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How does looking back help us look forward?
Vision Boards as Reflection Tools
Forgive and Forget?
How to move on and move through, one breath at a time.
We carry around things more than you realize, so pause a moment to recall the things you are carrying with you today. I told a story about how I just toss things in my purse and eventually it starts to feel heavy, so I have to unpack it from time to time. Our thoughts and ruminations are often like that, we carry them around until they feel heavy and we need to deal with them.
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What if you got hit by a bus?
Questions to ponder about what’s next. Also, I want you to rest like this person is, all secure in knowing his life is taken care of.
As the elder statesperson in the room, thought it’d be nice to talk about grown folks stuff on stream, so we talked about: buying a house, bitcoin, car AND advance directives, wills, living wills, etc. Whew! What a stream!
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Open Up
Taking space to heal is both scary and freeing.
On stream, we did what I call Catch and Release, letting folks type their responses first, and when prompted, hit the enter button, giving everyone a chance to write without editing. We also set up for ourselves the space to reflect and connect, and we have a !godeeper command so folks can be encouraged to tell us more. Only if they want to.
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A few days ago, I saw a recommendation from Maria Popova’s Brainpickings Blog for Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (affiliate link). I remembered that I own this book, and that I got it when it came out 7 years ago. It’s a GREAT book if you are a teacher and want to look at ways to engage your students in a way that’s unique and encourages their creativity because let’s face it.
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Elevators in an atrium of a hotel
Elevator Pitches are 30-60 seconds to describe your thing to someone. That’s about how long a ride in an elevator is with a captive audience, so why not shoot your shot?
Read moreTake a moment to ponder the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert. While our main priority today was talking about time, I really wanted us to think about accessing creative living that already is a possibility within us.
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Sample of zines that we made on stream!
Continuing with the creativity theme, I decided to be a little creative and make some zines. Zines are easy to make, don’t require exotic tools (maybe my bone folder was a little exotic), and are easy ways to make gifts for folks (esp since Mother’s Day is tomorrow!).
Here is the main link for how to make Zines.
Here are the prompts we used. Feel free to use any prompts you feel will bring out your creativity!
Title: Your artist ID
What core values guide your creativity?
Who do you admire?
What drives you to create?
What does a successful career look like?
I wish…
My mantra or self-portrait
I added the new markers/acquisitions to the tools page! Check them out!
When we think of creativity, we think often of things that we ‘make’ - visible, tangle things like artwork or websites. I wanted to include poetry in the creativity space because I think friends don’t realize how poetry can engage our minds in ways that we don’t think about when we think of being creative.
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Late December, I was streaming on Twitch while on vacation in Maui, and I had an idea to do a 31 day stream of doing art. Initially I thought of it as a joke, but the more I talked about what I could do, I started to think about what it could be. Holy moly, could I really do this? So along with my mod extraordinaire Ynotibox we both decided to give it a go together.
I wish I could tell you that it was easy, but when you’re trying to create something in real time for folks you don’t get to see, it came be a little scary, sort of like driving somewhere without a map…and a bunch of funny people in the backseat. I popped up for 31 days straight with the exception of January 2nd because I was travelling back to SF (the thought of streaming while at the airport did cross my mind), and no time in particular. Usually it was around 10PM at night for at least an hour…or two. It sort of depended on when the piece was done. I did my best after every piece to post it on Instagram nightly. Some nights I was just exhausted and wanted to sleep.
Each night had a theme:
And we just talked, and talked, and talked about the theme, asked questions, pushed each other to tell us more. It was revealing, honest, and funny. You learn a lot about people, even remotely, when they are being vulnerable and sharing out loud. You also learn that representation of people of color and diversity of every kind are severly lacking in the spaces where we looked for photos (I would search for photos at the chat’s request and they would also send links to pics). There were hardly any large people or people with disability. There were also rare photos of people of color. It was interesting to search for ‘woman working’ and have few results that were at the top level of Black women. Why is that? /s
I learned, as a streamer, that building something with a community takes work, and it takes being someone that provides value (interest, space, engagement). And sometimes I might have only two people chatting away but that’s good enough for me. When you start to worry about numbers, it loses something. The organic-ness of what I try to do on stream is important to me more than numbers. You’ll notice when you see the art (link below) that we started out as hand lettering, but we moved on to try to create art together. I felt insecure about my artistic ability and thought we could try something new. The first night we tried freemix.com and well, it borked in the middle of the stream, and wow is that awkward. It’s all good though. I don’t mind failing in front of folks, if anything it was nice to be real and not panic. We found another solution that we wound up using for the remainder of the challenge (Adobe Spark).
I would like to do another month-long challenge, but not sure where I want to go with that right now. I did learn a lot this go around, and it does have me excited to do the work. Maybe I’ll see you?
Check out the art we created here.
