Want to read: The Tarot of Leonora Carrington by Gabriel Weisz Carrington 📚
Want to read: The Tarot of Leonora Carrington by Gabriel Weisz Carrington 📚
Also in his first appearance, Tommy the Green Ranger wears this amazing green & white plaid with black short sleeves and a black hood. It’s so very 1993 and I would wear it SO HARD.
Every time we’re watching Power Rangers and Kimberly says “I’m Kimberly” I say “I’M Kimberly!” and I don’t think my kid likes it. 📺
Currently reading: The Artist’s Way - The Basic Tools by Julia Cameron 📚
🔖 Read The Death Positive Movement.
▶️💻 Watched What is the Death Positive movement?
🔖Read Death Is Having a Moment.
🔖 Read The Death Positive Movement Encourages Us to Face Death Directly.
▶️💻 Watched What remains.
Finished reading: The Artist’s Way - Spirtual Electricity: The Basic Principles.
I don’t have a lot to say overall about this chapter, so I’m just going to share my annotations with you.
We tend to think, or at least fear, that creative dreams are egotistical, something that God wouldn’t approve of for us… If your mom or dad expressed doubt or disapproval for our creative dreams, we may project that same attitude onto a parental god.
I think me not really fitting the mold of a lot of the people Cameron is addressing is going to be a pattern for a lot of this program. My parents were incredibly supportive of any creative dream I might express. A lot of this came from my mom’s own experience of her parents treating creative activities as frivolous pursuits, I think. She took great care to support myself and my siblings in our creativity. My dad did, too, though I don’t think it came from the same place as my mom’s experience. They still are both very supportive of our dreams.
As you work with the tools in this book, as you undertake the weekly tasks, many changes will be set in motion. Chief among these changes will be the triggering of synchronicity: we change and the universe furthers and expands that change.
This reminds me of a beautiful quote from Bakara Wintner’s WTF is Tarot? and How Do I Do It?:
In The Fool, we say yes to the universe and in The Magician the universe says yes back to us.
I’m not big into manifestation talk or The Secret or whatever, but I do think deliberately setting an intention subtly moves us in ways that make us more likely to meet that intention.
We are, ourselves, creations.
I really think this idea aligns well with my whole cosmic art mom thing. Every human grew in some other human’s uterus. I like to imagine my kid as his own person, of course, but also as a collaborative work of art to which I’ve contributed. (I feel like that sounds icky. I don’t mean it in an icky way.)
You probably won’t have time to complete all of the other tasks in any given week… In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist.
In earlier attempts, I found that I struggle with choosing tasks because none of them seem to evoke responses in me. Since I’m doing this on my own timeline, and I have such a hard time picking, I’m going to try them all.
We begin to excavate our buried dreams.
I’ll be interested to see how I respond to this. I haven’t made my decisions based on what’s expected or nice. My mom instilled in me a deep sense that being “nice” is not as valuable as it might first seem. (As a young person, people always told her how nice she was.) Nice and kind are not the same thing. I think it’s important to be kind. I don’t think it’s important to be nice. I don’t think of my dreams as buried as much as shelved. I know what they are and where they are, and sometimes I take them out and play with them. I have never allowed work to drive my creative interests out of me.
How do you know if you are creatively blocked? Jealousy is an excellent clue. Are there artists whom you resent? Do you tell yourself, “I could do that, if only…”
More often than not, instead of jealous, I feel inspired. If this person wrote a book after 10 years of not writing anything, so can I! If this person built a comedy career with only a bachelor’s degree in theater, I don’t need any extra training to start doing comedy! If this person only started writing their novel after two years of research, it’s okay that I’m in a research phase and haven’t started writing yet!
Stop telling yourself that dreams don’t matter, that they are only dreams and that you should be more sensible.
I wonder how much of this isn’t a problem for me because I have divorced the notions of art and money. Not that people shouldn’t get paid for creating art, but that I don’t have to wait to create art until it’s my job. I do all kinds of things that aren’t my job because they bring me joy. My job doesn’t have to be the vessel for my dreams. If it can, neat! If it’s not, that doesn’t mean I can’t find other ways to live my dreams.
▶️💻 Watched A burial practice that nourishes the planet.
🔖 Read Feminist Death Work: A History.
🔖 Read Funerals are expensive, broken and exploitative. They have to change
I love what Sarah Chavez says:
Your death matters. You can choose something that will reflect the values and beliefs that you held in your life, and translate them into your death.
Currently reading: The Artist’s Way - Spiritual Electricity: The Basic Principles by Julia Cameron 📚
Big Kimberly Energy, according to W., is writing a full parody libretto for a musical.
Anybody else get a little Billy-Crystal-as-Miracle-Max vibe from Brent Spiner’s performance as very-old Dr. Noonian Soong? 🖖🏻📺
This post contains minor spoilers for Star Trek Discovery Season 4 Episode 2, “Anomaly.”
Near the end of the latest episode of Discovery, Lt. Tilly tells Dr. Culbert that something feels off about herself, and that she’d like to talk to him about it in a professional context sometime.
This feels to me like a clear indication that Tilly is dealing with depression, anxiety, or both, and I’m very interested in following where this goes, especially as I read Tilly as my own sort of Discovery-avatar.
Over at Keith R. A. DeCandido’s recap for Tor.com, a commenter says,
The best thread for later is Tilly. Does she miss her mother? Is it about all the stress and loss and responsibility they’ve had? Mental health is an all too often ignored issue, so I hope they do it justice.
I, too, hope they do it justice, but what I don’t need is for there to be something Tilly’s depression is “about.” There certainly are things that can trigger depression, but the depression itself isn’t always a response to trauma. Sometimes it just happens because your body isn’t producing the chemicals it needs to.
I would love to see Tilly work through identifying how she’s feeling, struggling to decide between treatment options (or whether to go beyond talk therapy at all), and dealing with the consequences of whatever treatment she chooses. I’d also just love to see what mental health care looks like in the 32nd century.
But I don’t need there to be a reason she’s depressed.
Because depression doesn’t require a reason to appear.
Information is my love language.
I want to mark Stephen Sondheim’s passing with a story about his influence in my life but there are too many little moments to sum it all up. What a joy to have had him in the world as long as we did.
Bless Linda Holmes and her holiday movie guides.
Some international fans will be getting new episodes of Star Trek: Discovery starting Friday, Yay!
Hello world. Imagine I’m interested in fountain pens but am a complete beginner. Where would you tell me to go to learn more? What would your advice be? How do I get started? ✒️🖋️
Reading STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST again and when Austin Kleon described Patti Smith pretending to be an artist I thought “Cool, I’ll pretend to be a writer” and now I’m doing a Google image search for writer. So far it’s mostly disembodied hands writing in notebooks, so I’m on track.
Finished: The Artist’s Way - Introduction by Julia Cameron. 📚
Cameron’s introduction is very introducey, setting a foundation for understanding the work of The Artist’s Way and explaining her own story. My favorite quote from this section is probably “Accumulate pages, not judgments.” (p. xv)
Cameron spends a fair amount of time here talking about her use of the term “God” in the book, and how it’s there because this is a spiritual path but you don’t need to be a theist to follow it. She suggests substituting something like “good orderly direction” or “flow” if “God” makes you uncomfortable.
I think I’m going to substitute “Cosmic Art Mom.”
I am agnostic, humanist, and a bit witchy. I haven’t identified as Christian for a very long time, and I’m no fan of the idea of a sky bully, but from a tiny age I believed in a Sky Mom, and I kind of still do.
My earth mom is a theologian by training, and taught me a lot about who God is supposed to be before I ever went to church. When I finally went to a church and they kept referring to God as “he,” I was outraged. I said, “No! God is a Mommy!” because everything my mom said - creation, unconditional love - these things were, in my mind, things moms did.
I didn’t know I was doing the toddler version of Goddess Spirituality, but I pretty much was. In spite of my agnosticism, I still fall pretty squarely somewhere on the Goddess movement spectrum. I have an intuitive sense that there is a Sky Mom - or maybe I’ll just stick with Cosmic Mom from now on - out there looking out for me. I can get a bit Deist about it at times because obviously stuff goes wrong for me specifically and the world at large - but especially now that I’m a mom, I kind of get it. Moms mess up. Our attention wanders sometimes.
Like many ancient deities, Cosmic Mom can bear a variety of epithets. I’ll probably imagine Cosmic Art Mom, who, for the record, is pretty much a deified Carrie Fisher, as I work through The Artist’s Way.
What do you think of when you see “God” in The Artist’s Way?