Category Archives: motivation

This needs to be said, and said, and said, until it sinks in.

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Steal Like An Artist

Was introduced to Austin Kleon‘s timely little book this morning, via a post full of Kleon’s catchy, inspiring graphics, over on Thoughts On Theatre. Followed her links from there to Kleon’s own site promoting the book.

Steal Like An Artist - Promotional Poster

There’s not much I can say to add to this succinct message. If you are a creative person, you will already, instinctively, intuitively know these things. No doubt you’ve heard the message before…you’ve come across one of the many famous quotes on the subject, or maybe you’ve even thought these things up for yourself, and reading this list simply confirms what you have suspected all along.

Steal Like An Artist - Good theft vs. Bad Theft Poster

And yet, as common and familiar as these ideas are, seeing them still excites creative types. Why? Because while we’ve all heard the message, it hasn’t really sunk in to the point where we believe it, practice it, apply it, and really, truly KNOW it.

Kleon’s message is familiar, but not redundant. These things need to be said, and said, and said, until it sinks in and starts to change us from the inside:

The ability to create is a gift that life gives to everyone—your own creative ideas are a mashup of having seen other people’s creations—and what you then go on to create becomes your gift to the world, your contribution to the massive pool of art, ideas, and thought; you are simply joining in a conversation that started when human life began.

“Creativity is not magic, creativity is for everyone.”

Gillespie, on Charlie 'Bird' Parker

One of my favorite examples of both the continuing life of a good idea, and of artists drawing on what has inspired them in order to go on and make something “same, but different,” are these incarnations of a rhino woodcut that is nearly 500 years old…

rhinoceros

clockwise from top left: anonymous 1514, Durer 1515, Durer 1515, Dali 1956, preemiememe 2009, Hans Burgkmair 1515

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Oh, man! Banksy kicks ass…

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“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are ‘The Advertisers’ and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs”


A dozen paintings and a playlist

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Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Here are the twelve paintings I did for my show, together in one post, at long last (a week later!)

No pictures of the show itself, or the guests, because there was no photographer present. There’s no way that I could have done it, I was so busy just trying to have a word with everyone present that I unintentionally neglected my own friends (who were good enough to come and entertain themselves, and then leave without making a fuss.) David went home to his blog and wrote a post about the show on the very same night! Which puts me to shame, as I didn’t manage to do that, myself. I must say, there certainly was a good turnout, thanks to the big group show (16 artists) that opened simultaneously in the large gallery next to my ‘intimate’ little room.

Six days later, and I am deep into other things already…

(WordPress introduced their photo gallery feature just in time! Click on a thumbnail to view the whole gallery in a scrolling format)

Looking back on the paintings themselves with a calm and detached eye, I can honestly say that the process was more rewarding than the finished product. And that’s exactly as it should be, because I have never done anything like try to paint several works for a show before, and could not expect to make ‘amazing’ work just like that. Painting these, I was acutely aware of my ignorance—not just of the technical skills necessary to manipulate paint or treat a figure—but also my ignorance of what it is about painting that makes it come alive, what is that elusive kernel that drove (and still drives painters) to pursue this craft all their lives?

Like any art, you start out and it’s all about you, and all about pretty, and all about being liked, and all about trying to make things look realistic…the slavish reproduction of objects and faces around you; that’s fine, but it’s called ‘early work’ and is only valuable in a poignant way. It’s not seriously any good, but you have to go through that shit and come out the other end, and then maybe you will make something good.

I’ve recently read Annie Dillard‘s The Writing Life, and many of the things she says about a writer’s life are true about any artist’s life. Things can be split into two piles: The Good and The Bad. It is essential to a writer who wants to rise to a level of serious mastery and worth, to be able to tell one from the other. There are no greys, even though there might be small parts of really good writing in a sea of bad writing. Dillard relates a story about a photographer who worshiped the work of a certain master, and wanted to learn how to take photographs the way this master did. Every year, he took a selection of his best work to the senior photographer, and asked him to go through it. Every year, the old man divided the work into two piles: good and bad. There was a particular photograph, a landscape, that the master put into the bad pile. The next year, the same photograph appeared again; again he put it in the bad pile. This went on for a few years. Finally the master asked the young photographer, “Every year you bring this photograph, and every year I put it in the bad pile. Yet you keep bringing it back. Why do you like it so much?” To which the young man stammered, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.” Again, from Annie Dillard’s book:

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent? Is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer, personally?

The moral? Your finished work must stand alone in the world. You will not always be around to hold its hand and tell the touching story of how you made it. The process is important to you, yes, because you learn from process…but the process doesn’t matter in the least to the finished work, or to the other people who will view or experience your work. Sever the umbilical cord to your work. You may be an emotional and loving person, and may be emotionally and lovingly attached to your own life (well, I hope you are, anyway) but don’t burden your work with that. It doesn’t cross over well. Your work is either good, or bad, and if it’s bad (i.e. mediocre, self-centered, naive, empty, shallow, banal), banish it from your life (not without gratitude and a certain amount of introspection, certainly you needn’t hate it…but be firm) and go out there and do it again, and again, and again, until you get it right. Until it unmistakably, unquestionably belongs in the Good pile.

Friends have protested when I told them this. They think my work is “wonderful” (whatever that means). Okay, fine, but that doesn’t tell me anything about the work, though it tells me a lot about my friends. Do they reserve a special criterion for works by friends like me—because they want to encourage and cheer me up—as opposed to the critical appreciation they show works by Dali or Drysdale? How can someone who likes Matisse or thinks Goya is “wonderful” then turn to me and tell me they think my work is “wonderful” as well? I mean, you’re really a lovely person, but be serious, will you?

Your friendship and well-meant sentiments are cherished, but your art criticism is not. You do not care whether I fail or succeed…you will probably love me, anyway. But that doesn’t help me. Honesty helps me. It will help me to get better…or even help me to finally see that I may never be anything but a so-so painter. So that I can then decide whether to spend more years (and the years are flying by, the funnel narrows, the opportunities to do something else, and get any good at it, are dwindling) trying to get something right, or acknowledge that my paintings will never be any good and that the years might be better spent doing something else.

No, I’m not giving up just yet…stupid to stop after one’s just begun! There are bits in these paintings that have something…very small areas, here and there, something honest and raw and true. Even I see them. But that is not enough…the price tag is bigger than the gift, right now. This whole show is just that…a visual representation of what the effort cost me. I had to climb a mountain to get it. When the show ends, I won’t keep the ones that didn’t sell, to rot in the bilges of a boat, to live on singing mediocre hosannas to the novice painter that created them. I will, most likely, paint some over, and cut others up for book covers, and erase my tracks, and not look back. The only way I can possible move is forward.

The show came with a playlist on cd, because music played such an important role while I was painting. I wish I could include some sort of player on here, but my blog is limited, and I am in a hurry to post this, before even the strong emotions about the show’s aftermath fade away and I don’t feel anything but weary of the paintings:

  • Profile of The Artist:                     Do You Swear To Tell The Truth The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass     •     Amanda Palmer
  • They were an Irish bunch…         Anti-Pioneer  •     Feist     •     Metals

Dirty Old Town     •     The Pogues     •     Rum Sodomy & The Lash

  • Reading Monsoon Dervish         The Pirate’s Bride     •     Sting     •     Symphonicities
  • Lady Kitsune                                  Foxy Lady     •     The Cure     •     Three Imaginary Boys (Deluxe Edition)
  • Smoke Reality                                Smoke Reality     •     The Naysayer     •     Smoke Reality
  • Birdhouse In Your Soul              Birdhouse In Your Soul     •     They Might Be Giants     •    
  • The Sulking Chair                        The Perfect Girl     •     The Cure     •     Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
  • Crying Like A Cat                         Edna St. Vincent Millay     •     Beth Lodge-Rigal     •     Children On a Ride
  • Debussy                                           The Holy Egoism of Genius      •     Art of Noise     •     The Seduction of Claude Debussy
  • Senbazuru                                       Princess Mononoke     •     Marco and his friends     •     World of Miyazaki Hayao (Koto and Shakuhachi Duo)

Because the Origami     •     8in8     •     The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective

  • Pyromanicat                                   Stray Cat Blues      •     The Rolling Stones     •     Beggars Banquet
  • Mitzi                                                 Ragtime Cat      •     Parov Stelar     •     Coco, Pt. 2
  • Ton Katze                                        Morph the Cat     •     Donald Fagen     •     Morph the Cat
  • Afterword                                       Chromolume #7 / Putting It Together     •     Stephen Sondheim     •     Sunday In The Park With George

Decide to Love

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And the other thing is,
I’m concerned about a better world.
I’m concerned about justice;
I’m concerned about brotherhood;
I’m concerned about truth.
And when one is concerned about that, he can never
advocate violence.
For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder.
Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you
may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put
out darkness;
only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to
mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk
about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m
talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate….and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to
bear.

I have decided to love.

Source is here. From a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King 16 August 1967  “Where Do We Go From Here?,” Delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention , Atlanta, Ga.

handgeweorc : : leading the soul camel home

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Camel

It has been five days since I returned to Darwin after a month-long visit with family and friends in Manila, and only today do I feel comfortable with being back home and taking up residence within my old life again.

The first two days were something out of Dante’s Purgatorio…I was using the words ‘lost’ and ‘disoriented’ repeatedly, to describe the way I was feeling. Often these words were accompanied by a strong urge to cry. During the daytime I wanted nothing more than to sleep the time away…sleep as though dead; but at night I would fidget and squirm next to my husband, complaining of restlessness and imaginary discomforts.

“Oh, jet lag!” the modern world would diagnose, and prescribe pills or a bizarre schedule of waking and sleep that involved long walks, alcohol, and caffeine. But jet lag (extreme tiredness and other physical effects felt by a person after a long flight across several time zones) just doesn’t manage to explain away the full range of ‘effects’ experienced by someone who has just traveled, over the space of a few hours, from a Third-World Asian megalopolis like Manila, to the relatively sparsely populated, big empty streets of a small-scale city like Darwin in Australia…with the total time difference comprising a mere hour and a half.

Neither is culture shock (the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes) to blame when, as now, the traveler is having difficulties assimilating the details of her own home environment!

What has really been going on? The way I see it, I was traveling too fast this time, and my soul was left behind. In Singapore, actually.

Life is so short, we must move very slowly.
—Thai proverb

I have hardly ever traveled by plane. This recent Darwin-Manila (and back again) trip has required my first international flights since 1979, when my parents took me, aged 5, to the USA. Otherwise, Kris and I pretty much travel overland on foot or by bicycle…further afield, we go by bus or car; we move between neighbouring islands by row boat, pump boat or ferry, and between neighbouring countries by sailboat. The few times I boarded a small plane for a domestic flight I experienced a confusion and disruption similar to (but only for a few hours…a day, at the most) my recent condition.

In his books, essays and interviews on the subject of modern travel, Alain de Botton explains:

“There used to be time to arrive…time to get used to the idea of being in a place…nowadays, people constantly get to their destinations too quickly…arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.”

My soul arrives at the speed of a camel…(may as well be a camel, then, eh? Why not? A Soul Camel) to which ancient wisdom I would like to add that, according to my grandmother, the Soul—like a small child—is easily lured away from its familiar (hence boring) body by all things new and unexplored…charming little colonial streets, marketplace tchotchkes, the beckoning wonders of a foreign land. What am I saying? I’m saying that when I took the train into the city of Singapore and got off at Bugis Station, my soul took one look at those little shops with marzipan mouldings in pastel colors, and parks full of modern sculptures, and went off to explore the place on its own…taking all of five days to catch up with me in Darwin.

Makes perfect sense. Explains a whole bunch of things that neither jet lag nor culture shock can. Alain de Botton (sort of) concurs…and that’s always a good sign. What is more, my grandmother moved through her life with the purpose and authority of a military commander—looking much less lost, insecure, and confused than a lot of so-called rational and scientific people I have met—so why wouldn’t I take her word over theirs?

What to do till the camel comes home…

Don’t fret, for it will catch up. In the meantime, don’t make too many demands on yourself…accept that you’re not quite arrived yet—not all of you, anyway—so you can’t expect to snap perfectly into your old life like a piece of Lego.

Go slowly, be patient with yourself and others, find activities that you can work on quietly and in solitude.

Activities that ground you, similar to the ones witches recommend after working a major spell or raising a cone of power, are good: gentle housework or manual tasks like sprucing up the pot plants, weeding a patch of garden, doing dishes, folding dry clothes, or an easy craft that you know well and won’t have to think too much about…anything that you can do without having to make big decisions or come up with creative solutions, can help ground you.

Such actions connect you to the physical reality of where you are; they help build mini routines, that in turn help to re-establish the bigger routines that made up your life before you went traveling. Routines are firm shells that enclose and delineate space, so that your soul camel—with its creativity and passion and expressive fluidity—can feel safe to check in, unpack, and then jump on the unmade bed until dinnertime.

I planted one packet of marigold seeds and pruned the basil………I brushed the cat for an hour each day………I did the laundry………I brought my bicycle back up to snuff (replaced two broken spokes and trued the rear wheel, changed one tube, cleaned the gears, removed a troublesome mudguard)………

I started on a journal. I worked slowly. On Tuesday I stitched the paper and wooden covers into a coptic binding. Yesterday I played with a few headband ideas that didn’t work out. No matter. I undid everything and went at it from another direction.

This morning I think my soul camel finally arrived—every hairy, harrumphing inch of it—for I was suddenly vacuum-sucked out of my lethargic and bewildered state, into an absolute frenzy for everything I was doing before I left Oz in early March…embroidery, bookbinding, writing, mail art, visual journal pages, reading, working out, designing things, drawing, gardening…oh my god, I want a finger in all these pies, and a lifetime of plums!

I’m back. We’re back. How’ve you all been? ◊

Good for Nothing: A book launch and exhibit

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Lots of people in Darwin have seen Kris…he’s mainly known as “that bearded guy that rides everywhere on a weird bike”. People have seen him carting ladders, or a dozen loaded crates stacked up into pyramids, or whole trestle tables, on his home-built recumbent bike (he’s secretly proud of the way he can transport almost anything on his bicycle), and have come across him riding as far out as Humpty Doo, or Litchfield, or out in the Tanami Desert…with rubber thongs on his feet and just a sleeping bag and a jug of water in a milk crate on the back.

What most people don’t know about Kris (because he keeps very quiet about what he does…he is the embodiment of “the cat that walked by himself”, his own person) is that he pours 70% of all his living energy into projects that have no obvious purpose, nor promise any of society’s conventional rewards.

Hours of each day are spent on whatever his current obsessions may be; Kris doesn’t merely squeeze his passions into the gaps of “free time” left over after a boring ordinary work day…much the opposite, Kris squeezes a little bit of boring, everyday life into whatever gaps are left after he has spent the best part of his day on weird or wonderful projects to please HIMSELF.

He approaches his projects with the discipline and focus that most people reserve for jobs they are getting paid (or somehow rewarded) to do. I have seen him spend many, many hours over a period of 12 years or so, researching and cataloging the mythical, fantastic, unusual beasts/creatures of every culture…sorting them into groups, and then making a small painting of every single one. It’s all been compiled into a handbound book with carved teak covers, handwritten pages, illuminated majuscules, gold leaf, and some 170 original paintings; it is known in our household as Teratologus. A few of our friends have seen the book, but it is not something he talks about or passes around easily. It’s not that it’s a secret, but that it represents too much hard work and…dare I say it?…love, to be exposed to people who would never understand such a project.

Questions like “What’s it good for?“, or being told that “You are very privileged and lucky to be able to live your dreams,” are sad and disappointing. Some of the best things in life aren’t “good for anything”. And as we don’t have much time on this planet to do all the things we want to do, we’d rather not waste our precious minutes trying to explain creativity, imagination, or living without imagined fears, to people who, themselves, aren’t good for much more than criticism and worry. We feel sorry for you, but we can’t help you.

Recently, Kris has been into bicycles. Specifically, bicycles in Australia…not the bicycle as status symbol or state-of-the-art lifestyle wank…but the bicycle as a simple machine that has changed very little, essentially, over the centuries, and is one of the most energy-efficient and accessible modes of transport, loved the world over.

He’s spent the past three years researching the topic. He’s built 5 recumbent bicycles over time, and made two trips from Darwin to Port Augusta, and to Broome, on his home-built bikes. He wrote a book about his trips, research, the philosophy and practicality of human-powered-versus-fuel-consuming transport, of slow-versus-fast transport, of boxed-in-versus-in-the-open transport, and the different mindframe a long-distance cyclist develops…a sort of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for bicycles, called Bicycle Dreaming.

After four days of hard slog on the Gibb River Road in the Kimberley, WA, during the heat of the day, I was looking for a shady spot to hole up for the afternoon when I bumped into this marvellous billabong. I propped “Kraken” against a spindly tree on the side of the road and waded into tall grass. 50 metres in I discovered a clear patch of water with sandy bottom and rocky ledge. I was parched and tired. I sat down under the first tree at the edge of the water, had a feed, long drink and a short nap.
I had a leisurely scrub and rinsed my clothes….I spread the rags on hot stone shelves, had another swim, and settled myself in a cool spot. The sun was far too high in the sky to climb back into the saddle; I had plenty of time, and I started scribbling about bicycles in my notebook. I was going to write about interesting things and marvellous places, about great and crazy people, and their legendary exploits, all of it in one way or another connected to bicycles. I was going to describe how I see the world and how it affects me.
At that waterhole in the Kimberley I was at peace. Every half an hour a dusty 4WD would roar past, windows rolled up, rattling their way over the corrugation as fast as their suspension would allow, looking dead ahead,…oblivious to the countryside. Some of them noticed my bright red bicycle leaning against a tree, but none of them noticed the waterhole I was sitting at. They came here to see the country, but their cars made them blind.

—excerpt from Bicycle Dreaming by Kris Larsen

He made a lot of drawings for the book, in pen and ink, and because he was in the mood, painted up a dozen large posters about bicycles, too…loosely based on the old bicycle posters of the early 1900s, but with humor and a wilder imagination.

We held a book launch and exhibit of all Kris’s bicycle-themed works at the Darwin Visual Arts Association yesterday evening. Was so surprised by the numbers of guests who turned up—thanks to all our good friends, who were so supportive and made the evening a busy, talkative, enjoyable one.

We hope you enjoy the books and the artwork that you took home, may they inspire you to never settle into a comfortable, lazy life of non-doing…may they  awaken you to the fact that Making Your Dreams A Reality has nothing whatsoever to do with Having Enough Money, or Being Entitled, or Being In The Right Place, or Coming From The Right Social Stratum. That’s bullshit.

Possessing a dream is all the entitlement, ability, and birthright you need to make it happen. Stop telling yourself lies because you are afraid. Do it now...it is later than you think.

urban snails follow each other down a wide highwaythat has collapsed, and drop one by one into the sea

Kris’s new book, Bicycle Dreaming, is available within Australia via his website.

The End, part 1:: Stay Changed Always

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Each year receives a name at its end—a word or phrase to hold its essence, a name to remember it by. So much has happened this 2010 that it’s hard to settle on a name…I’ve decided on something very general, though it really does gather all of the year into one firm hand:

The year of change

On Christmas day of 2009 I found a lump in my breast. It turned out to be nothing, however the full medical check-up I underwent at the start of 2010 disclosed that I was pre-diabetic (blood sugar levels not quite diabetic yet, but getting there,) had hypothyroidism, an unusually low blood pressure, and was overweight by 23 kilos. So I committed to making some big changes in my life:

I quit smoking. Initially I found ii-ne-kore’s diary of a quitter inspiring, but as she slowly slid off the wagon and gave up I turned to, and got real help, from QuitCoach.

I read dozens of books on pre-diabetes. The New Glucose Revolution and all the other titles in that series were the most helpful; I learned how to make better choices from among the foods and ingredients that I liked, instead of going on some sad, unrealistic diet of deprivation—like the truly hair-brained “Lemonade, Sea-water and Laxatives” diet that some misguided family members talked me into doing for 10 days in 2007!

I went to a dietitian and a diabetes educator for advice (and then I followed that advice!) and joined the local diabetes health organization.

I switched to a low GI and low fat diet:
I turned my back on potatoes, on bread, pastries and all flour-based foods, on rice (an Asian who can’t eat rice! Still, my days of creativity and life are worth more than all the world’s bowls of freshly steamed rice…)on candies and jellybeans (not a problem, I never liked them) and anything made with glucose (Greek Halvah, alas!) Said goodbye to all noodles (except soba and bean thread,) to processed meats, to butter, and to all but a thin sliver, a mere shaving, an occasional crumb of cheese.
I still enjoy beautiful food. I have turned to pasta with elaborate sauces of roasted tomato, grilled eggplants, basil and kangaroo fillets…to bulgur as tabbouleh or as a spiced bed for fiery vindaloo…to rich dhals of chickpea or split yellow pea or mung beans…to avocado and smoked salmon on a mound of fresh salad sprinkled with toasted seeds and walnuts…to bowls of fruit tossed with pure floral honey and yogurt. I watch my portion sizes. I don’t feel like someone on a strict diet!

I started taking the daily hormone for my hypothyroidism.

I went to a doctor and paid her to design a workout program for me. I enrolled in a good gym, and went there three days a week. I also asked my husband to build and install a simple workout bench on the deck of our boat. I bought several pairs of dumbells and a yoga mat. I use them on the days that I don’t go to the gym and it isn’t pouring rain.

The results? I’ve had 6 or 8 cigarettes in the past year. I no longer dream that I am smoking, either. In October I had the blood sugar of a normal person (no longer pre-diabetic), my thyroid antibody levels were down, my blood pressure was unremarkable, and I had lost 13 kgs (28 lbs). Needless to say, I really do feel very good, and I’ve gone from a size 18 to a 12 (at some shops I’m a 10). So yes, it did pay off in a very satisfying way, and my initial success has done wonders for my willpower and self-esteem. That sounds like a mouthful of New Age crap, but it’s true.

It doesn’t end here, of course…I know I can never go back to living the way I used to…and why would I want to, when that way obviously wasn’t working for me? I haven’t had this much energy and verve for years.

I don’t know where the strength to change so many things, so quickly, came from, but I am grateful that it came, and that it stayed with me through the year.
Fear played a part: that lump that started me on my journey of personal health. Nothing like the hint of cancer to make a girl sit up and take notice.
Honesty, too…my grandmother and mother both developed full-blown diabetes—my mother is now blind in one eye because she ignored the many, many years of warning signs, and lived as though she believed she was somehow above it all, or that it would, in passing, spare her for some special reason—and I had to finally face the hard fact that I had inherited the tendency to become diabetic; that, unless I made special efforts to avoid it, it would come for me, too, and that I would suffer as I got older.

And having reasons to live and stay healthy will often help turn a sea of unresolved grays into clear black-and-white choices. Kris, my partner and best friend, whom I love more than I love anyone or anything else in my world, is an active, adventurous, healthy man full of passion for life; looking after myself is one way of loving and respecting him, as well as being able to accompany him and share those adventures.

Also, there is that joy beyond words—the ardour, excitement, and intense satisfaction—that I get from other people’s art, and from making things, myself. I love getting up in the morning and taking a book of poems from a shelf, to enjoy with my coffee…or sitting in the dark with my headphones on, adrift on a sea of music… almost as much as I love being able to spend my days in my studio, deep in creative mindfulness… wholly engaged in the playful act of making something, where there was nothing.

These are my reasons for changing, and hoping to stay changed. How could I keep following my old ways, when there was so much beauty and joy and love at stake?

Committing to 15 Projects

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This picks up where the last post, Michael Nobbs Takes 20 Minutes a Day, left off. The simple idea is to:

….Pick something you’d like to achieve and publicly commit to doing it.

Then regularly (everyday if possible, but at least three or four times a week) work on your project for twenty minutes.

—Michael Nobbs | Sustainably Creative » Take the 20 minutes a day challenge.

Deciding to take this challenge up, I made a (rather long) list of things I’d like to work on, make, achieve, experience, do…and picked the first (or the most pressing) fifteen items on that list. I’m going to try and give each of these items 20 minutes,at least 3 or 4 days a week, and see if I can bring them all closer to the finish line at a roughly even rate, without neglecting any one of them.

15 Projects I am publicly commiting to doing...

1. Fill a sketchbook with drawings

2. Join a group and complete a 365 photo challenge

3. grow a lovely veggie and flower garden on the boat

4. “Random Acts of Crewelty” : Have An Exhibit in 2011

5. The Phat Quarter Swap: Movies!

6. Sew a Spool Bird: “Red Brocade Bird”

7. Sew at least one item with each of the patterns in my collection

8. Make a group of 15 journals using the Allium flower technique

9. Framed, embroidered pendants and jewelry

10. Read 10 books before the end of the year

11. Use up all my small canvases…paint lots of small paintings!

12. Write 4 poems

13. Craft a series of patchworked journals and mini quilts (20)

14. Craft 12 Bijou (miniature) books using existing materials

15. Complete the August Challenge on 750Words.com

Most of these projects are part of a bigger project, with its own blog, called From Hell to Breakfast…