A Simple Means of Personal Transformation

A line from a story by Kristina Mahoney in The Boston Globe:
"I became curious about life beyond my own self-imposed limitations."

Following the example of her mentor, this woman followed her curiousity and her life grew immensely richer.

Change for the good can be that simple: following those flashes of interest that can come and go in a second, taking the next step, seeing something new grow.

The Morning Glory Project

I've tended to think--wrongly, I know--that a bold action is necessarily one quick simple movement. I'm finding that my current experiment in audacity--the Morning Glory Project-- is slow and involves lots of little pieces.

To paint these flowers on my aged car, I've so far assembled the equipment : borrowed sander, the right grade of sandpaper, spray paints, and a stencil. I also have an old $6 thrift shop filing cabinet I'm going to do first for practice. That's how far along I am now. Today I crank up the sander and grind on the file cabinet. Will report on progress.

I sorta wish I could just wake up tomorrow with giant morning glories growing all over my car. But doing the bits and pieces seems a necessary part of the process. As with writing books, etc.

From Passionate Marriage

My psychologist husband Bob often wants my opinion on books that pass across his desk. This one--Passionate Marriage, by David Schnarch--I grabbed. And I found that it offers some wisdom that applies to more than marriage.

From page 297: "We have the fantasy that we have the choice between being anxious or not. Unfortunately, we don't. Our choice is one anxiety or another. Do something scary--or face problems from not doing it. Make an error by commission--or omission. Face the anxiety that things will change--or stay the same. Do...things you've never done--or forfeit that taste of life. Face the anxiety of growing up--or the terror of living life as a perpetual child."

I decided somewhere in my college years that life was sufficiently daunting that going for broke hardly adds to the risk at all. I've certainly wavered on that many a time. Yet I still hold to it, act on it as much as I can.

Color Your Own Parachute

Perhaps thirty years ago I read an article in Travel & Leisure about Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. I'm pretty sure it was written by Paul Theroux, a fellow travel writer/novelist, though a much more prolific one. The photos showed mist and deep green. And there was a line in the story that I've remembered ever since, which said in effect: only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.
Last weekend, I was at Wrightsville Beach where I grew up. The weather was so-so, and the beach was terrific: the water warm and the waves, close-up, full of light. A few clouds didn't stop the major surfing competition that brought crowds to the beach--the Reef/Sweetwater Pro-Am--though surfers had to paddle in for a little while to let a spate of lightning pass.

One way and another, people brought their own color, their own good weather. It was inspiring. Now I'm toying with the idea of taking a surfing lesson; it seems the right thing to do before I turn sixty. Also to finally get around to going to the Dingle Peninsula. I was so happy that I finally braved getting into the water last weekend. I'm generally happier, I find, when I don't let myself be stopped by a trifling obstacle, when I go ahead and take the plunge.

Dressing Bold

"Loud and Clear

The Message in Accessories? Go Bold or Go Home."

This is a message in the new issue of W, my favorite fashion magazine--and even with the fun of the Internet, I'm still a hard-copy-full-0f-perfume-ads-magazine junkie.

Now the truly self-expressive person certainly isn't ruled by fashion mavens or trends.

However, there's an advantage to each new turn of the fashion wheel. That is: for a few months, those of us who like feathered pocketbooks or other such conversation pieces will have them easily available and can stock up. And then they'll be drifting into the thrift shops for a few years. So if big color and strange clothing creations are your style of high glam, this is your heads-up.

Then too, I just sort of like the phrase: go bold or go home. I like it even better this way: go bold and go home. The real boldness is authenticity. And decorating one's self according to one's genuine taste is part of being authentic.

Approached that way the whole process is a joy, as it should be, rather than a social obligation.

And decoration is, I read, more and more of a guy thing. Note above the fine start on a decorated mailbox from RK, a novelist/teacher as well as a valued commenter here. He is continuing to work on this, with the addition of red paint, and some leaf prints. Definitely going to be a bold combo.

The Admirable Art of Self-Promotion

For anyone who is hesitant about promoting her or his own work: take a look at this piece of encouragement in the New York Times.



I am one who is blessed with what my politician brother calls microphone fever. I like promoting my work. I respect others' efforts to promote theirs.



The only time I ever cringe in embarrassment is when my husband leaves my business card, with book credits and contact info, etc, at a restaurant table for the waiter to pick up with the credit card. That's my limit. Maybe it's the fact that he's doing it and not me. I'm not sure. (I keep giving him cards, because he puts a lot of them to good use when I'm not around.)



In any event, I think most of us have some shaky moment about advancing our own passionately-held cause. I believe that, on the whole, holding back from telling people about our work is a bad idea. It leads to resentment and poor sales, and who knows what else.



You might also have a look at the book refered to in the article: Brag: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. One review says it defines bragging as an act of authenticity. Seems right to me.

Obsession Update; Obsessive Art

The project to paint huge blue morning glories on my car has taken tiny steps forward. The custom-cut stencil has arrived from England. I borrowed an electric sander from one of my brothers. And I've acquired a thrift-shop file cabinet to practice on. (Keep in mind: I'm a writer not a visual artist.)

The idea of painting my car this way has dogged me for years. There's a very good chance that it will look awful. But I must proceed. It's in my DNA. Or my karma. It was the same way with the idea of setting a novel in the city of Varanasi, India; it was clear years before I ever visited the city that I had to write such a book. That turned out to be Sister India, which grew out of notes I took after spending a winter there.

I am possessed in the same way now, not only with the morning glories, but with research on a biography of a strange and little-known painter who died in 1947. It's a good thing it's possible to be ferociously pulled by more than one project at a time; I'd be in trouble if I devoted all my time to car painting.

The feeling I--and so many of us, at one point or another--share is that of the guy in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's obsessed with the shape of a mountain he has never seen. He even sculpts the form in mashed potatoes at the dinner table. He has to find that place.

That's one kind of obsessive art. The other is the kind that is meticulously repetitive: Campbell Soup cans, for example. No doubt, the two types of obsessiveness are related.

I do have a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. And I don't want to romanticize that. It's no fun at all. But this passion for a project feels like an obsession of a different sort. It feels like love.

SIX LINKS, cool in extremely various ways, to more on art obsessiveness:


!Obsessive-Compulsive-Artistic Geniuses?

Why Do We Like to Watch Obsessive Art

On Being Eccentric

Inventive Art Created from the Mundane

Insect-Obsessed Artist

Obsessed with Painting vs. Finding a Balance


And A QUESTION: Do you ever get obsessed with a project, maybe one that you know is weird but MUST PURSUE anyway?

Billionaire Inventor Who Doesn't "Think Straight"

James Sorenson's teachers said he'd never learn to read, says Monday's USA Today. His mom said he could do anything he set his mind to. A friend and dean of a business school says he's a "non-linear thinker." The reporter who wrote the story said that "his thoughts meander so much that a few hours (with him) produced a...notebook full of disconnected clutter."

Yet Sorenson has, over his several decades, put his thoughts together extremely well and come up with a list of medical inventions to his credit. Many of his ideas have come to him while he's soaking in the bathtub with a washcloth over his face.

Now at 86 he has begun the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, sampling DNA in 107 countries. He wants to show that people have a common ancestry, without regard to races and ethnic groups. His hope is that demonstrating this will lead to world peace. His wife of 60 years says," I stand back and wait, because he does the impossible...You can't tell him he can't do something."

Biography Research: Repotting a Book-in-Progress

When I was a few months into my research on my biography of painter Elisabeth Chant, I bought a thrift shop item to house my growing stacks of notes.

That piece of furniture, shelves that were more like mail slots, was fine for a while.

But recently I realized I needed more space, and lots more different files. The distinctions in topics were growing ever finer, in addition to the added piles of bulk material.

So: a new container. I'm up to a very deep-drawered file cabinet, dressed in a sari from Varanasi, the setting of my novel Sister India. (This is the very distinctive Banarsi brocade.)

And this doesn't count the shelves of books, or the digital material.

I expect I'll have to repot another time or three before this book is done. It's a satisfying piece of the process, seeing it grow.

Repurposing

I like using things in ways other than their original purpose. To me, that's one of the three basic approaches to creativity, to making up new stuff:
1. use a familiar object for a new purpose
2. look at the familiar from a different perspective
3. combine elements that haven't been put together before (or never so well.)

This assemblage to the right is my project of last weekend: the idea being to do something with the unsightly nearly-six-foot multi-armed "stump" at the edge of my woodland garden.

I find it wonderfully phantamagorical, and expect the flower-pot-handed arms to start waving, hydralike.

Another nice thing about this kind of project is: it's not my writing, my career, and all that...I'm free to do it as sloppily as I want. Very liberating.