Fiery But Mostly Peaceful
a creative revolution within
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This is the extent of snow that we’ve had here in southern New England so far this winter. (Update: I’m lying. When I began writing this essay, this was true, but three days later, as I finish writing to you, fresh snow is falling!)
We have family in the mid-west, so I know that other parts of the country have been buried under a blizzard. Maybe that’s you.
However, what we have had in disconcerting abundance this winter is wind. Wind, or pneuma, is Spirit, and Spirit is creativity.
pneuma
noun
The soul or vital spirit.
Breath; spirit; soul.
A breathing,
~ American Heritage Dictionary
When the Earth is resting in winter, my outward surroundings are still, quiet, and dormant. When Mother Earth is not actively creating, I sense that space has been made for my own creative activity to flourish. I’ve begun to notice this pattern over the years. The inrush of pneuma or, more precisely, the creative operas Spiritus, the creative work of the Spirit, comes upon me once the Christmas decorations are put away and the whole house seems more Spartan and spacious. Despite my need for creative chaos and studio mess, the Muse arrives more readily when there is both physical and mental space available to accommodate her presence. A clean-slate type of austerity invites new thought, innovation, and room for creative possibilities to breathe, just what Pneuma desires. After all, pneuma is a breathing. While the winds howl outside, the creative breath of life rushes through me like a whirlwind of ideas and inspirations.
My own journey as an artist has been a long one, spanning nearly six decades. From a child who loved drawing and crafting from a very young age to earning my BFA, being a professional artist, teaching art, having my work purchased by major corporations and included in prestigious art collections, and being a gallery director, I have a long career. Then something happened. I have inklings about what happened, and it had to do with the constraints and expectations of allowing my art to be a commodity, a decoration, or a product. Something in me shifted, and I felt dismayed seeing my creativity was directed, manipulated, and consumerized by others. I was constantly competing in exhibitions and negotiating with galleries that had rules, standards, and expectations; there‘s that word again.
I believe wholeheartedly in the healing power of personal art.
I believe in art as a calling, a profession, a vocation, a passion, and most importantly, as a powerful agent of healing and personal, spiritual, and intellectual growth in human beings. I believe that because I’ve experienced all of it.
For the last decade, my art has been personal art in service to my spiritual, emotional, and intellectual healing and growth, as well as being a whole lot of fun.
The best way I know to bring you into my world of personal art is simply to show you and tell you what’s bubbling up inside me and gifted to me from the Muse of Inspiration.
Fiery But Mostly Peaceful
When the Muse arrives, it ignites the creative flame within me, and currently, it’s burning blindingly bright, so much so that I have to force myself to get on with routine tasks. So alluring and engrossing is my creative activity that everything else falls by the wayside. I’m carried away in the flow state, where time is suspended, and my surroundings vanish into the mist of Muse-inspired ideas. I also can’t fall asleep easily because my mind is generating new ideas and running through scenarios about how I might do this or that in the project I’m working on.
Yet, for all of this internal and external activity, I feel peaceful, energized, and firey, but mostly peaceful. I’m carried along by an archetypal pattern of energy known as The Artist, and I’m fully committed to being in its service. The Muse is my partner, full of beauty, truth, and goodness, urging me to create and explore with abandon.
My switch to personal art was a creative revolution within. It allowed me to break free of expectations and pursue art forms that I secretly loved but sidelined in favor of the more respectable art form of painting.
Now, I am elbow-deep in papers, bookmaking, printing, stamping, collaging, stitching, and surfing a tsunami of images and ephemera. It’s pure play and pure joy while at the same time being a serious exploration of ideas, philosophical concepts, personal cosmology, shadow work, and profound healing from the inside out. Creativity is the healing work of the inner child, and I’ve embraced it to the core.
Books, Books, Books
One day, I had a revelation. I realized that for me, art journaling was the visual equivalent of the Julia Cameron-style written morning pages I used to write. I like to write, obviously, but morning pages always had heavy energy for me; they never brought lightness or delight to my soul. Certainly not in the way art journaling does.
Now, I know that there are positively huge communities of art journalers on line and in-person. It’s a well-loved art form, and yet, it gets a fair amount of shade, too, from the camp that sees it as a too crafty, “no talent required” activity, bad art masquerading as therapy. Don’t listen to them. Ever.
My visual journals hold what’s on my mind, so the content is important, but the process of constructing a book is also sacred and fascinating work.
Books are sacred containers; they hold precious knowledge, wisdom, and stories, all the things that mark out a thriving human civilization. It’s not hyperbole to say they are the containers of civilization. Thus, making a book is to make something enormously powerful, a container for wisdom, knowledge, and sacred myth. To be a bookmaker (not the gambling type) is to engage in a timeless magic that humans have pursued from the earliest clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Before books, there were oral traditions. Then, we learned the secret magic of conveying ideas with symbols, hieroglyphs, and, finally, letters. Initially, petroglyphs and hieroglyphs contained pictures as part of their makeup, and later, even the earliest books contained pictures to help illuminate the written word. So, in a way, a book manifests the logos, the sacred word of the mind, and visual symbols and images become the manifested language of psyche, the soul.
Once the book is made, the invitation to fill it is irresistible. Everything important, every question, musing, discovery, insight, parable, proverb, equation, insight, correspondence, and poetic ecstasy of the mind and soul is preserved in books.
I’ve been on a book-making frenzy while simultaneously filling said books. There is a lot of creative fire right now.
nota bene: Clicking on the images will enlarge them so you can see the details.
I began January by finishing up a few projects that were not quite complete. I used up a page from a journal that I made last year that simply would not stay glued in no matter what I tried. It became the basis of a folio called Diana, chronicled from time to time, exploring the moon goddess Diana. It was my first artwork for 2024, and I am extremely happy with it!
A big project I’m working on right now involves a large book that I took apart and repurposed, turning it into a large journal with fabulous black and gold cover paper and gold filigree corner protectors. Inside this art journal, I am exploring the connections between the major Western esoteric systems Kabbalah, Alchemy, Astrology, and Tarot, with a focus on a Tarot card and how it links back to these other systems. This is a continuation of an exploration that began last year and was scattered throughout several smaller journals.
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A second project has been gutting a 1907 edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Hanging of the Crane and turning it into a beautiful journal with two signatures of gorgeous mixed media paper just waiting to receive paint and collage papers. I picked this book up for $8 at a used bookstore several years ago and have already previously used some of the pages for paint-out poems, and now I’ve used some of the original pages I removed in other journals and as both pages and elements within collages.
One of the books to receive some of the pages from the Longfellow book is a small nature-themed journal that uses some illustrations from a 1905 bird guide I picked up at a flea market years ago on the cover.
My favorite project thus far in 2024 is building a devotional journal for Mary Magdalene. In it, I am exploring my own encounters with The Magdalene and my personal mythology around her. It’s currently in two pieces as I’m working on filling the pages before I glue them into the elaborate cover in order not to damage it.
The Vitality of Creative Expression
There is something vital and life-giving about expressing yourself through hands-on art-making. It can be a professional pursuit or a personal pursuit, and if you are incredibly fortunate, it’s both, though that is a tricky tightrope to walk fraught with perils.
Regardless, if you feel the slightest urge to make something, act on that intuition, even if you “can’t draw a straight line without a ruler.” Go buy a ruler, or better yet, abandon the straight line and embrace the unique wavy and wonky line you can draw that is authentically your own.
I’m deeply interested in what people create, why they create, and how they have found ways to weave the energetic pattern of The Artist into their everyday lives. What do you create? What’s your favorite art form? Do you struggle to embrace yourself as an artist? What stands in your way? Where does the resistance come from? What kind of art-making brings you the greatest joy? What are you making right now?
The comments section is a safe and welcoming space to share your insights and experiences.
Comments and conversation are always appreciated and enjoyed, so feel free to let your voice be heard. I read them all and try to respond to each one.
Thank you for reading Hedge Mystic and participating in this vibrant and growing community of creative, spiritual humans. You are always welcome here, appreciated, and loved.
One of the ways I am offering tangible support to fellow artists is through a new hybrid personal and group coaching program called The Mytho-Poetic Artist.
This will be beyond what some of you are ready for. However, it will be exactly what a few of you are looking for and ready to invest in right now.
I will only be accepting four artists who already have an active and ongoing creative practice. There will be personal coaching as well as community time with the other artists to exchange experiences and insights.
Our journey together begins February 1st.
If you’re intrigued by working personally with me and being part of a small, select group of kindred spirits and like-minded artists, click on the graphic below to access all of the details.
I am forever creating. It’s funny that it took me well into my 50’s to realize that I NEED to create beauty in this world. I love color, texture and flowers, and these things show up in everything I create. Winter is quiet time, perfect for knitting, cooking, studying herbs and their medicinal uses. While Spring, Summer, and Fall find me out in the wild more often than not, in the garden, creating in the kitchen, gathering flowers, visiting with my birds and bees, feeling the sun warm me. We are in Winter now though and the fireplace is my sunshine. The candles my comforting welcome to a quiet evening on the couch with kitties for company and a project in my lap. I just finished a beautiful Norwegian alpine blossom hat and am getting ready to restart a crewel work floral piece that I started over 30 years ago. I create primarily for myself or my loved ones. I’ve sewn for others but always struggled to price things. I want to give out of love not for profit. I create for my own pleasure because it nourishes my soul.
I’ve started a nature journal. I’m only jotting down observations for now (and taking photos), but I plan to make more of an art project out of it. I’m inspired by your bookmaking idea, and I think that would be a fun way to chronicle the seasons this year 😄