i wonder if cards can help me reopen my creativity?

i got this deck of intuiti cards from an ad i saw on instagram. they were developed by a student at a polytechnic in milan to open up creativity. they use tarot, numerology, design and gestalt psychology and should help with opening up one’s creativity. i thought it would be interesting to work with them to open up my stymied creativity.

the first exercise they recommend is to take the primary cards (they have roman numerals) and pick the one you like best and the one you like least and try to explain to yourself why you choose each one. they say to do it out loud, but i want to do it “out loud” here on the page.

this is the card that i chose as the one i like. i had laid them all out (there are 24 of these primary cards) and then, without thinking too much, i chose the one that spoke most to me in this moment. it would undoubtedly be a totally different card on a different day. but today, it was this card. what i like about it is that it is dark and deep, but the path is bright and clear. that dark blue opening down at the end may be dark and have eyes, but i don’t get a scary feeling from it. nor do i get any ominous feelings from the darkness of the forest. the yellow eyes glowing seem to me like lights in the darkness and i feel that when i get there, they will guide my way. it makes me think of autumn and the time of darkness that lies ahead of us. now, after more than 20 years of it, i’m not afraid of it or dreading it anymore, but looking forward. it’s only when we experience darkness that we can appreciate the light. and this darkness doesn’t feel ominous to me. it feels enveloping and mysterious in a good way. we never know what’s ahead and i feel like we shouldn’t. i get the feeling, looking at this card, with its forest of trees and dark blue opening with yellow eyes at the end, and bright orange path through a bed of deep green, like we may be walking through the darkness, but light lies ahead. 

this is the card that spoke to me in this moment today as the one i liked least. it has a dusty pink background, a blue oval with a green border and with a symbol made of shapes in the middle. they are intertwined and have that möbius unendingness to them. they are a long skinny diamond shape, a half circle, a circle and a triangle, all tangled up within each other. they look like one of those desktop puzzles where there’s a way to take them apart if you fiddle with them just right while you talk on the phone. 

i didn’t like it because in their closedness, they seem unwelcoming and so tangled up in their own thing, there’s no room to join them (they remind me a little bit of the danes). they poked at that terrible feeling that i get when i feel like i’m excluded or don’t belong. being closed off, kept away from the group, not welcome in the community. they also feel somehow like a ritualistic symbol used by a secret society, one that also is based on exclusion. and there are no openings, every way in is closed. the colors were also not appealing in their combination – kind of washed out and clashing a little bit, though not exactly clashing, because they’re too faded for that, but they aren’t in harmony. 

the intuiti booklet gives this explanation of the first card that i chose: 

XVIII: with eyes closed she goes down the dark winding stairs. one step after another, she perceives some changes in her body. at first she becomes narrow and starts to crawl like a baby, then her face gets longer and hair grows all over her body. she continues to go down, in the shape of a beast, in the darkness, and she hears the moans of desire, feels the burning hope, and sees the sparkle of terror. and she continues to go down, in the dark abyss of a dream that contains all the other dreams.

trust the irrational. you must feel, not see.

and the second card: 

XXI: she walks and dances, she devotes herself to the joy of life, she puts a cross step in her walk, and she spins on herself like that, without reason, just for the fun of seeing the colors of the world turning around her. And so that the world too realizes that she is turning within it.

it’s time to connect the dots. 

interesting how different the story the maker applies to them in relation to the story my mind told when it saw them. that seems pretty powerful and the fact that they’re each more or less opposite to how i experienced them is a very rich learning. it reminds me that there is always two sides to everything and those two sides can be diametrically opposed (i should have known that in light of the times we are living in). i also quite like the notion that i should trust the irrational – and i do think that’s not so far from my interpretation of the card that i liked on this day. it was a little bit irrational that i liked it since it seems a bit dark and ominous. And i only see the world in the second one now when i look at the blue background edged in green – it could have an elongated globe-like quality, but i still see it as excluding and not connecting the dots, despite that it’s intertwined. it may be intertwined, but it’s also very closed, so it’s a kind of self-contained and while they may be tangled, they aren’t really in dialogue with one another.

interesting. i’m looking forward to working further with these. i don't know if the exercise opened up my creativity, but i guess time will tell. at least it resulted in these words and that's something.

when rivers of ideas begin to flow

here's what happened with my green felted stone - in fact, in this shot, it's not even dry yet.  if you recall, i used lisa's stone felting tutorial. and i fussed about worried about over-thought pondered how to make it my own. with a little viking helleristning (petroglyph), i think i managed it. i'm not done with this idea yet.

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i have spent a couple of very energizing days with a friend with whom i feel very much in synch. so many ideas surfaced and best of all, it feels like there is action and impetus behind the ideas, so some of them may even materialize. i had the strangest feeling after we met last friday (what i thought would be a 2-hour meeting turned into 5 because we were so crazy in flow)...it felt like a dam had been released inside me and all of the pent-up ideas and thoughts i had had in recent months just began to surface and tho' they were coming quickly, it feels like it's at a pace where i can grab and examine them. some of them had been there for awhile, but some were entirely new. it was positively elating. it's odd how you can get all blocked and not even realize it until you're not blocked anymore.

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things i'm pondering:

what it might mean to be a social artist

community gardens.

art walls.

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i think my keyboard may be menopausal - the period is getting pretty unpredictable.

sorry. bad joke. couldn't help myself.

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what's your type?

find out here.

apparently i'm architype van doesburg (a brutally fair typeface).

play the game, if only to hear the narrator's awesome accent.

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the p boards on pinterest: patchwork. peacocks. personal style. photos that make me think.

inspiration is as close as the library

i've been perusing jan messent's designing for embroidery from ancient and primitive sources, which i just picked up from the library. it's so fascinating i even let my coffee get cold! it was published in 1976 and tho' some of the embroideries and crochet look very 70s, i'm mesmerized anyway. we're a bit enamored of the 70s around here anyway, so it kind of fits.

for a person who thinks almost constantly about inspiration, it's an absolute goldmine - full of ideas on sources of inspiration and how to use them. i scanned a few pages, just of the parts in which messent uses the white horse of uffington, an ancient ground mark in berkshire, england, still visible from the air. 

she shows various ways of using the basic graphic outline of the horse to create very different things....a circle, a repeat, reverses, blocks, color, texture. it has opened my eyes to a whole host of new possibilities.

i'll be on the lookout for this book as i comb the flea markets, but for now, i'm grateful for well-stocked libraries and a service that delivers whatever i want to my local library for pickup, just within a couple of days.

where will your inspiration take you today?

rock on

it was a banner day for mail at our house. this beautiful little stone - entitled one bright morning - arrived from far away alaska. i've been stalking admiring amy komar's artistinthearctic shop on etsy for awhile now and with my birthday approaching, i decided to treat myself. she's got loads of wonderful painted stones in her shop and i can tell you that they are magical in person. check out her blog as well to see what's she working on and for glimpses of the beautiful alaska nature where she lives.

by amy komar - artist in the arctic

i showed sabin amy's shop last evening on etsy and sabin immediately wanted to paint some stones. we both had to try out amy's dotted painting technique and i was totally blown away at sabin's results. i am seriously in awe of her ability to just begin and not overthink everything. she has an amazing feel and is completely in tune with her muses.

this is my favorite of the stones she did last evening...she painted the heart and had intended to paint more, but she looked at it with the one and she said, "i think it's done, mom." i seriously hope she never loses that childlike ability to just be one with her art.

these fishies were a close second. she was actually painting the white one and she said, "mom, i don't know what this is." and i said i thought it was a fish, tho' it could also be a tooth if you tip it up the other way. and since sabin has a couple of loose teeth at the moment, it may have been an artistic manifestation of those pesky molars. but i love it as a fish.

she did another little heart...with dots coming out of it, a bit like the stitching i once did. so sweet.

the embroidered-looking one on the top left is the closest sabin came to imitating amy's work. somehow she intuitively went in her own direction, picking up the influence of the dots of paint, but going off on her own. i found it utterly magical to watch it.

here in my stone basket is the last one sabin did especially for me, right there beside amy's lovely petite little stone and a couple of margie's, the beautiful stone spudballoo had made for blog camp 2.0,  a few of my own and the feather i bought from geninne once upon a time. it's my basket of zen, right here beside my desk.

realizing zen

it seems that completing one thing will cause an avalanche of sorts and it will become lots of things. it was this i was trying to get to with the whole finishing friday concept, but didn't seem to achieve. (when will i learn not to force these things? ) somehow tho' finishing wednesday just doesn't have the same ring to it.

not forcing it, but just going with the flow once you're in it, leaves you with the most wonderful zen sort of feeling. maybe it was all of these lovely stones i gathered on the beach yesterday, sitting there on the table in a big bowl, that set the tone, but i got completely on a roll. it all started with finally finishing that binding on this quilt:

once that was done,  i also finished a tea cozy and my basket of clarity birds and got them all tagged for the april market. once i had all that done, i allowed myself to start some new projects. as a sort of reward.

i guess i'm the kind of person who has to work hard to get into the groove, but once i'm there, it feels pretty unstoppable. i wish i had a bit more discipline and could make it happen more often. does anyone else out there struggle with finishing projects before beginning new ones? how do you discipline yourself?