Soulfaring –

Welcome to my blog.  This is my first post, and my first venture into blogging.  The creative possibilities of this excite me and my goal is to create a place where anyone who is interested in living an authentic creative life can find inspiration, guidance, and affirmation.

I have entered my 21st year as an art therapist.  When I reached my 20th anniversary in this work, I knew that I would need to create something that would help me both reflect on, and honor, the 20 year process of working, living, and engaging with community and world as an art therapist.  Originally, I thought that creative reflection would be done in one of the art forms I have come to know deeply during these 20 years – mosaic, printmaking, poetry, storytelling. Instead, the creative process has totally surprised me.

It began with a total reorganization of my studio, inspired by a series of dreams calling me to give my work a larger, more generous home.  That lead to renewed excitement for the business work of promoting my practice – creating brochures, marketing workshops, etc.  A deep tending and self-validating of my work.

I also sat down at the computer to begin writing what I called my “art therapy memoir”.  So many transformative moments with so many amazing people have been part of my ongoing work-life, with never adequate time to write about them, reflect on them in the here-and-now as I am living them. My thought was that I would go back and reclaim them in this “memoir” process.

But something kept stopping me. Memoir writing energy just wasn’t there.  The last time I sat down to work on this I found myself writing, “I don’t want to go back over the past. I want to write about the present. To live a new, immediate process, not direct my creative energy toward what has already been.”

I also realized that even my methods for writing are based on old practices.  Sitting in the college coffee shop with my spiral bound notebook worked 25 years ago.  Writing at the computer in solitary hours to slowly compile a book that I would send out to publishers has been another way I have often worked. But now I want to combine my own doodles, writing, art projects, photos of others healing art experiences, community interaction, dialogue, story, poetry all in one place.   A living journal, a creative process that does not ever have to be finished, completed, finalized. Something organic. Something that will engage me in a new creative process.

And so this week, when a friend suggested I try a blog rather than update my old, and sorely out of date, website to market my current work, I realized that the blog medium opens up all kinds of new ways of creating for me.  And presents the opportunity for me to share with you the here-and-now life changing events that art therapy, and engaging with unexpected living images, offers us all.

I am very much looking forward to sharing with you the blessings of my work.

So, welcome to this dialogue with creativity.

And welcome to my blog.

This entry was posted on October 24, 2009 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.