As I write this, I am on the sofa of a friend’s home in Western Pennsylvania. We are on a 13-day vacation, which has definitely made this week more challenging for daily and weekly tasks. As I’ve learned from The Artist’s Way and other books or tools I’ve tried in the past, it can be hard to stick with a daily or weekly practice of anything when life throws you a change. Typically, this is where I would go off the rails and proclaim “I’ll pick it back up when things go back to normal.” But this time I’ve chosen to keep moving. It may not be perfect, and a few things may not get done, but I am not going to quit altogether. I have decided to take it one day at a time and do the best I can. That alone is a step in a changed direction for me.

Tasks

Week 3 had 4 overall tasks:

1. Bless Your Blessings - a walk in which you reflect on all the blessings in life. People, places, things, anything that brings blessings to you.

2. Use Anger as Fuel - make a list of 50 things that make you angry, from the petty to the grandiose, and then find a few that you can do something about. I struggled a bit with this one. I have been meditating and working on mindset for a while now, and I actually found it difficult to come up with 50 things that I could honestly say I felt true anger about. Frustration, maybe, or disappointment, but labelling something as making me truly angry was difficult.

3. Mapping Your Interests - make a list of 5 things that interest you, 5 people that interest you,5 art forms that interest you, and from that 5 projects you could create. Simple as it seems, this one was very helpful in inspiring new ideas.

4. Wanna Make Something of It? - This last task was to set an intention and set aside one hour to collage about it..Since most of the magazines I have on hand are fashion magazines, I didn’t want to focus on the fashion as much as the intention set. I chose to flip swiftly through magazines after setting my intention to see what really stood out for me.

After collaging for twenty minutes, the book suggests reflecting on your collage in writing for 20 minutes. Here is what I found:

Collage

Before starting this project, I searched my consciousness for something I wanted to understand more fully. For me, this was a clearer vision of my purpose but also what is missing in my life. A lofty ask, I’m aware, but I was curious to see what would come up.

What I found was interesting. I have a strong female focus in my collage, but many types of women are represented. One image represents the masks we wear. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, and how we all wear masks daily. I have personally been working on removing my masks and living a more authentic life. Many of the other female images represented what I feel as many sides of myself, whether seen or unseen at the moment, all parts of me that need love. The free-spirited wild side, the bold side, the classic art side represented through photography, fashion, art and self-development, and the side that is bewitching, spiritual and magical. All sides of me are present; all need proper nurturing.

Then there were the spirit representations, the longing for travel and worldliness, the freedom of the bird, the letting go represented by dancing and movement imagery.

These, along with the phrases and words that pulled me in, all tell me I am on the right path and that I need to let go and trust even more. To stop hiding myself and be free.

Artist’s Date

I did not have a proper Artist’s Date this week with all of the travel, but I have been working to allow myself time alone with my thoughts even as we hop from place to place. This is one of the goals of the Artist’s Date, so I am trying to find other ways to serve the purpose.

Getting my meditations in where I can as we travel

Weekly Walk

My daily walks have also been disrupted a bit by our travels. When we got to Western New York for the first leg of our trip, the air quality was severely affected by the fires in Canada, so I wasn’t able to go on my morning walk for the remainder of the week. I was able to do my blessings walk before we left town. Technically, the weekly task only specifies one weekly walk, so I guess I didn’t miss this one entirely.

More than anything, I am proud of myself for continuing to move forward with the weeks even if each one isn’t executed perfectly. This is a big step for me as someone who typically would just quit if something couldn’t be done perfectly. My personal growth shows in many different ways along this path, and not always just from the assigned tasks.

Week 3: Discovering A Sense of Perspective

Discovering A Sense of Proportion: Walking In This World - Week 2