Heartsong Studio

You’re overwhelmed with too many demands: a house to clean, kids to raise, a living to earn. Seems there’s always something more important than indulging yourself in making art.

A New Yorker cartoon shows Superman, the disguise of his everyday suit stripped off and flung over a deckchair. There he lies on a tropical beach wearing sunglasses, sunblock, and sipping a cool drink, with a big red S emblazoned on his muscular t-shirt. He’s answering his cellphone right now — “Listen pal, they’re all emergencies.”

What’s Superman’s secret?

He knows he can’t possibly do it all, because he’s a normal human being, needy by definition. He knows from experience that mercy, compassion and love don’t come from him in the first place. Unless he regularly refills his own spirit with these qualities, he won’t have any left to give to anyone else. It’s simple - he won’t survive.

Several times a day, whenever he gets a call for help, Superman surrenders his everyday disguise and bares his inner spirit. It takes but a moment of his time.

Indulgence or spiritual renewal ?

You can use art making in the same way the cartoon Superman used lounging on a beach. If you can surrender your overwhelm whenever you get empty, you can make art as a way to renew your spirit. The time it takes depends on how readily you can strip off - surrender your outer disguise.

At first, make sure you’re alone when you strip.

Surrender. Go inside and with inner reflection or Remembrance, say out loud what you’re feeling. No, really; let it out: “I can’t do all this! I’m afraid I can’t cope anymore!”

The hardest thing is to admit that you cannot do it all. Surrendering seems like giving up in failure, but it’s not. It’s empowering.

For once, don’t force yourself like a good little soldier you’ve been all your life, to confront this fear and march yourself down into the basement. Don’t. Instead, allow the feeling, watch it like a mother would watch her child until it dissolves.

Then ask to be filled with mercy, patience, compassion, love - whatever qualities you need. Without second guessing how it will feel, wait until you start to actually sense yourself filling.

Take a tip from Superman on the beach:

They’re all emergencies, and yours comes first, or no one survives.

Making art this way as a regular practice renews your own spirit. It keeps the creative qualities primed and your Superman energy flowing from your heart out through your hands. Besides, you will enhance your ability to make art and care for others at the same time. Your dependents will thank you.

“Clark Kent’s Other Life”

 I based this painting on a photo of
my husband Bill taken 60 years ago. Check out the tatoo I gave him and the name of the magazine.

My friend, Bill Allen, used to be a school principle in California. One day, he decided to hold the weekly fire drill at recess. To his utter horror, all the kids followed instructions to the letter and ran back into their classrooms, because that’s where the fire drill map started !

You may have been taught that the way to work from your imagination was to follow the blueprint instructions in your mind. I’ve had a tendency myself to approach painting that way out of a wish to stay safe with what I know. Like me, you may have found that this tends to result in just another work of art similar to the last.

What if there had been a real fire that day ?

Following instructions could have led the kids to their deaths. Bill and his staff were shocked to realize that blind obedience was what they were actually teaching with this fire drill routine. Not only didn’t it serve to keep them safe, it also blinded them from seeing what their deeper purpose really was.

Just as the old fire drill route was so rigidly mapped out that it shut down flexible thinking, copying what already exists in your mind tends to blind you from acting in service to your heart’s calling and the whole point of making this piece.

Humbled, Bill and his staff took a step back to examine their real goals for the children. Brain-storming in staff meetings, they agreed that their larger purpose was to develop competent flexible thinking.

In the same way, you can shift your focus from the solution - already finished in your mind - to the original feeling behind your idea. By “heart-storming”, you can explore and expand your motivating spark for this work.

Ways to kindle your spark:

1. Play around with different colours of modeling clay or play dough long enough to explore the tactile depth of your feeling.

2. Sniff out your kitchen, field, shore, woods, or workshop, looking with your nose for a smell that brings life to your intuition.

3. Let your ears search out different music, sounds, and noise, to see which brings your feeling into focus.

4. Just before you drop off to sleep, ask for a clearer sense of the feeling in a dream.

Once the spark of inspiration ignites into a deeper emotion . . .

Go inside with the Remembrance or any other inner reflection, and humbly surrender to this higher purpose. Wrap yourself in the sounds, scents, or dreams that inspire your intention.

With suitable physical movements, get your whole body into it, using whatever media presents itself as appropriate. Let it lead you to even better solutions to express your deeper feelings as they naturally overflow from your heart out through your obedient hands.

The whole school had fun getting creative together, thinking up possible fire emergencies and ways of responding to them. As they practiced a different situation every week, they became a school of growing creative intelligence, not blind obedience.

What a difference !

Sometimes your solution may resemble the image you originally had in your head, just as the kids might use the old escape route if a fire occurred while they were in their classrooms. With creative intelligence rather than automatic obedience, the visual metaphor that shows up in your work, whether or not it resembles your mind’s first image, is sure to transmit your heartfelt inspiration in an original and effective way.

Rather than struggling to copy the first image that comes to mind and make just another picture, your heart full of expanded purpose will show you the way. As a visual metaphor emerges, like the fire drill kids, you too will be transformed in the process. Born through creative intelligence, your resulting art will transmit deeper meanings that may surprise even you.