THE SPARKS ARE FLYING // BABY STEPS
Creative Sparky, the business through which I will run art courses, is now live! In a way, it happened extremely quickly... there was quite some time of things percolating in my head, slowly bubbling away like a lava lamp. Then, suddenly, there was a burst of energy and I was writing 8 weeks of lesson plans. I do enjoy the nature of energy like this.. it’s like ideas need their time to be in caterpillar mode, then suddenly they’re in the coccoon and you can feel they’re ready to be talked about, posted about, venues booked, etc, cause the public facing butterfly mode is not too far away, baby! Also, baby steps are so good. My dream is to run a school, maybe? Which seems ridiculous, but then it’s like ‘plan out the lessons for one short course which you will run in a hired space’ is actually very achievable.
YEAR OF THE MONKEY
Something so intoxicating about Patti Smith’s writing, every time, the poetic swirl. She makes it feel so effortless, and yet, it’s hard to find that balance between the concrete and abstract. In this novel, which I’m really just starting, she’s writing a lot so far about interpreting signs in the real world, like roadsigns, as signs in the sense of a message from the universe. The sign of ‘Dream Motel’ takes us on a long subconscious journey. There’s loss and grief in there at the start too, but can tell that the thrust is going to dive into the political, this having been written right at the start of Trump. It’s all there, always, swirling together, the personal, political, artistic, spiritual, surreal, semiotic, semi-formed. Love it.
O.T.E.
Of the ‘big 5’ personality traits, the one which fascinates me the most: Openness To Experience. Fortune favours the bold, as some ridiculous cryptocurrency ad ft. Leo Dicaprio tells us lately, and am feeling the positive effects of this, here, three quarters of the way thru Jan 2022... some nice moments of unexpected and lovely occurences going down, the product of staying open to what the universe might offer, not having knee-jerk ‘no’ reactions just because it wasn’t what was planned, or is a bit confusing, or difficult, etc etc.
DAILY DRAWING DIARY
This year, have been doing a practice kind of inspired by something that I think Georgia has been doing for like a decade. A small page-a-day diary and every night, a quick few scribbles and words to represent the day. A lot of freedom in moving outside of just writing sentences about the day, in that traditional diary way. Drawing one moment from the day, writing a few words. Not having to capture everything, maybe it was just a memorable bird on a powerline, or a quote someone said. In my version, i’ll often draw little circles in the corners of the page with some special moments in them ‘riding bikes with Neil’ etc, and then sketch a key image in the centre. :) So fun. Would reccomend, and now I always spell reccomend correctly first time cause I stopped and practiced it. Nice.