Looking at the landscapes and seeing abstract paintings
self-love
Filigree
floating up the beach
ruffled by a north easterly,
fine intricate bubbles of air
cluster, froth to anyone else but
reminds me of Port of Spain,
the lace-like wooden fretwork of house gables and around porches,
Boissiere House, along Queen Park West,
gingerbread style fulfilling the fairy tale romance and fantasy of being home at last.
A 50 day streak
Yesterday marked 50 days of my creative sketchbook practice. 50 days of consistently turning up to the page to play and experiment.
What I’m learning is that I can trust myself to turn up for myself. I’m learning that my practice muscles can be strengthened. I’m learning that I love creating colour fields. It like what I create with visual journaling but different.
Here with these colour fields, there’s layers built up and then stripped back. Marked into. Scratched away to leave textures I like to see and feel. This practice is definitely expanding my palimpsest exploration and obsession.
I’m learning that I want this my creativity to be the main focus of my day and everything else is the add on, not the priority. Not the main meal. My creativity is my life source/force.
I’m practicing taking my creative sketchbook practice into my life. The attitudes, the risk-taking, the consistency, the trust in self and my art-making, these values and practices I’m carrying with me throughout my day, no matter who I come into contact with.
This creative sketchbook practice keeps me centred and focused on my feelings of joy and abundance. This practice keeps me present and checked in with myself, moment to moment.
On top of my visual journaling practice, this safe space of play and to {BE} me, is enough. Is more than enough to fill my day with bliss and connection. A practice that I’m finding opens up doors inside and outside of me, for me and others.
Find your safe spaces
being told, not to believe our own lying eyes
in my feelings
At last, let’s explore time
When a planned work gig falls through, time can take on a precious meaning.
Instead of attempting to fill time with all the things I ‘should’ do, I’m choosing to rest and finally bury my nose in a book I’ve been itching to read all last year. But some how shit got in the way.
You know the feeling when you find a book that is probably going to speak to your soul and underline all the arguments you’ve been putting forward in the last couple of years but you procrastinate in the reading of it.
For me maybe there’s been a fear factor. That I’ll have more evidence and weapons to add to my arsenal that makes me even more ‘other’, on the edges outside the mainstreams.
And just sometimes occupying this space and moving against the grain is tiring.
It’s like when your eyes have been opened, once you’ve seen it, once you’ve seen those zeroes and ones of the system behind the surface fake-arse narrative, you can’t unsee it and you can’t continue to move and act in ways that support and perpetuate the systems of oppression and hierarchy.
Yes that kind of reading and knowledge. That kind of book. Well that’s what I feel Dismantling The Master’s Clock: on race, space and time by Rasheedah Phillips will do to/for me.
I’ll let you know how I get on!
Mood
Walking into North Shields to attend a useless ‘interview’, I gave thanks for the light after days of grey rain.
Walking and listening to music,and this song comes on and acts as a reminder.
I’ve been forgetting myself, forgetting who I come from.
What would my life feel like if I prioritised my creativity, always. That the risk taking I’m exploring in my creative sketchbook spread into my reality, my day to day life? What would my life feel like then?
I was thinking today …
While completing my visual journaling this morning, at my old wooden table moved in front of my bedroom bay window looking out onto my rainy, foggy street, I had the thought that I’ve lived most of my life already.
This year I’ll turn 55 in October and it just struck me how the majority of my life/ living is behind me.
Then it got me thinking about how many years do I have left. I played with the idea of thinking, what if I’m just reaching the mid-point of my life? What if I have another 55 years of living ahead of me?
How would I feel about that? What would I need to do now to make that happen? Do I want to live to 110 years?
It has been done. It can be done even though those ‘blue zones’ where the majority ofcentenarians live are shrinking.
I feel I’d have to change a few habits first to give it a good shot at living until 110.
I know I could have been looking after my body better up until this point. But it’s never too late right, to start using food as medicine and to stop punishing my body for being black fat and ageing.
There’s still time right? There’s still a lot of twists and turns and bumps in this road left of this journey, right?
I’m not sure as nothings certain. But what if …
a morning well spent
Visual journaling in community is always time well spent.
Even if it’s their first rodeo, to witness the freedom, the mess, the expansion as paint meets paper meets card. Bliss. Magic. A gift.
Walking out with their own visual journals clutched close to their chests, promising to carry on the practice themselves, now they’ve got the power within their hands, hearts and soul.
A job well done any time the visual journaling practice is passed on.
I do believe it makes us better human beings. Better to each other and ourselves. Softer, caring and well-nourished.
Healing.
Living Wild Studios 