Third week of Advent: we could use a little joy

23
Dec

We’re falling a little behind now, but I think it’s still worth it to write about each of the weeks of Advent rather than skipping one in order to catch up. Plus I like joy — who doesn’t like joy?? [Note: if you want to read posts on joy from previous years you can read one here, and another one here. If you’re behind on the Advent posts from this year, you can read Hope here and Love here.]

The thing is, in the past I’ve been taught that joy is a long-lasting dispositional quality, as contrasted with happiness, which is situational. I don’t disagree with that, and we all know people who are almost never positive about anything, regardless of the circumstances good or bad. So what does it matter if someone is joyous or happy, if someone is filled with joy or with happiness? I mean, are these cows joyful, or just happy (or on the verge of a stampede) and ultimately does it matter?

I suppose one could argue that they’re happy, because they’ve been released into the spring grass and they will acclimate and probably won’t continue bouncing around with glee. All I’m trying to suggest is that we don’t need to have disdain for their happiness. It’s not “less than” because it’s circumstantial. I feel much the same way as these cows when it comes to springtime sun and fresh air. Or this dog who learns to be a dog…

Again, is it happiness, is it cultivating joy, and aside from being in a healthy safe place, how important is that distinction?

I only watched like the first 5 minutes of the Paul McCartney video above, and it made my heart all warm and fuzzy, so I hope you feel the same way after watching some of it. There’s an aspect of gratitude in it that seems conducive to joy. In my experience, more grateful one is, the easier it is to find joy.

I’ve been working on an art page for a while, and I think it’s done enough to share now. I was trying to capture that feeling of joy and elation, while also using specific materials that I felt were important but challenging. There’s something about the childhood joy of getting a choice swing all to yourself without anyone pressuring you to give them a turn, when you can go as high as you want, day dreaming and imagining all sorts of adventures. If you notice something unusual about the chains on the swing, it’s because they’re made from insulin pump tubing. 🙂

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The coming of Jesus is an event of gratitude and joy, especially when Jesus is viewed as the great healer, the reconciler, the one who calls all people unto himself. In the United States the white evangelical church focuses so heavily on humanity’s fallen-ness, God’s wrath, and the idea of Jesus as a blood sacrifice to atone for people’s sins, there’s not much room to pay attention to how Jesus lived his life…we’re too focused on his death.

There are other positions, such as the role of Jesus as example of how to live a life, how to treat people unlike ourselves, and even as a great unifier of all things. Richard Rohr has some interesting things to share on this concept — Jesus as the Cosmic Christ. [He’s also written about the idea of the first half of our lives being all about building containers for meaning, and the second half of our lives being a process of dismantling those containers. That’s a wonderful head scratcher for anyone over 35!] But again, the evangelical church in the United States doesn’t talk much about that, since the going theology is the exclusivity of Christianity.

However, how much more joyous is it to think of Jesus as making all things new, including humanity? Definitely something to think about.

What’s bringing you joy this season?

Second week of Advent: Love for all peoples

11
Dec

Love is the theme of the second week of Advent and Advent seems a good time to deal with some theological concepts that have troubled me. (That might not be your first inclination when you think about love but stick with me here.) I’m interested to hear your perspective on this, so consider this an invitation to a conversation over the next couple weeks.

An original peekaboo page about love.

Here’s what’s peeking through the top layer.

The concept of Christmas is that we celebrate the coming to earth and infant birth of Jesus ( we can get into the immaculate conception another time). Good stuff right? I mean, a baby is a snuggly addition and the Bible was certainly due for a redemption story after the way many babies were treated in its pages, including Herod killing all the infant boys in an attempt to protect his throne from the one who’d been prophesied to overthrow it.

That little fleecy diapered baby didn’t happen in a vacuum; he was born into a Jewish family in the Middle East.

Read that again more slowly: a Jewish family in a country in the Middle East.

We might try to acknowledge this, but we only really think about it at Christmas time, and after that, in just about every single church I’ve ever been to, Jesus grows up into a hockey playing, lutefisk eating descendent of Vikings.

Foreigners, immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, peoples who were in North America before western explorers “discovered” it, people of different faith traditions — all those people are somehow different, in many people’s view, than a teenage middle eastern couple looking for a place where they can find shelter and deliver a baby. We’re so quick to cast people as “other” and so quick to develop convenient amnesia about the roots of Christian faith. We shouldn’t forget the lessons of love for all peoples that we learn at Christmas time just because a couple months have passed and the remnants of pine needles have finally been picked out of the carpet.

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When we talk about love, or the idea of Jesus being “love come down” it’s way too easy to whitewash Jesus’s heritage and background. He could have been put into any family in the entire world. But he was placed into a middle eastern family that had no trouble blending into African surroundings when they were on the run. White/Caucasian churches tend to overlook that information, if not deliberately then passively, and then discover it strikes them as surprising (or even offensive) when anyone suggests Jesus could be anything other than Caucasian. Even though much Western art has portrayed Jesus as a white man with blue eyes above his flowing beard, the Bible is quite specific about the lineage of Jesus. This Jewish/MiddleEastern/African Jesus should not come as a shock for people who spend so much time insisting on a literal reading of the Bible.

If it ruffles our feathers to think about God choosing to send Jesus in the form of a person with a brown body, people who are caucasian (like me — specifically Scandinavian and European descent) need to take a look at our own biases. One of the best checks of my own implicit bias is a little self reflection when I see imagery that agitates me or seems quite different than what I’ve always seen. Why does it strike me as unusual? Is the usual way I see it an accurate portrayal? What do I think is the “right” way for something to be portrayed?

The counter argument to acknowledging Jesus’ lineage is usually something along the lines of saying, “Well, I don’t see color,” or “Why does it matter where he was born since he’s God and is now all spirit and doesn’t have a body anyway,” or to lean heavily on the Middle Eastern but definitely not African delineation. If it’s so unimportant, then why get discombobulated by the idea that he wasn’t a fair skinned person? If it’s so unimportant, why make sure to point out he wasn’t from Africa? Might I take the liberty of pointing out that Egypt is in Africa and when they were on the run Jesus’ family took off to Egypt?

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If love has come in the person of a non-white person, what does that say about my position as a white female or my action and advocacy regarding the treatment of our brothers and sisters of color? If love has come in the person of a Jewish man, what does it say about people’s tolerance of anti-semitic rhetoric, even in the form of old jokes, or hate-filled actions?

What does it say about us white folks if we can only follow someone with the same skin color as us?

It’s something we should stop and consider, and Advent is an appropriate time for such reflection.

Are you used to the idea of God as a white dude with a long flowing beard? Or Jesus as a blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian?

Want to read Advent posts from previous years? Here’s my post on Love from last year and then here’s one from two years ago. And if you missed last week’s post on Hope, you can read it here.

Advent and the first week: Hope

8
Dec

Advent is the anticipation of Christmas, a time of preparation. Different traditions have slightly different liturgical themes for each week, but it has deep historical roots which you can read about here

Wreaths and colored candles

The Advent wreath is a circle (are there wreaths that are NOT circles, and wouldn’t a straight wreath count as a swag?) and has five candles. Each of these candles is symbolic and each week, one more candle is lit.

But did you know circular Advent wreaths date back to the time of Luther, and they represent God’s endlessness and eternity? Well there ya go. Although I must say it feels ironic to use something like pine boughs to represent something without end, since when we’ve taken down our live trees they’ve left at least half their needles on the floor where even after I’ve swept multiple times they lurk like little booby traps until spring.

The candles of an Advent wreath are usually purple or royal blue, with one being pink or rose (we’ll talk about that in a future post) and the final one being white to symbolize the purity of Jesus.

Reality

While I like the idea of Advent, (and appreciated being pregnant with all three of my children during Advent — it was an especially poignant time) many times it feels like another commitment within an already busy time. And as much as I want to focus in the whole reason why we’re celebrating in the first place…sometimes it just doesn’t come together.

So here my tree sits, cut at the tree farm and decorated with white lights… and nothing more.

That’s just the reality of it.

[Note: the tree just got fully decorated last night but there are still not many other decorations up yet.]

Hope

This first week of Advent is Hope, and I hoped to get this post up earlier this week but it’s taken me this long! That’s again where the idealized (fantastical) reality and the actual reality meet.

This is a slippery topic because I’m an optimist. There’s almost always a bright side, a silver lining to find. And I’ve found that tendency can venture dangerously close to delusion. But here’s a small reflection on Hope.

Hope

It’s a hearty, determined tree, that’s lived through many storms, the kind that seems ready to topple but each spring it leafs out, its branches lusty for the sun and warm breeze.

It’s a fragile, resilient fiddle head fern pushing up through the brown leaf clutter, sure there’s something brighter on the other side.

It’s power creates a well-meaning denial, a befuddlement in the face of facts,

a moving violation – hit broadside from blind alley, totaling the car and leaving you with a limp.

It’s one more try, one more tactic, one more appointment, one more meeting, one more new year’s resolution, once more into the breech because

This time

This time might be the one,

And we just need one.

We’d take more, but we just need one.

Do you take much time for Advent? How do you set the tone for your holiday season? I’d love to hear about your traditions!

Essential wholehearted Humanness

14
Nov

It can be instinctive to try and make sense of situations, to look for connections between things so we can identify with what’s happening around us.

However, for some people that comes with more difficulty when faced with unfamiliar situations or world views. They might shut out people rather than looking for that point of connection.

It’s important to remember that while there are vast differences in backgrounds and beliefs, there are some characteristics which are universal.

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I have a tutorial up on the Get Messy Art Journal website today, and it’s all focused on living wholeheartedly. Human development theories tell us some of the things which are desired at the core of all people, such as connection, to be known, and to be loved. More recently, Brene Brown has studied what it looks like to live wholeheartedly, and in my mind her work goes hand in hand with the season of ubuntu.

Here are a couple pics from my tutorial on wholeheartedness (and from the past couple weeks)…

Another couple pics not related to the tutorial but circling the idea of ubuntu and our connected humanness.

Seriously, have you been watching the midterm elections here in the US? What’s up with that , meaning with the barriers to people having their registrations purged, with closing polling stations, and with trouble counting the votes?

Bringing it in closer to home, a friend of a friend had an almost unthinkable tragedy happen recently and I just can’t wrap my head around what things must be like for her right now. Working it out in my art journal gives me a good place to focus my thoughts.

The words on the left side say “you are not alone” which I feel is so important when walking through a very dark time. This is a difficult month for our family, with difficult anniversaries and birthdays and mile-markers of those who are no longer with us, and we grieve them deeply. Knowing we are not alone in that grief makes it a fraction easier to bear, and as you know if you’ve ever been there, a fraction is still significant.

Then finally, just a parting thought of love to you. Maybe you need to hear it today, so just know that your presence in the world matters. We should all keep chugging along, doing the next right thing, sharing love with those we come in contact with, and slowly things will change for the better, if only because we have become more wholehearted in how we approach the world.

If you want to see the whole tutorial for the wholehearted page, it’s on the Get Messy site. To see it you need to be a member, which is just fantastic fun. Click here to get started. And as always, thanks for visiting!

Interconnectedness

25
Oct

Right now it’s very easy to feel disconnected. Disconnection happens in subtle ways, whether that’s doing our own thing without checking in with our partner, letting too long go between phone calls back home.

It also happens in purposeful ways and can be positive, like when we no longer wish to be associated with a certain philosophy or worldview. It can happen when we leave a dysfunctional or toxic relationship. That’s healthy growth.

And disconnectedness is most definitely happening all over politics in the United States, where holding a different position becomes a moral judgment of your character. On both sides.

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We are in the season of ubuntu for Get Messy and it’s been a trick to wrap my brain around the word. It’s the concept of our deep humanity, the qualities of compassion and interconnectedness.

We are as a society in a period where loud voices are promoting fear and scarcity, which make our brains close down and send us towards tribalism and mistrust.

So this season comes at a perfect time, a chance to recalibrate and make deliberate observations about our connectedness and shared h umanity .

In the spirit of ubuntu I’d like to share some of my pages so far…

And a little video of flipping the page…

https://tclarson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/img_2215.mov

The leaves have been so beautiful, they made a perfect backdrop.

Then we moved to a different color palette.

This spread is also a multi-page set up so I’d have room for some journaling.

I still want to go back in and add a paper doll figure to the purple page, but we’ll see if I make time to do that before I forget.

One last spread, done with an image transfer and some vinegar in my attitude.

As always, thanks for reading. If there’s something that resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Have a fabulous week!

A little journal for a new season

4
Oct

The challenge is to work small, work in a journal that’s much smaller than what you might usually use.

I chose to make my own.

Initially I thought I’d use a store bought cover and just add the signatures. But when I looked carefully at that cover, I realized it was really just a piece of cardboard. Duh. So I dug around a bit and ended up using the cardboard back from a pad of mixed media paper as the cover of my journal.

All I used for supplies on this part of the project were a craft knife, and this ridiculously tiny cutting mat.

I scored the outside portion of the cardboard and then once I had the lines scored, I just worked my way through the layers, carefully slicing until I cut all the way through.

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For the next portion of the project, I created signatures from papers I already had. I didn’t document that but once you’ve done it a couple times it’s not hard to whip one together pretty quickly.

Then I got ready to assemble my journal.

First I had to make holes in the cardboard cover. I measured where I wanted the holes and then used an awl to create the holes.

Then it was time to put it all together.

I used a Coptic stitch for this. I watched this really helpful tutorial step by step tutorial and even though it was my first attempt, I’m pretty happy with it.

[Note: one handed filming is not my forte, so everybody, take your motion sickness meds and buckle up.]

https://tclarson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/img_1976.mov

The stitching looks like this:

I’ll be sure to share more photos of the spreads I make as I fill up the journal with this season’s theme, which is focused around the theme of “Ubuntu”…but more on that later. For now, thanks for letting me share my little journal with you, and thanks for taking the time to visit, even if I did make you a bit seasick.

Seasons, jobs, and adulting

17
Sep

Are we settled into the school year yet?

Umm, only partially, right? Because just as we start to think FALL, the weather decides it was only joking and it wants another round of August. Good one, Fall. You’re a laugh a minute.

There’s a different feeling in fall though, isn’t there? Maybe it’s because my calendar still revolves around the school year. But I gotta believe those cooler evenings and drier air would indicate a change even before the tops of the trees started to look like sunsets.

This season at Get Messy we are focusing on seasons which is just perfect for so many reasons. One is because our family now has a high schooler, and that’s definitely a new season for us.

Another reason is that I took a job with our local school district. After staying home, working part time, or working from home, I now have a job as a Media Assistant, and they want me there EVERYDAY. I cannot do this from home, people. I cannot do this from a coffee shop. I have to be physically present from morning to afternoon EVERYDAY of the week.

(Keeping it respectable but not too serious.)

I know this is normal for the majority of adults, but this is an adjustment for me. It’s a good thing and I really enjoy the job, so it’s a good decision, but still — adjustment, which means there are some habits to reevaluate and some patterns to tweak. But the trade off of a job where my schedule mirrors the kids’ schedule and I don’t work in the summer? Yup, I can happily make those adjustments.

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For the past month or so I’ve been playing with some different approaches to my pages, using some different materials and letting gravity and evaporation do the work.

In addition I’ve joined with some art journaling friends to incorporate blackout poetry in my pages. Some of those pages incorporate use less paint and more discovery. I’ve really enjoyed it so I thought I’d share some of those with you .

So that’s what’s been going on around here.

How’s your September been?

End of summer and changing seasons

25
Aug

We’re in the last weeks of summer, trying to ignore the drumbeat of fall and school starting up again.

We can only ignore it for so long, and this coming week is a major reality check for us, with three different school orientations (one of them being for our very first HIGH SCHOOL student. Hold me.).

We’ve been trying to squeeze out every last drop of summer so of course we had to incorporate a couple excursions.

One was a trip to the zoo, where they had a big art installment of sculptures, all made from materials that had washed up on the Pacific Ocean shore. It might have been depressing, except that the sculptures were so playful. Here’s just one to give you an idea…

I mean, come on! How great is that??

We took one other excursion recently…

The State Fair. (View from the Skyride.) We HAD to do the State Fair.

We’ll head to the cabin again and also probably do some more swimming since the children don’t even care if it’s hot enough to swim. They’re die-hards. They also don’t care if there’s a breeze to break up the humidity that makes their mother’s skin prickle and hair poof. It’s good that we’re coming to the end of summer because I’m running low on sunscreen and the kids’ swimsuits are starting to lose their elasticity.

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With Get Messy, my very favorite art journaling community, the last three weeks have been kicking off the Season of Seasons. The challenge is to use a found journal, which is what you call it when you use for a journal something which is not a journal. Here’s what I came up with:

(I couldn’t resist working on that front one before I thought to take this pic.)

I’ve had these appliance manuals sitting in a drawer in the laundry room. They’ve moved with us from other houses, some going back almost 20 years, and never once have I referenced any of them. Why the heck do I still have them in the first place??? Apparently it’s so I can use them as found journals this season.

Recently I got a pad of this crazy material called Duralar. It’s similar to a plastic transparency from back in the day when teachers used overhead projectors rather than smart boards. Each sheet is really thin and apparently they can accept wet media? What is this magic?? It’s especially good for alcohol inks and markers, or so they say. I’m still figuring it out, but in the meantime I’m having so much fun allowing water and watercolors or inks to play and interact.

See what I mean?!

So besides ignoring the start of school, that’s what’s been going on here. As always, a big thanks for letting me share with you.

Fill me in on YOUR end-of-summer; how’s it feel to shift into fall?

Season of story summary and no more alliterations, I mean it

30
Jul

We’ve come to the end of an eight-week season of story in my art journaling adventures, specifically with Get Messy Art Journal community.

It’s been busy!

For most of my pages I avoid using my own image, but I’m trying to incorporate more of these as an exercise in pushing myself.

I took over the Get Messy Art Journal Instagram account for a week and there I walked people through a step by step process of creating a page.

This is the step by step page I made during the IG takeover. This page focused on common themes and characters found in stories.

There I also shared some of the Purple Kitty story with the illustrations I’ve created to go with the story.

More fun at the Fair — Mini donuts and Fair Hair

It was interesting to discover the different brain topics this season brought up. It’s a funny thing about story: so many of our stories are intertwined with those of other people, and it can take some work to figure out how to handle telling that story. What things are for someone else’s business, and what things are for us to share because they were our experience?

While I agree with this quote from Anne Lamott, I’ve been thinking about this from a more positive angle.

Soon I hope to offer some prints of some of these pages, so check back soon for an update!

Here’s a quick video round up of my season of story journal. Hope you enjoy it!

Dreams, wishes, hopes delayed, or just a reality check: my first writing conference

27
Jul

This was my first writer’s conference. I knew going in that it would be a good learning experience, that it would show me more of the inner workings of the publishing/writing world.

Day one: trying to look legit

A month prior, I had attended a writer’s group that focused on conferences and how to prepare for them. I learned about a “one sheet”, something I had never read anything about in all the research and reading I had done to learn about publishing. I had been advised about being prepared and being open, making space to absorb information and experiences. I’d been encouraged to keep a weather-eye out for those who might be having a difficult time and do what I could to befriend folks in that situation.

This might come as news, but I can be both an extrovert AND an introvert. When I lean towards introversion, it’s not a discomfort with people, but it’s more of going into observation mode. There are times when something in me shifts into being quieter and more of an observer than a contributing participant, though I’m still actively participating. I try to listen well and I find it profoundly interesting to observe people as they express themselves.

I relegated that to the background and put on my most extroverted hat. I welcomed others to join circles I stood in, walked with a stranger to a workshop, asked another woman to join me at a session, and basically wanted to I’ve myself an award for being Miss Congeniality…but I might only qualify for the before-makeover rather than the after-makeover:

The biggest thing was that I had an opportunity to have a ten minute meeting with an agent.

This sounds like a huge development but it’s not so much. Anyone could pay a little more and get one of these meetings, so it wasn’t based on merit or anything. That’s not to say it wasn’t a great opportunity, and I wanted to make the most of it.

This particular agent had visited the writer’s group after the conference last year, and I bought her book which was all about agents: the whole process of getting an agent, what they do, the editing process, everything. Last year she was quite engaging and approachable, and she works at a big name agency in Christian publishing, so I thought I’d give it a go.

[A word about Christian publishing: I’m not totally convinced this is the place for me, except that because of my background, I can’t help but have Christianity inform my writing. I mean, I guess I could help it, but I choose to let it co-mingle with my writing. However, the traditional conservative evangelical Christianity that’s going around is not something I’m comfortable with. {Full disclosure: I have not left our church even though it would totally fit this description.} We can talk more about that another time, but I must tell you this was a step back into a world I once inhabited with no qualms. Now I’ve got serious qualms of all sorts. It was really interesting.]

Back to the meeting.

Second day outfit. Yes that’s a teal, magenta, and grey cheetah print tunic you’re seeing.

It was short.

She was lovely.

She said the idea behind my Kettle River Meal Swap manuscript is interesting and she liked it.

She is not accepting any first-time authors at this time.

In a lot of ways, this ought to be encouraging. She didn’t say the idea was junk or that my one-sheet was a mess of errors or my writing was misguided. She may have just been being kind but she didn’t shut me down that way.

Is that good or bad?

It’s both.

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Writing is such a self-motivated thing.

Nobody external cares whether you write or not. And that’s not some way of asking for people to tell me it matters. It’s truly okay. It’s a reality. It’s an internal drive that pushes you to want to write, to make space for that. And it can make you less than a competent judge of your own work and the open or closed doors you encounter.

Was this meeting a motivator to approach other agents to see if they A. are a good fit and B. would want to take me on as a client? Sure! After all, the agent I met with didn’t put the kabash on my novel, although she did say that it’s still a little too short at 73,000 words. That’s ok, I can beef that up. But there’s also the possibility that she was trying to let me down gently, that if my story idea or writing was so compelling that she would have picked me up regardless of the busyness of her last year when she launched two first time novelists, which would (I assume from what she implied) take a lot of energy and deal-working.

So how to know?

It’s back to what I want to pursue. Is having a traditionally published novel a goal and what am I willing to do to get there?

You always hear the rejection stories from people who did finally get their book published. They ignored the rejections or learned from them, and pressed on until they finally found a home for their work.

You hear that it usually takes years and years to make that happen.

What you don’t hear about is the loads of people who had to give up.

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Everyone who writes has to decide their definition of “success”. Is it success to take from within the concepts and ideas we’ve got, to write and express them? Is it success to be brave enough to put these out into the light, into the world in any form? Do those words need to be useful and ultimately uplifting, helpful to those who need to feel connection with someone else in the universe, or can they exist for their own sake rather than serving some higher purpose? Or is success only when those words are put into book form and distributed into the world for monetary gain?

See? It can go many different ways.

For now, I’m going to go back to the computer, back to the library, back to my bookshelf and do more research on other places that might be a good fit for my writing. Maybe that means entering contests, maybe that means putting my book away for a while and working on other writing, maybe that means letting go of it altogether. Time will offer a better perspective on this than I can get right now, so I’ll have to accommodate time’s passing.

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Can I ask you a question?

What would you like to see more of in this space? I’ve been typing away for a long time, and I want to be a value-added to your day. What would be useful to you? Do you come here for anything specific? Would you like a way to engage more? Do you find anything that sticks with you after you go away from reading here?

I want to make a difference, even if that means providing a breather in the midst of the frenetic pace of life. So tell me, what would be helpful for you?

I can’t wait to hear what you think!