for me. I’ve learned the value of creative excursions and explorations on my own, of filling the well, but on my own schedule. I may not be following the instructions of the “Artist Dates” but I get the same benefits. I follow the spirit of the teachings, not necessarily the absolute.

I will confess as well, I didn’t fill out one worksheet, one questionnaire, answer one “recall a time when xxxx happened” exercise in The Artist’s Way as proscribed. I didn’t follow the recommend schedule for reading. I would move quicker or slower as the material worked for me. I’ve done the same with many, many creative books now. I never read Simple Abundance daily, I would pick it up as it inspired me and read chunks of it at a time. I skipped all of the fill-in-the-blank exercises of Martha Beck’s Finding your own North Star but the material has stuck with me nonetheless.

I read, absorb, journal, write about the most important pieces to me here. The ideas go into the “swirl” I’ve talked about before, become the fuel that keeps my creativity burning bright. I gain an enormous amount from the books I read and the classes I take. There is so much to learn from great teachers. I believe in trying on ideas and methods, and then trimming them, nipping and tucking them to make them fit me. We have to believe in our inner wisdom and intuition. We have to rely on our own experience and awareness of ourselves, of how we learn and integrate knowledge. We have to make the teachings ours if they are going to be useful.

Have you ever started a book or a class, something that comes highly recommended like The Artist’s Way, only to quit because you didn’t like the methods or didn’t want to follow the procedure? If so, I don’t think you’re alone. Here’s something new to try, if you find yourself in that situation: Just read the material. See what resonates with you, inspires you. Who knows, you might end up liking some of the suggestions and incorporating them in your own way, in your own time. Or maybe not, but you’ll have gained something more through the reading.

Today’s picture is inside the amazing Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, by architect Antoni Gaudí. Here’s an artist who found his inspiration in novel sources. I’m sure he learned valuable information from his teachers, but I am glad he didn’t follow their proscribed methods exactly. He integrated and applied the knowledge in his own way, developing new methods. The world of architecture is more beautiful for his unique and creative interpretations.

Take that to heart today.

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So Many Angles

Lately I’ve been thinking about time and space. I’ve started to see more personal time free up, and I have not been intentional with how I spend it. I’ve spent it on the computer, hopping around on the internet, reading blogs and getting “caught up.” That certainly fills the time, but leaves me without the space for dreaming and scheming, letting the new ideas come and flow. Letting creativity take me where it will.

This line of thought, about how I spend my time and energy, is not new. It’s been with me for a while as my Dramatic Cropping post will attest. These thoughts are a natural outcome right now of finishing my work on Find Your Eye as well as participation in Christine Kane’s Uplevel Your Life Mastery Program. My brain is filled with a lot of thoughts about being clear and intentional about my time and energy.

I have no answers right now. There are just too many angles and directions to sort out in this moment. But I am aware and asking the questions, and that is always the start. Taking the first step, to start close in.

Image is from Nice, France.

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Capture the Sky

I have been fascinated with skies lately. Whenever I am out and about, I find myself capturing a few images of mostly sky. Maybe just a little bit of something else, to ground the image, like this tree in silhouette.

There is so much possibility in the sky. It’s wide open, too big to capture it all with the camera. I can only capture little glimpses, enough to give an impression. The glimpses are so fleeting, as the sky is ever changing. The clouds and the light do not hold for any photographer, I have to catch what I can.

I am once again reminded of the Spiral of Creativity by this image of the sky. We do the best we can to capture the fleeting inspiration that comes to us, and pull it into our spiral. We figure out how to make this transitory and insubstantial thing, this idea, into something real. For all of the giant, expansive nature of ideas, we have to break them down. Frame them into something manageable in order to proceed.

Turn an idea into a manageable plan. Capture a piece of the sky. It’s all the same thing, and about as easy to do either. Yet, I am challenged to continue trying. Maybe, just once in a while, something great comes out of the effort. Something I can share with you.

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