Category Archives: SoulCollage

Two New Cards – One with Variations


SoulCollage collage – not yet a card.  For that, a Staples run is necessary, and then some cutting and gluing.  But this one popped out of the pile today.  Watched the TV show “Grimm” last night, and figured this one could be called, “Grim Fairy Tale”.  This is, in part, my response to flipping through a couple of Vogue magazines (thank you unusable miles that translate into free magazines!), including the one that featured Kate Moss’s wedding.  The message seems to be that happiness is a question of purchasing and looking good in the right outfit.  The next one was worked in a series.


I have made many cards that refer to the creative process.  This is another and I call it simply, ‘The Maker’.  I shot twenty or so with various pieces moved around.  I thought about making a slide show, but ultimately, the static quality of the red dancer defeated the point.  But here are a couple of variations, the second being digitally altered.

techno overwhelm

Technology Overwhelm ebbs and flows, and is generally present in the life of this almost-55 year old.  It will never be easy.  It will never be natural.  But the knowledge/skill level has plateaus where I can skim along, doing what I want to do.  Then, there are the craters that occur when something that once was automatic stops functioning and I don’t know why.  There are the steep, steep learning curves brought on by a new program or new tool (like my new-ish smartphone which I still barely know how to use).  And, in addition to the craters and curves, is the big, big list of things that I have been meaning to get around to developing some mastery around, and haven’t.  This SoulCollage® card was created in honor of this constant strain of frustrations, which is at some freakish peak right now.

I HAVE been quilting – all morning in fact.  The old style — piecing standing up, rotary-trimming, pressing as I go.  It felt downright athletic after so much time away, or time spent stitching by hand, sitting down.  Pictures, tomorrow.

SoulCollage — Dread

Early on in ‘Loving What Is’, Byron Katie states:

“Every story is a variation on a single theme: This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t have to experience this. God is unjust. Life isn’t fair.”

This card depicts my current version of that story.

Katie goes on to offer four questions of inquiry, which can reorient us to our thoughts, and ultimately, nudge us toward freedom, and they are:

1) Is it true (the belief)?
2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3) How do you react when you think that thought?
4) Who would you be without the thought?
and
Turn it around.

The details of the story literally do not matter to get the gist of this SoulCollage card. It’s all here — the posture of resignation, the failure to be properly equipped, the paralysis of defeat.

What this card ALSO reveals is the freedom that lies just outside of the story — the encircling unity of the brass compass (untouched by the drama within), the delicate silk butterflies oriented upward, the suggestion of galaxies just over that defeated shoulder…  which to my view, makes it ultimately a card about hope.

In January, one of my stated goals for the year was to use tools already in my arsenal.  Well, I’ve just shared two of them — SoulCollage and Byron Katie’s “Work”. We all need tools like these. And they need to fit who we are. A visual person who likes to make collages, who studied the Tarot beginning in high school, whose read and resonated with Jung, and who has a 40-year, fairly consistent habit of keeping a journal, is well suited to these two tools.

What methods do YOU use to investigate and release negative patterns?

Five Things, Early 2010

One, the weather — It is snowing. And cold. Colder than yesterday.

One thing I did well yesterday — shifted out of major crankdom. How? By allowing myself to return to the cellar and the big piece on the floor. Brought sections up later and worked them by hand. This is new! Sections brought upstairs and worked by hand.  Can’t wait to lay them back down.

One thing I could have done better yesterday — I could have shifted earlier in the day and spared my family my verbal torrents of discontent.

Two things I’ll commit to doing today that I might not otherwise do
** get all remaining boxes and bags out of the house
** locate the remaining stink in the fridge before loading it with new groceries.

And, by the way, this SoulCollage card, made this summer, represents a prayer for the new year.

Gratitude List

beechs-reach

I am grateful for trees, for sunlight, for November’s melancholy, for shapes and shadows and cameras.

anniversary-gift

I am grateful for anniversary gifts (above), Julia Child, my husband, 19 years of marriage, the task of raking, the smell of fallen leaves, flannel sheets, darkness to sleep in, sleeping, and coffee.

Halloween-water-break

I am grateful for my boys, for teenage boys in general,

boys-being-girls-TWO

and for the high jinx of Halloween.

I am also grateful that I am mothering teenage boys and not trying to partner with them — which is to say, I am grateful to be 52 and not 14.

I am grateful for some new cyber friends, for the thread/cloth/fiber community I am slowing becoming a part of, for the way blogging forces a certain kind of accountability, and a tracking that is useful to someone like me with a sieve brain and short attention span.

I am grateful for the way my mind works, even with its gargantuan gaps in organizational skill and memory.  I am grateful to all those people wiser than I who have taught me how to surrender (once in a while, accompanied by some form of Grace or other).

Surrender

I am grateful to SoulCollage® and Tarot cards and the abiding power of images.

More on Surrender when Newton Open Studios is over.