Collage for Self-Discovery
Week 1-Collage Journal Class- For weeks 2-6 see here
Journey 1: Starting out
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" -Marcel Proust
Finding what is Vivid
Life is truly a collage. As the poet Allen Ginsberg once said, “Vividness is self-selecting.” In a world where we could possibly perceive an infinite number of things, we unconsciously “find vivid” what we need to see and notice for our own unfolding. What stands out and appears vivid to us tells us a story about what we feel and think right now.
When I awake to write this morning, the world outside my window is alive with birds singing. The varieties of songs speak to all the dimensions of myself. Each day I have a choice to live my life from an infinite number of probabilities. I might not realize this if I believe that my habitual approach to life is all that there is. I have discovered that here is much more to me than my past conditioning.
Creativity offers this ability to find the “more” in you. It is a wonderful loosening of old habits and beliefs. I have discovered that I have choice. I can change my perspective. I can paint new colors into my experience. The daily practice of creativity is an invitation into something new.
When I engage my creativity, new probabilities reveal themselves. I see who I am and glimpse what I could be in a visual way. It seems that as I discover and integrate more parts of myself then I can accept and embrace more parts of others. It is a vibrant feeling to include more and more into my experience of living. Connecting with myself makes my relationship with life and other people grow in depth and meaning. This fills me with fire and passion. I wonder; can I hold the whole world inside of me with love?
Seeing in Pictures
I write, I paint and draw and most of all I do a simple form of magazine collage that helps me understand the unfolding of my own life. As I collage my inner world I start to see my whole life in pictures. This is the intuitive way. The soul sees in pictures. Do you ever look at your dreams? If you imagine that every character and situation in your dream is a part of yourself, you will begin to understand collage. Doing a spontaneous collage is like dreaming. The imagery I am drawn to shows me something about what I am within.
Beginnings
In many ways, I have struggled to open up to my most playful and spontaneous creativity. I don’t have a story to share about prodigious childhood artistic talent. I remember myself as a quiet and shy child, longing to express something true about myself. I did not show many outstanding early gifts as an artist.
The odd teacher noticed that I loved to create. But for the most part my creative motivation came from a quiet inward prompting rather than any sort of external encouragement. I am not sure if the poetry I wrote when I was a teenager expressed the intricacies of my heart. I felt muffled and invisible in the middle of my own life.
I spent most of my time in bookstores, trying to understand how other people expressed themselves. For the most part I followed the outer rules. I grew up in a rural area. I was a good daughter. I was Miss Congeniality in a teen beauty pageant. I married early. I felt unknown to myself. I was a blank slate focused more on what others thought I should be. I was unconscious of my deeper motivations.
Reclaiming Wholeness
It is part of the human journey to forget who we really are. I have yet to meet anyone who was deeply mirrored as a child for who they are in their entirety. We are all born as unique beings but as children we cut off the parts of ourselves that do not match our parents or our culture. This is because they cannot recognize or accept them in us. And so these parts go into our shadow. At some point in our adult life we need to find a form of accurate mirroring and reclaim all of ourselves to be whole.
I always knew that I would reclaim my wholeness though art. In my early twenties I distinctly remember standing in the middle of the Mona Lisa Art Supply store, trembling with possibility. I had a vision of expressing myself eloquently and well with color, symbol, and nuance. This felt safe. I would offend no one because only I would know what my pictures meant.
I did not feel safe to express my own uniqueness. I feared that if I did, I would not be loved in some private, primal, childhood place. But as time passed I realized that we all follow this path of early family conditioning, and at some point in our maturity we are called to differentiate. We can spend our entire lives living in the dreams our families and culture holds for us, or we can find a way to wake up to the true essence of ourselves.
Life, with its inner urges and outer surprises has its way of moving us along to this end. My awakening began when I was pregnant with my daughter. Pregnancy woke me up to my body, and I felt the need to listen and create from the inside out. I started to experiment with drawing. I would put the pen to the page and started a doodle and let it evolve on its own.
Many changes came from those early drawings. When my baby was 3 months old, I started to paint in a spontaneous way at a big easel in my basement. I would paint all night. In the morning when she awoke, I would sit with my new daughter in the Good Earth Café, glowing with aliveness and feeling as though I had just been born myself.
When Hadley was in her highchair, I pulled out an old typewriter from the basement and wrote poetry at the kitchen table. I wrote pages and pages of “kitchen poetry.” What was this spontaneous voice that was emerging? It filled me with a courage that fitting in with the status quo could never offer. When I found out my husband was having an affair, I carefully packed all of his clothes in black garbage bags and put them on the front lawn.
Something powerful was emerging. After I put my baby to bed I put music on the stereo and danced in a way that was wild and free. Not long after that I fell in love with a woman and moved with my baby and her to a rural artist’s town deep in the mountains of Canada.
I was eager to recreate myself completely. I was optimistic that this would happen quickly but life and creation is wisely slow. It has been a long and patient uncovering of the limiting beliefs and stubborn habits born in childhood, and in my own learned humanness, that block my intuition on this path to a radiant, truthful life. I have been exploring this intuitive creative path for over 10 years. This is a journey that I share with you in the spirit of deep and abiding connection.
In teaching and writing and reaching out to more and more people with this offering I realize that we are all longing to uncover the truth of our authentic selves. If we are residing in the familiar comfort of old habits and beliefs there is always a stirring of “divine dissatisfaction”. We may choose to accept it’s prodding toward uncovering what wants to be born or instead to meet it with addictions, and distractions of every kind. It is our purpose to love and see every part of ourselves. All of life wants to be accepted and included. This is our creative path and our destiny.
Discovery 1
Gathering Materials
I invite you to join this journey with me by gathering a few simple materials.
A Journal
You will need a good journal that feels inviting to write and collage in. Hold it in your hand and realize the possibility that there may be more of you to discover than what you might be living right now. I recommend a blank journal or sketchbook that is well bound. I usually collage on the right side of the page and reflect and write on the left side. Sometimes I mix the collage and the written reflections together.
Old Magazines
Gather together a good selection of discarded magazines. Libraries and thrift stores often sell them for 10-25 cents each. National Geographic magazines hold a wide variety of imagery that might speak to the more mysterious and unconscious parts of you. The magazines that you regularly read are useful too. For me they usually speak to what I am consciously thinking about and working towards. I love home and art magazines for their beautiful patterns and colors.
Scissors
A comfortable pair of scissors is essential. You will be doing a lot of cutting. I recommend a good pair of hair cutting scissors for their ease of maneuverability, but any small, pointed pair of scissors work quite well.
Glue
A simple glue stick will work best for now. This provides a wrinkle-free adhesion. Later, we will explore wet mediums that work better with painted backgrounds in collage.
Pens and Crayons
An assortment of pens, markers, pencil crayons and even paints are always helpful. You may find yourself wanting to write or draw around or within the collages. Any tool that contributes your sense of excitement and exploration in the creative process is worthwhile. Try exploring art and craft supply stores and let your intuition guide you towards glitter glue, gel pens, oil pastels, colorful markers or watercolor paints.
Storage and Organization
Invariably, when you begin the collage process you will always have extra bits of paper left over that you might want to save for another time. I use a three-ring binder with clear page protectors. In this way I can sort my extra bits of collage scraps by color, category, or theme. It is quite easy to flip through my books and find what I need for my next journal page.
Finding Imagery
When I select imagery in magazines, I simply pull out pages that feel vivid and exciting, or that evoke a strong emotion in any way. This is a mysterious process. On one day I might be drawn to pictures of travel, postage stamps, and exotic locales. These images may fill me with a sense of hope and lightness.
On another day I might find an attraction to dark birds, a stone face, and a lonely window. The dark and disturbing images are equally important. All imagery that feels strong to you can be included in a collage. As in a dream they will not make rational sense to our conscious, everyday mind. As in a dream place each cutout image on the paper without thought, more by feel. This will become more and more natural as you go along.
The most important part of spontaneous collage is exactly this seemingly random putting together of images. It is both simple and profound. When you relax your eyes and body, new information can come in. As you start to see yourself in the images you choose, it becomes easier to see yourself in the context of your everyday life. You can begin to “read meaning” and all of life will speak to you.
Collage has a way of fitting many disparate fragments of reality together. As you integrate all of your parts you begin to perceive a more vivid world. You begin to see wholeness and interrelationships as an artist does. You start to see the underlying unity and exact rightness of your experience in words, shapes, colors and images. Artists invite integration. Collage for Self-Discovery is a simple way that anyone regardless of artistic skill or experience, can begin to open up to a rich and creative life.
