Working With Intensity, an amazing book by Daniels and Piechowski

Thank you, Melissa, for recommending this book.  Like finding the Myers-Briggs when I was 19, or The Highly Sensitive Person at 29, this book is affirming and encourages me to stop fighting who I am.  Funny how we circle back over and over through that lesson, huh?  

By the way, I am an INFJ....what are you all???  

Here are some quotes:

Intensity, Sensitivity and Overexcitability

Dabrowski explained the sensitivity and intensity experienced by these individuals in terms of overexcitabilities – a greater capacity to be stimulated by and respond to external and internal stimuli.  Overexcitability permeates the person’s existence.  Whether it’s music, language, physical sensing, kinesthetic activity, imagination, or something intellectual, an overexcitability orients and focuses them.  Overexcitability gives energy to their intelligence and talents.  Like a plant turns toward light, overexcitability draws out a their thoughts and behaviors.  An overexcitability is a temperamental disposition toward a class of stimuli that the person notices and responds to.  It is a lens that opens, widens, and deepens their perspective.  They receive and respond to signals that many others don’t even know or can’t imagine might exist.

Overexcitabilities are “original equipment.”  They are innate predispositions.  We are born with them.  Although everyone is born with basic modes of experience, persons with overexcitabilities are unusually intense in their experiences.  They react to lower stimuli than others – that is, one’s reactions may be higher or greater than others’, but also one’s threshold for reaction may be lower, and a person may react strongly to what others perceive as a non-event.

The five forms of overexcitability are: psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, intellectual, and emotional.  People often hear:  “You are just too sensitive.”  Our goal, with children with overexcitabilities, should be to nurture our children’s genuine self-expression – to support each individual child along his or her unique developmental path.  In terms of expression of overexcitabilities, we must guide our children to express and release their intensity and energy in safe and gratifying ways; and to help our children learn strategies to modulate the expression of their OEs.  To modulate means:

1.     to regulate or adjust

2.     to alter or adapt according to circumstance

3.     to change or vary the pitch

To ask a child to completely quiet or squelch expression of their OEs can be damaging to the child’s development.

PS - you can get directly to the blog from the link at the bottom of the email....

If you scroll to the bottom of the email that comes to you when someone posts, there is a live link that will take you directly to the blog - how easy it is!!  love Catherine

My Recipe for Making a Collage - and a challenge - How do you do your creativity???

Here's my little recipe, dear Swans....can you write a few lines about your creative process - remember to go to NEW POST so it's not just a reply:)

Recipe For Making a Collage by Catherine Haynes

A. Prepare the Space

1.     Turn on the Fairy Lights.

2.     Spray the room with Bright Star Mist

3.     Light some sandalwood incense or a pine candle

4.     Turn on some music, e.g., Tallis Lamentations or The Prayer Cycle

B.  Lay Out Your Materials

Beautiful handmade colored papers, craft papers; feathers, pearls; images from dreams or meditations or magazines or photos you’ve taken; scraps of poems; pastels, colored pencils, marking pens; glitter paints and acrylic paints in your favorite colors: teal, bronze, gold, copper, violet, black

C.  Sit silently before them and (choose either 1 or 2)

1.     Feel your way toward the seed of an idea that has been germinating and stirring in you – breathe with it, invite it to unfold, invoke it, provoke it – then as it begins to take shape dance with it, rock it, sing to it, breathe life into it and….(move on to D.)

2.     If there aren’t any particular ideas coming to mind, take three deep breaths with your eyes closed, feel the chair you are sitting on, listen to the sounds around you.  When you are centered, open your eyes and…(move on to D.)

D.  Turn toward your supplies and see what is alluring to you at this moment. 

Let yourself be drawn by a color, a paper, a picture - by anything there in front of you.  Pick it up and introduce yourself to it.  Hold it and see what it wants to doJ.  Pick out something else that IN THIS MOMENT interests you. Simply follow what arises as you sit with the materials, as you PLAY in the unselfconscious exploring way of children. If necessary, ask your inner critic to sit on a chair outside the room until you are done.

E.  See what develops.  At any point you can:

1.     Paint over everything with a lustrous transparent gold or evanescent pearl paint.

2.     Burn the edges so that they melt one into the other until past, present and make believe are one and the same.

3.     You can start over and do it again, differently, 3 times, 13 times. 

4.     Follow idea shifts and riff on what shows up, or stands out wanting to be carried through into the dark night of gestation and shooting stars, or into the honeysuckle-scented morning before the heat rises.  Or let it take you into the sacred garden with its lanterns and the breeze moving the spider web from the shadows into the light, and back again – a blessing, an invitation, an invocation to weave what is in you; to let it come through you no matter how many times it is broken, but to start again with one thread thrown here to the hydrangea branch and one to the vine maple, back and forth because something in you is templated to create in just your way in the very particular colors and scents and sights of the unique life you have fashioned thus far…

Can't resist posting this one!

Beginning again in the studio

These past few days I have begun to work in my studio again, playing around with materials that I've had for a long time. Did you see my posting of the John Cage quotation? I'm going to put it here again, because it seems so relevant at the moment!

"When you start working, everybody is in your studio--the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas--all are there. But as you continue painting [or writing or creating], they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave."

I know what Cage is talking about, though I'm not yet alone in the studio . . . this takes time, I think.

assemblage #1 8.06.16, broken pot shards and found glass

assemblage #2 8.06.16, found objects, glass, and tiles fragments

Swan Kathryn and the Cascade Camino

So here is a photo Kathryn and I took on a hike we did as part of her prep for her "Cascade Camino" -  her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail for a month.  She started on July 30th, on her 60th birthday, from Snoqualmie Pass!  You are in my thoughts and heart every day Kathryn!

And here is the latest GPS photo of where she has been and where she is.  The little "envelope" symbols show when we have texted through her GPS system:)

Prior to her trip she asked friends to send her favorite poems appropriate to a pilgrimage.  She has a lovely practice of choosing a line from a poem - just one or two lines - and walking with them, mediating on them, letting them work on her.  I can't wait to get a copy of that collection after you get home Kathryn! (I know she won't be reading this until September:).  Here is one poem she sent to me before she left:

Rewild Yourself: Be Your Own Medicine

There are places in you

Where thousands of bright, tiny flowers

Open each morning to the sun

In meadows as vast as the sky.

An ancient alchemy courses through your bones.

It speaks in feathers and stones and

precious metals and the footprints of mandalas

left by the stories we tell with our lives.

Rewild yourself.

Until green tendrils sprout from your fingernails

And lichen swathes your eyebrows.

Rewild yourself.

Until your roots spread and uncoil and

Writhe down through soil and rock.

Rewild yourself.

Rise up into your magnificence and

Take your place among the constellations.

Rewild yourself.

The Earth is her own medicine.

Be yours.

Caroline Meller

Swans with Wings:)

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

Virginia Woolf