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…