Rollin On the River

it's about the flow

Back when I was working full time and in the thick of motherhood, I was desperate to squeeze art time into my day. To steal, scrounge and scavenge my art time, I did things that, at the time, felt more like treading water, rather than diving into my art like I wanted to do.

circa 2007 or so

In my corner of the art world, many people know me as the artist who worked on her bed. I told them it was because of a lack of workspace, and that’s true, but no one really knows why I began to make art on my bed.  Imagine trying to put three children, ages 5, 7, and 9, who all slept in the same blue bedroom right across the hall from ours to bed. That nightly ritual of overseeing the bath and bed routine required a good hour or so of supervising, monitoring, and saying (yelling), “Go to sleep!” Rather than waste this mom-duty time, I started working on the only available place and space within sightline and earshot: my bed. My clear expanse of a queen-size, four-poster, comforter-covered bed. Every day, I woke up and said to myself, “Maybe this is the day I’ll get to make some art.” Really! Every single day. A mantra of sorts that kept the flame burning.

As the days, months, and years went on, I began to look for ways I could turn wasted or waiting, frittered or fallow time into my creative advantage. We really don’t need to watch a pot of water come to a boil, do we? What I didn’t realize until much later when people began to ask me how I got it all done, was that all the things I did to create art time were contributing to and creating a perpetual, personal, simmering state of flow.

How do you get to the point of flow when your creative time is snatched and crammed in cracks and crannies between the day-to-day responsibilities of your busy lives? Why wait for flow? Why hope to catch the wave? Why drown in frustration any longer? Here’s how to get to and stay in flow…

BE THE RIVER!

2013. At the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers

A river is in a constant state of flow, even when it encounters obstacles. It goes around or tears down. The magnitude of a river’s flow is so powerful it literally carves itself through landscapes. It flows over rocks, meanders down hills, and falls over precipices in a loud, powerful rush of sparkling water, like the awe-inspiring creative force it is. It is always on a journey to something greater.

Be the river; be in constant and powerful flow. Over the years, the frustrating years when the time to create was so elusive, I discovered how to prepare myself to be ready to create a moment’s notice. The solution was never to get out of flow. Always be thinking, planning, doing, mulling, musing, reading, envisioning, dabbling, sorting, drawing, daydreaming, doodling, and imagining your art. Granted, it’s not the suspended-time, world-drops-away kind of flow, but it is a way of being that enables your creatability to be ready and ripe when the time is right. When the time appears, you can hit the ground running, just like the river. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Quotes of the Week

The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us,
thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies,
making them glide and sing.
 John Muir

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving through you, a joy.
Rumi

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. 
Norman Maclean