CED Check in

I think I might be doing this backwards. I'm posting for what I did last week (August 2-August 9). I just started CED this month and I'm already excited about the many opportunities to be mindfully creative.


Like many people I do morning pages a la Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Over the past several weeks my pages have gone from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Each day I play around with paints, pens, markers and colored pencils and make pages to write my morning pages on the next day. I have many more I'd love to show you but they're filled with pretty personal thoughts so I'll have to wait until I figure out a way to obscure the words a little bit.

As I've been experimenting with painting my morning pages, I frequently wind up with extra paint and it seems such a shame to waste it. One day I noticed a small blank journal on the table and I started to smear the extra paint there. Now playing with the extra paint in my blank book has also become part of my daily ritual.

I've been thoroughly enjoying these practices because I feel no pressure. I'm not making art. In one case, I'm just going to write over the pages anyway and in the other case I'm just using up the extra paint.

In addition to doing these pages each day, I've been up to a couple of other things. On Tuesday and Saturday I helped out some friends who are participating in Project Twenty1. They have 21 days to write, shoot and edit a 10 minute film. I was "the opera ghost" which basically meant I got to wear liquid latex to make me look like a ghoulish creature and pretend to be a ghost. They'd say things like, "Um, what kind of opera would you sing" and I'd make up some operatic sounding song. Or they'd say, "What would you do if someone shined a light on you" and I'd invent some wacky appropriate ghost behaviour. I gotta say, it was fun, mostly because I got to just make stuff up.

On Wednesday I made a full moon dreamboard. I've made vision boards before but this was my first time making one for the full moon and the first time participating in the amazing Jamie Ridler's circle. It's a lovely group and it feels very nurturing to have other women lend support to my intentions and it's also inspiring to witness the aspirations of so many powerfully creative women.

Thursday evening after I finished teaching I sat down and tried to mine a poem that's been sitting at the edge of my consciousness. I sat peacefully and just played with the words. I still don't have a poem but I was very much in the moment as I worked so I really didn't mind. I can't wait to get started on this week.