REDONDOWRITER'S SACRED ORDINARY

Spare Time Spent Learning Digital Collage....and Lots of Other Stuff

My parents taught me what you probably learned as a kid, too.

• A rolling stone gathers no moss.
• Idle hands are the devil's workshop.
• A stitch in time saves nine, and yada-dee-yadedah. All these old sayings apply to me for sure.

I spent a lot of years being married and raising a family, and have been my own sole support for more than 25 years. I tend to choose activities these days that I enjoy, at least when I can. I only work three days a week for money (and because I LOVE it), but I'll admit I'm pretty involved in my community, and I have just been elected to the vestry of Christ Church. I'm just completing my fourth year of Education for Ministry studies at church and will look forward ultimately to that time slot opening up. Then there's my monthly journal writing group and the monthly SoulCollage group, the Friends Board of the Peninsula Library District, and the Redondo Beach Art group. Those of you who know me well also know that I'm a mixed media collage artist, and I play with art journals, too. And I read at least one or two books a month and stream a few movies. And yes, I do hang out with family and friends sometimes, too. Yikes! I thought I got over being a work-a-holic, but---. Though I'm a contemplative wanna-be, the more meaningfully I keep my time occupied, the more energetic and creative I seem to be, and depression and anxiety don't rear their ugly heads as often as in the past. (Knocking on wood.)

My new passion, as I've written before, is learning digital collage. I'm using the tools of a site called Polyvore, but amazingly enough, I am now finally beginning to understand the layering power of PhotoShop itself thanks to Polyvore. A new world has opened up to me and you know how time consuming that can be! But, Lordy, how challenging and gratifying. Even if no one else likes my "stuff," I like my stuff. I also know myself well enough to realize I LOVE learning new things, but I ultimately grow tired of many of them, too, and then want to learn MORE! My life is a blessed one.

Here are a few of my digital collage creations, and you can see more at Redondowriter's Polyvore site or at Redondowriter's Pinterest site, if you are interested. 

After reading what I've been doing, I'm exhausted. Now it's time to walk Mollie and go to bed with a good new book. 

 

Anne LaMott Says 'Let's Occupy Valentine's Day'

My friend Vicki Hammond, an excellent collage and assemblage artist in Portland, OR, sent an e-mail with her photo regarding Valentine's Day today--and she put it on Facebook, too. Vicki's art blog is HerStory. 

At first I thought Vicki had written the paragraphs below, but all the credit goes to author Anne LaMott, she says. (I once was on camera few seconds when a documentarian was filming her for a documentary at the Sun Valley Writer's Conference.) This is what Anne wrote. Enjoy!

We are all so pumped about Valentine's Day. You could cut the excitement around here with a knife.

My first plan was to celebrate by giving the kitty a flea dip, and overeating, but I think I've come up with a better idea.

Now, most of all us have some wonderful Valentine's Days over the years; or at least days that were not SO excruciating that we wanted to die. Which is at least a ...start. For instance, I had a wonderful man for seven years, who made me the most incredible little cards every year, but because he did not believe in climate science, or that there was any real difference between McCain and Obama, there were tiny tensions off and on the rest of the time.

I would estimate that approximately 17% of people enjoy Valentine's day. Mostly, women will be given boxes of chocolates that they don't want and can't resist, and will be really mad at themselves for inhaling. Many people will be filled with resentment, anxiety, and guilt at having forgotten, or having shown up late, or having accidentally been having affairs with other people. Many people will feel a sheet-metal sense of loneliness and rejection. They will be comparing their insides with other people's outsides, especially those happy valentines actors in advertisements and commercials.

Most of the day, except for the lucky few, will be a nightmare.

So let's start an Occupy Valentine's Day movement. 

Let's begin with the premise that another word for Valentine's Day is Thursday. And on Thursday, as an act of radical self-care, we will celebrate the miracle that a few people love us SO much, that we can go on, and bear up, no matter what; that even though they know the darkest, most human and intimate and disgusting stuff about us, they still love us. In fact, they love us more and more through the years. This is so wild, and is really my only hope. It is what salvation looks like. A handful of friends is the reason my faith in God is so deep. Because they ARE love; they (along with the dogs) are my most obvious connection to divine love in this joint, the looks of love on their faces. 

Let's celebrate that all you need is love; and that God is Love and love is God; that Love will heal ALL, although unfortunately, maybe not on our time--ie by Wednesday, right after lunch. But it will. When all is said and done, Love is sovereign on this earth. So let's go crazy with love on Thursday. If we want to be filled with loving feelings, all it takes is to do a bunch of loving things for others and ourselves. That's all it takes! You take the action, and the insight will follow--that all you need is love. Crazy. We don't need to buy or be given a single thing, and we don't need to eat anything we don't really want. We'll just give each other secret love gestures all day. Okay? You in?

Sophia the Art Mannikin: Rockin' at Mardi Gras

Sophia is all ready for Mardi Gras but compared to New Orleans, celebrating here at Sanctuary Center is probably pretty boring. But, here she is: 

Thanks, Leslie, for your recent comment about my big Barbie doll. My mom, as she grew older, had a baby doll that looked real. So, what do I end up with? An art mannikin. Yeah, sometimes I am like Steve Martin in Lonely Guy, but Mollie and Sophia keep me company when I do get down and out.

My friend Ray Whiting lived in New Orleans until the hurricane drove him out and I used to love hearing his stories about the revelry. Now I am too old, or maybe just too smart, to even want to go into a crowd like that. 

It was fun to visit Mardi Gras New Orleans site, however. There is a lot of information there. 

When I dressed Sophia this weekend, I had just finished reading about Jean Paul Sartre, Rudolph Bultmann, Martin Heidegger and other existentialists for a class I'm taking. After that heavy duty thinking I kept asking myself, is my somewhat frivilous life authentic or unauthentic? I'm a wanna-be scholar in the midst of all my art and writing, though. And I do love people--and I love them in the moment. Maybe Sophia and I are actually existentialists. 

My own Mardi Gras celebration will be at Christ Church's annual pancake dinner on Tuesday night in the church hall. I wish Sophia could go, too, but she's too bulky and heavy to drag the block down to the church. 

I do remember a trip my friends Kathy, Donna and I took for rodeo weekend in Bishop, CA one time--and we went to the local community hall to a Cajun dance. I was too shy to dance, but Kathy was out there among them. Remember that, Kathy? This is what the music sounded like: 

 

And here is Sophia's sweet face up close. I sure wish I had those lips.

SoulCollage® Card: Queen of Evil via Polyvore

For those of you who know me, I began dabbling in art about seven years ago, pooh-poohing myself all the way because I was a writer not an artist. Writing had long been my passion and I both wrote for a living as a PR person, and then fell in love with Ira Progoff's National Intensive Journal in the late 1970s. I studied with them to become a consultant and began offering workshops in 1984. I did that for many years and have long had general journal groups for psycho-spiritual exploration in my home and in the commuunity when I am asked.

Then I was introduced to rubber stamp art and mixed media collage. In 2003 or thereabouts, I first read about psychotherapist Seena Frost's method of SoulCollage® in an issue of Somerset Studio. A psycho-spiritual method in the Jungian tradition, I immediately ordered the book and self-trained myself to make cards for about a year. SoulCollage® cards are an excellent spring board to journal writing and I was able to combine both writing and art for the first time. Next I went to Santa Cruz for training as a SoulCollage® facilitator in 2005. 

Though I do not lead large groups, I do work with an ongoing small group and many of them use their journals to write about the cards they make. 

I've played around with digital collage in PhotoShop for years, but never became proficient in digital layers until Meri Magic introduced me to Polyvore in December. It was devised originally as a fashion site but many artists quickly came to find the site a real boon for digital collage art. I've written about it before here. 

So, this afternoon I came home and made a template for SoulCollage in the classic 5" x 8" format on the Polyvore site and made my first card above. The average person who uses SoulCollage will never want to create cards digitally, but it's one more thing I can do to continue exploring myself. You know the old saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living?" Well, I tend to overexamine. 

So, this card is called "The Evil Queen," an archetype card in the Council suit of SoulCollage. It could also be used as a classic death card. Using the "I am the one who" statements, I wrote: "I am the one who can cause havoc and doubt when trying to live a spiritual life, but I am also the one who makes it possible to tell the difference between good and evil. Yin and yang, anima and animus. Evil is a loaded word, and you could have named me more gently."

If I could ask a question of this card it would be, "OK, I named you too harshly, but can you tell me how I can sometimes kick up my heels and not be so preoccupied with outcome: death?"

She immediately answered with a laugh, "Check out Woody Allen's old movie 'Love and Death.' Both Woody and I have something to contribute to your question." 

By the way, when posting to Polyvore, several friends have told me my art is improving and I have to counter that doing art by hand and digitally are two entirely different things. Digitally I am largely using images of my own or others and digital effects, then altering them. My hand made art is still very kid-like, but very healing to me. It's just like writing by hand in your journal and writing journal entries in your computer. They are two entirely different things. Different parts of the brain are used and different outcomes happen; both can be beneficial for what I use writing and art for. But, if I really want to work something out in depth, I still have to handwrite in my journal or create art with my hands, paints, pens, pencils, etc. 

By the way, now I'm incorporating bits and pieces of both Polyvore and SoulCollage in another passion: art journaling. There simply aren't enough hours in the day considering I still work three days a week, volunteer in my community, take classes, spend time with family and friends, watch movies and love the Internet. But, you know what? I'm rarely bored.