Downstream

Today’s territory:

Swimming downstream.
Letting go, letting the current take over.
Being clarity.
Being ease.

In making things, as in living life,
there are actions that enhance our process and desires, and actions that obstruct them.
We have free will.
We can choose whatever serves us best.
We are here to learn to choose.
We have all the time we need.

Imagine a clean mountain stream: several shallow feet of water moving across pebbles and rocks.
Fish, weeds, last fall’s leaves drifting along, the cool water flowing quickly.
Some stones are large boulders, that sit in the middle of the water and divert the water to either side.
They block it from flowing directly along that path of least resistance.
They experience the constant pressure of water pushing and wearing at them.
Some stones are large, but sit along the banks of the stream, diverting it also but in a more gentle way, keeping the constraint of direction and focus by blocking the stream’s expansion.
Some stones are smaller still, pebbles that settle to the stream bed and rest once they are there, rolling back and forth a bit in turbulent weather, but otherwise a predictable ground.
And some stone has been gradually worn away over centuries. It has changed to grit, sand, and dust that has filtered in and down, under and between, all the other detritus in the stream. This stone is now barely recognizable as the same material as the big boulders jutting up from mid-stream and diverting the waters.

All of this is really about the water flowing, the river.
Different elements move around in this flow; watch the fishes and the weeds. The fish choose to move, the weeds cannot choose, but are moved. Active and passive movement. Sentient creatures have choice.

Allrightee, what does this have to do with art and that picture up there?
When I made this particular postage stamp brooch, it was easy to be in the flow of creative inspiration,
to move with that lovely image on the stamp.
I already had many colors and translucencies of polymer clays mixed and conditioned.
Incidentally, we will be making lots of colors, textures and translucencies of polymer clay at the COLOR EVERYWHERE retreat in Bolinas in April. If you feel a bit unsure about how to create and use your own unique color style, check our retreat out. Several  spaces have been taken, but there are still a few left.
Anyway.
So here I am, wanting to make a piece with this stamp.
A direction for flow is easy, no pun intended. Colors and textures are clearly suggested by the stamp itself. My studio is full of miscellaneous materials like this piece of abalone; putting them together seemed obvious. The brooch came together easily, I liked it, someone bought it as soon as she saw it, all went well.

The whole process flowed along without obstacles, like water in a smooth stream. Easy.

So how do you feel reading about this working easily? It’s actually kind of odd, isn’t it,  a bit boring, a little unsatisfying, maybe even kinda irritating?

Why would I tell you about something that worked easily?
Why do most of us feel that something has been left out if things go well? If there is no struggle?

We miss the struggle somehow. It is more interesting, makes things more valuable.
Is this really a defensible position?
Sure seems to cause a lot of pain. And delay. And sense of failure. What is going on here?

Look at another piece. Also a British stamp, and quite a nice design.
I made three brooches from this series of stamps: all more  difficult to
make than they should have been. None of them came out the way
I wanted, and none of them sold.
You know, the truth is that soon after I began to work with this stamp,
I could tell that something was off. It just didn’t feel right. Nothing was
coming together, but I knew it should. I could feel an obstruction in the
energy flow.

Just like Luke ‘Trust the Force’ Skywalker, the energy should have been moving from me into the materials, but it wasn’t.

So I pushed harder. I decided I would make it work, that I was just being lazy, that I needed to try harder. I used elements that should always make things appealing and marketable, like textured gold surfaces, the embossed purple with raised gold, a nice blue to go with the purples.
But these brooches never worked by my standards. They aren’t right, somehow. They never sold, either.

It was as if the elements were pushed into place through a turbulent, struggle-filled energy flow. As if I tried to build a bridge of stepping stones across a raging river, but the stones were shoved around by the waters and washed aside. They couldn’t function there in that place of struggle and turbulence.
So I still have this brooch. I notice the difference between it and others, like the fish above, that we all love.

What’s up with this?
What is this with struggle and ease?
Ease usually has less perceived value than struggle, but struggle takes much more effort than necessary, and often doesn’t work out anyway.

At least in my life this is true, if I look honestly at it all. You can fill in your own examples here.
I will leave aside the question of how we got ourselves into this sad belief structure…

Ease does not mean laziness. This misidentification causes big problems.

Ease has gotten over-identified with not having to work.

However, committing to ease and maintaining it is a different kind of work, and even harder.

True ease requires finesse, intuition, self-confidence, a trust of the universe, a light touch, and other subtle and elegant ideas.

These are all things that are much harder to cultivate and act upon.

In the case of the angel brooch above, the brute force of my will said “ Someone will buy an angel. You must use gold and purple. You must add blue. You must make this now. Do not listen to your intuition. This doesn’t need to be easy or feel good, it just needs to get done.”
Yeow. Does that sound like something you want to buy? Not me.

Contrast that brute force to the feel of moving in the direction of the current, being the flowing waters. Being moved by love and intuition, not fear and judgment.
I am convinced that people buy my work because of the love I have in making it.They feel that.

Of course no one bought this poor angel brooch, energetically exuding difficulty. Why buy a struggle-filled angel? The more I make what I love, from my great appreciation of all the magic of this life’s experiences, the more I trust myself and take action from my intuition, the better my work does.

Much better to be a fish going downstream joyously!

Being able to feel and let go in to the current carrying us downstream is challenging.
It requires trust in ourselves, and trust in life.
We are not trained for this, we are trained mostly to struggle. So our training comes mostly from ourselves, and from those who truly love and care for us.

Our first choice is to believe we really can live with ease, finesse, elegance, grace.
We can head downstream. We can Flow with the Go, as they say in ‘Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe’.
Our second choice is to practice noticing and trusting when things feel good, happy, energized
Things feel this way because this is the feeling of the Go, the river, pulling us along.

This is a better business decision too, turns out.. You noticed this?

More and more people are using this time to start doing what they always truly wanted to do, where their own ease and flow is. Because the struggle and greed didn’t work, in the end. so what is there to lose in being true to yourself now? I still have that purple angel, but the fish sold a long time ago.
The rest is of this practice in letting things be okay, work out.  And being really patient with ourselves too.
I think there are some basic tools for this, but much of it is very individual,

because it means unlearning all those old things (“Anything blue and purple, and gold embossing, and with angels, always sells!”)

and getting back to our basic easy swimming selves (“This fish feels most fun and most energizing to do for right now!”)

I’ve tended to be really hard on myself, so this practice is very moment-to-moment for me. Very necessary.

I will let you know where the current takes me.

Exploring in art as in life,

Tory

Tagged as: Bolinas Color Retreat, Creativity Retreat, Inspiration, Postage Stamp Brooches, Risk and Creativity