What are you reading? How are you feeling about it?
Just last week, I had conversations with a few different colleagues about how I work on many things at the same time, and so progress on each project is slower than if I were more singularly focused. My way keeps me engaged. I do the same with my reading. It reminds me of the adage, “How you do one thing is how you do everything,” which I’m not 100% behind, but probably live more than I care to admit.
I’m currently reading Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaoaud, Sylvia Boorstein’s book, Happiness is an Inside Job: Practicing for a Joyful Life, and New Techniques of Grief Therapy by Robert Neimeyer. I just finished “reading” the audiobook, We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something, by Amie McNee. And, I’m listening to Big Magic (Elizabeth Gilbert) in the car. (Oh, plus a {small} section almost every day in Walking Each Other Home by Ram Dass and Mirabai Starr, and my ongoing work with A Year to Live by Stephen Levine).
Are you ready for a breath of fresh air?
Amie’s book, We Need Your Art is so fabulous! Her content is great—the message is clear, well-articulated, and insistent — she grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Listening to her Aussie accent at 1.2 speed is completely charming! It made me want to get in the car and drive anywhere, just so I could listen to her reading.
My suggestion is, go to your local library or to Audible and listen to a free sample— just to hear her accent and get a flavor of her sassy attitude that is just so strong, so vulnerable, and so real. She speaks about the life of creatives. While she’s referring to artists of every kind—writers, actors, musicians, painters, and more—my personal belief is that we are all the artists of our lives, and in that context, this book is for everyone. Of course, you don’t have to agree with me or my premise that we are artists–though my definition is based on the realities of personal agency, living within constraints, creating successes, failing, and learning how to move forward—life is messy.
If you pick up her book or listen to it, please let me know what you think – good, bad, or ugly. I want to hear it because I don’t think there’s any neutrality when listening to it.
For something more personal, spiritual, perhaps philosophical..
Sylvia Boorstein’s book is a balm for the soul, and that doesn’t mean that it’s sweet or calming. It means that it’s real and about everyday challenges that we face in our lives. Her writing makes what can be a big, heavy topic—how do we show up in the world— accessible and practical. I love that!
Of course, Elizabeth Gilbert’s book is such fun, and listening to her is a delight! I have to pause the book often to jot a note… Of course that does interfere a wee bit with getting through the book efficiently, as I can’t drive and write… it’s worth it!
Bob’s book on grief therapy balances the aforementioned easily accessible books. It is a treasure chest of methods for working with loss and bereavement in death and non-death losses. The work is rich, and the reading is slow (for me). The contrast between the density of the various authors’ writing styles is stark, yet all offer engaging, thought-provoking, and life-changing ideas and practices.
My almost daily practice with Walking Each Other Home and more episodic reading of A Year to Live provide thought-provoking reminders of my mortality…
What do you want from the books you read? I’d love to know!
This past Sunday, I had an inkling that I needed to do something different—the psychic load of health issues and grief for me and many in my inner circle is quietly laying heavily on me—I whisked myself to a local state park and painted for an hour… though the experience felt outside of time. The absorption was complete and nourishing.
I have done my share of thinking about the influences in my life. My lineage chart includes family (blood relatives and chosen members), my educational experiences, my work, volunteer work, and Buddhist practice. When Susan started naming artists and musicians as part of her lineage because of their influence on her, my mind was blown! This idea potentially integrated my visual resumé creations with my lineage chart and invited me to think so much bigger and more precisely… I was on a roll, thinking of artists, musicians, and rethinking what the people on my lineage chart mean to me and who I have been/am/am becoming.
Women’s Marathon there. It inspired me to imagine making a visual that includes all the names of all the people, places, pets, and experiences I had that make me who I am today. What would it look like… like the wall of the Nike building in San Francisco, or maybe a drawing of me in the middle of the space surrounded by rings of names and/or photos, or an upward spiral surrounding my figure in the center?
Early the other morning, I was working on the Methods and Materials course for my Art-Assisted Grief Therapy certificate. Generally, I don’t get involved in art early in the day because I never know how long it’s going to take, and I don’t want to have that time constraint unless I plan for it. But I knew the assignment was a timed experience: Use seven different types of media and seven different surfaces (one medium per surface), devoting only five minutes per piece … so this assignment should have taken 35-40 minutes. I was determined to get it done. Well, you can guess what happened… I ran over.
generally do it the way it’s designed. That experience becomes my baseline, and I experiment from there. My curious mind got the better of me, and I decided to use one surface for each different medium, which was quite readily accomplished in the 40 minutes, and yet was not the assignment! When teaching/training or facilitating, I feel frustrated when folks do not follow the instructions—I mean, they’re created for a reason! Well, I had just become the kind of student/participant that I shake my head about… and I couldn’t live with that. So I had to complete the assignment the way it was designed, which took another 30 minutes or so.
Truth be told, I totally loved all the time I devoted to this assignment (aside from running late and pushing my schedule around like putty)! It was a delight to see what worked—or didn’t—in which ways on the different surfaces.
Therapy program. With my chapter about the integration of visual practitioner work into my chaplaincy internship completed, my article for the AI (Appreciative Inquiry) Practitioner about AI in “the wild”/real life well underway, and my second article on integrating Appreciative Inquiry, leadership, and visualization mapped out—I am excited! The end of July will bring, Urban Visual Storytelling, and the opportunity to sharpen my skills in graffiti with Ramiro Davaro-Comas along with fellow visual practitioners, Sketchnoters, and folks who are game to try something new*. Plus, the IFVP Summit will give me the opportunity to see colleagues from around the world and to share one of the bikablo methods of storytelling. The end of summer/early fall holds a trip to Auckland, NZ, to deliver 