The Dish
WOW. More than a 18 months in the works, weeks of
working out details with my printer, stacks of panels, hours of
writing, editing, proofing, painting, stamping, erasing, critiquing…Ordinary Sparkling Moments is almost here!
“In
this book Christine asks us ‘What does it mean to live an authentic
life?’ By sharing some of her thoughts and experiences she attempts to
peel away the layers of the created self in search of what it means to
live fully open to what gives us the greatast meaning, even when that
is extremely challenging.” -From the Forward by Keri Smith, author of Living Out Loud, The Guerilla Art Kit and Wreck This Journal
Synopsis
Is
it possible to find meaning in our day to day existence? Can wisdom be
attained while we run errands, do the dishes and pay our bills?
Ordinary Sparkling Moments explores these
questions and more, celebrating the deeper truths that await our
discovery in some of life’s most mundane moments.
Details
160 full color pages / 8″ x 8″
200 Signed, Numbered, Limited Edition Hardcovers / Softcover editions will be plentiful
This book is a self-published labor of love, printed in the U.S.A.
Hardcover pre-orders have been going on all summer, and softcover editions will go on sale Monday, August 4, 2008 in my Etsy shop; books will begin shipping August 20, 2008.
Etsy Special: The first 25* orders beginning Monday, August 4, 2008 at 9:00am PST will receive a FREE 5.5″ x 5.5″ original collage!
Book Events
I’ll be making my way around the country for some fabulous book events,
and I’ll announce that schedule here in the next few weeks. First
stop: Squam Art Workshops!
To read more about my book tour and take a look at a few pages from the book, head on over to my website.
[*One collage per order.]
“When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.” -Meister Eckhart
Follow Up
[Lessons Learned :: Mixed media on wood panel, 48" x 60"]
Have you heard of Blog Nosh? It is a great website that features blog entries from all over under specific categories such as Art & Design, Business, Family and more. It scours the internet for inspiring, informative & interesting entries and organizes them in once place for one-stop shopping. They recently featured this entry which chronicled the journey of one of my larger creations, an experience that put me through the ringer creatively, hence the title of the piece, “Lessons Learned”. When they posted this entry, I realized I never followed up on this to share what the final piece looked like. So without further adieu – Ta Da! The final piece, shown above, with a detail here:
I look at this piece now and feel a peculiar sense of gratification. I don’t even consider this one of my “best” pieces, but I am very proud of it for the fact that I stuck with it even when I wanted to use it as firewood. This piece is bumpy and layered and messy and drippy…the gold elements behind the wings were a totally spur of the moment, go-with-my-gut idea that was the one and only period of time when I felt like I was “in the zone” artistically. The rest of the work that went into this piece was mechanics, which doesn’t make it any less creative or inspiring, but it is a piece that now has a very specific meaning to me. This piece was about process, about trials and mistakes and feeling like I was trying to create a work of art blindfolded with one hand tied behind my back. This piece was the hike up a mountain that is far steeper than you imagined with unexpected patches of ice and gravel, where you curse your way to the top only to feel like a superhero the next day knowing you did it despite the difficulties.
The best part is that all the work I put into this piece got to be immediately channeled into a new piece, a commission I did for this lovely soul.
[Just One More Thing :: Mixed Media on wood, 48" x 72"]
It is always difficult to see the meaningful details in pieces like these on a computer screen, but I love putting these two pieces next to each other to see the journey, to see clearly how one was the necessary preface to the other. It is in those arduous, maddening creative experiences when we can learn our most important lessons; we simply have to be willing to accept these floundering moments without judging them, to led them take the lead instead of trying to rein them in and control them. Sometimes mistakes have to be in charge in order to show us what we most need to learn.
“The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly – without judgment, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.” -Art & Fear
And Then The Earth Shook
[View from my hotel room at the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco earlier this month.]
I’ll just say this right off the bat and get it over with: I feel like I have been…let’s see, how shall I put this gently…oh yes, right, here we go – INSANE – over the past few days. Depending on what time of day it was any blog entry I made could have been anything from a never-ending rant on greed and materialism to a sobby, woeful, sad sack of frustrations to a jubilant, glowing treatise on all things happy and rainbow-y in life. My mood at times has been shifting by the hour, where one minute I feel like a rock star and the next minute I’m on the verge of tears, all the while wondering what kind of emotional or hormonal imbalance could possibly be going on to make me feel like such a crazy woman. And let’s just be clear – I haven’t been simply feeling like a crazy woman, but acting like a crazy woman.
I could sit here and write about all the bits and pieces of the story that led me to the realization I had today, but instead I’ll just get right to the point. I think what has been going on is that my body is worn out. I have been in a cycle for many weeks of having some kind of great workout followed by at least two days of intense soreness. While I am not an Olympian athlete, I am in good shape, and I have started to feel downright depressed over the fact that I haven’t been able to get out of this painful cycle. Maybe I am naive in the ways of body mechanics, but I don’t think I should be feeling this intensely sore all the time. Something has started to feel really off.
Our Wisconsin vacation was so peaceful, quiet and gentle, and after it ended I was eager to make a commitment to bringing more of that gentleness in my life. Yet here I am, a mere three weeks later, feeling like I am back in the fray of craziness, anxiety and all-around worn-out-ness. I came back home with a deep peaceful energy in my heart and was immediately flung back in the direction of “too much”, “not enough” and “keep working”. Bit by bit, my internal vibrations got cranked up like the dial on an amplifier with no music playing, where the buzzing that was barely audible on level one is a distinct, high-pitched hum on levels eight, nine and ten.
I was talked into taking a yoga class this morning, and in the middle of class an earthquake hit. It wasn’t huge or scary, but still a tad jarring, with everyone in the class looking around at one another through nervous, relieved giggles after it was over. I’m not going to sit here and say I had some grand epiphany in that moment, but I will say it was a tiny reminder that I need to make a more concerted effort to back away from this feeling that I am never doing enough. Walking through life this tightly wound is only going to lead to destruction in some form or another, and I think my body is trying to tell me I need to do whatever I have to do to get that volume knob turned back down.
For me, this is a tall order…here I am later in the day after this tiny glimpse of wisdom and already feeling frantic again, as if my to do list grew exponentially while I was away from my desk (which in fact, it did not). But I am trying. Trying to take a deep breath, trying to avoid looking at the clock and feeling like I am in a race against time, trying to remove all the gremlins from my consciousness. I am trying. All of the things that have been keeping me so intensely on the go since we returned from Wisconsin have been positive, great things, and I see now that the more I insist on trying to maintain this level of movement, the more fun I’ll drain from each moment. Simply put: I can’t do it all or have it all. At least not in one day.
I am SO thankful of all of the wonderful, supportive comments everyone left about the printing of my book. It is at the bindery right now and I will begin pre-orders for the softcover editions later this week, then the first round of shipments will go out on August 20th, a few weeks ahead of schedule. More details on that, as well as information on new prints, book events and other goodies, will be posted here as well this week. Until then, I will be doing my best to slow myself down, at least a little bit.
Point of No Return
[Press sheet with twelve book pages on the press at Ventura Printing. Taken yesterday.]
Just over 24 hours ago I still had the power to say, “Stop the presses!” and call the whole thing off, but the horse is now officially out of the barn and there is no turning back on the publication of my book. It is now going to come to me in the form of boxes (and boxes) of inventory in a few short weeks, the result of more than a year’s work and a task list that grew exponentially longer the closer this print date became. Yesterday was the first of two days of press checks, where I’m on hand as the pages of my book come gliding off the press for color adjustments and one final opportunity to catch any mistakes, which at this point would do what for me? Just one thing: give me that one tiny detail among a million other details to focus on – the thing that I didn’t catch, the thing that I did wrong. The thing that lets me justify screaming with my fists in the air, “But it isn’t perfect!!!!!! How can I possibly call myself a professional?! I’M A FAAAAIIIILLLLLURRRE!!!”
How funny that we are so often lured into the depths of the one thing “wrong” even as we are practically drowning in so many positives. The one mean comment on a blog. The one person whose attention we can’t seem to get among a sea of adoring faces. The one typo in 160 pages of type.
But I digress. And I haven’t even caught anything yet, but there is no doubt in my mind something will appear, and I’m actually looking forward to that discovery.
[Comparing the color proofs to the first printed sheets.]
I have been in panic attack mode all week, seriously questioning my sanity and the decision I made to get as many books printed as I’m getting printed. See that? I’m too chicken to even put the number here, afraid that if the book bombs everyone will be whispering under their breath, “Well, geez, did you see how many books she got printed? What was she thinking?” Yes, it’s true, the insecurities have been running on full steam this week, blazing through my mind like ants on a glazed doughnut.
[Here comes the cover!]
I thought I would be more excited in the days before the press checks and more emotional as I watched the first pages come flying through, but I was in a total funk at the beginning of the week and yesterday felt like I spent more time and energy goofing off with my partner in crime David (aka my sales rep at Ventura, who I’ve worked with ever since my very first print run of Swirly cards in 1997) than thinking about the significance of this first printing of my book. But I learned long ago that all the things we think we are supposed to feel, all the ways we believe an experience is supposed to turn out, it’s all just a big fantasy in our brains and we have no hope of knowing the truth of what any experience will be until we’re knee deep in it, and then our job is to sink ourselves into it and accept it for whatever it is.
[One of two presses running my book.]
I have been giving my “observer mode” muscle a tremendous workout this year, so much so that it is becoming second nature for me to step back and observe what is going on in any number of situations – my reaction to things, my thoughts, my feelings, even another person’s actions. In challenging situations in particular, this ability to shift into observer mode has become a very resourceful, practical tool, one that enables me to see what is happening without judgment and allow the situation I’m in to unfold in its own way. Rather than resisting or trying to “fix” something, I instead aim to try to let it happen without my interfering in its natural flow, even if that means it is going to flow in a direction that makes me feel uncomfortable or maybe even angry. I find the less I resist the quicker things are resolved, within my heart and mind or otherwise.
[Und now vee vill examine dees page...]
I feel like this is a bit of a rambling entry, but my brain has been on analytical overdrive this week and hey, here I am, trying to do exactly what I’m writing about – letting all of this unfold the way it needs to unfold, right down to today’s blog entry, which is turning out to be nothing like I thought it would be. But I started typing and the thoughts started flowing and now here I am, wondering what the hell the point of this entry exactly is, and being totally OK with the fact that I don’t really know.
In a nutshell, the printing of my book is halfway finished. Tomorrow I head back to Ventura for another day of press checks and then August 18th I return to pick up the books and begin my journey of sending them around the world, hoping they act as water and sunlight to all the beautiful seeds of wisdom, beauty and creativity that are now waiting silently beneath the soil, ready to burst ouot into the world and shine their own light.
To see a quick video of my cover coming through the press, click here.
Inward
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” -Mary Anne Radmacher
Objects and Their Stories
We shared soup and giggles surrounded by hummingbirds and ferns.
I cried the day I left Havana.
A promise was made to see each other again.
And just like that, it was over.
Whatever I was feeling was totally OK, accepted and understood.
Quieter Inside
[On a walk from our rental house to the lake in Ephraim, Wisconsin. Taken last week.]
It turns out I didn’t pack quite casually enough for our vacation in Door County, Wisconsin, and I could have left half of what I brought at home. I know that is a typical travel error – overpacking – but there was something incredibly comforting about the realization that there is a place in the world I can visit for two solid weeks with nothing more than bike shorts, tank tops, hiking shorts, a bathing suit and a pair of jeans. Throw in some jandals and all-around outdoor shoes like the turquoise pair shown above and you’re good to go. The itinerary on Wisconsin’s peninusla is pretty simple and straightforward: ride bicycles on beautiful, peaceful roads as well as along trails through empty forests, kayak on Lake Michigan, hike through the Peninsula State Park, read, nap and – the most important piece of the puzzle – eat.
That list pretty much sums up what I was up to during my two week absence, and I came back having a particular kind of clarity I’m not sure I’ve had in a while. It isn’t that I haven’t had focus or priorities or a clear understanding of what drives me to create the life I’m creating, it is more that I returned home with a lot less noise in my brain. After thinking of myself as someone who longs for a simpler life, I now have a deeper understanding of what I need to do to open up more space for that, and recognize all the ways I have been adding and creating complications in my life unneccessarily. I don’t think this means I am now embarking on a radically different path, but that my life will continue to look basically the same but feel remarkably different as I remove all the tiny threads of distraction that pull me this way and that.
So much is out of our hands in life. Well, pretty much everything is. It is all out of our control – the weather, the stock market, the behavoir of those we love, whether or not whatever we offer the world is accepted and celebrated – none of it can be reined in and molded to our specifications, needs and desires. With this understanding of the way the world works, the best we can do is pick and choose what we allow into our lives, knowing even that can be managed to a very limited extent. My goal now is not to try to force things in or out of my life to create more of this elusive "simplicity", but to approach any situation, dilemma, dream, plan or relationship from a gentler frame of mind. To honor that corner in my mind where the volume is all the way down, and all I can hear is the steadiness of my own breathing. I don’t know how successful I’ll be as time passes and the memory of the past two weeks grows fuzzier, but right now I feel clear-headed and light, and thankful for what will very likely be a tragically brief glimpse of unmitigated contentment.
