Nature Time: Create A Maze

Last week you were asked to create a maze inspired by the Your Nature article “aMAZingly You!”     and     the   wonderful metaphor mazes can offer. Here's your exercise up for comment:

Make it simple or deviously complex. I spent about 10 minutes creating this maze on the large leaf I left in a Double Tree hotel lobby--at an information kiosk--for someone to find! Maze-making can be as relaxing as doodling or free-writing, allowing your brain to unwind while focusing on something repetitive, yet engaging.

It’s easiest to draw your “answer” or home path first, then filling the rest in around it. If it’s your first maze, I highly recommend using a pencil so you can go back and open up your false routes! Or just remember to leave gaps on both sides of your path for adding the phony routes and dead ends in later. Have fun with this one! Create them in or on unusual places for extra fun, like a leaf, a bookmark, a flat rock, or on the envelope of a letter to a friend. Let us know what happens. My leaf maze with, “Have an aMAZing day!” on the back, was gone by the time we left to meet friends for dinner, about 40 minutes!

Nature's Palette: Clinging Feather

Photo (feather) by Dries Knapen

Color is a powerful visual. A specific color or color combination in nature may be used as a warning, as camouflage, in mating, to attract pollinators, and more. Either way, it's purpose is to evoke a response. What colors do you respond to in the things you collect or the art you create?

The nature's palette series is a color prompt from nature itself, how will nature inspire you today?

aMAZingly You!

When I was a teen I was big into mazes. I loved trying to find my way out of hedge mazes, hay mazes, and even a huge corn maze once. In fact, the seasonal “Maize Maze” staff warned us to plan a couple of hours for navigating our way through the huge maze, complete with look-out towers. They also gave us an emergency “help” flag mounted on a tall pole so we could be found and rescued, along with a quick lesson on how to signal for help! It was great fun! We prided ourselves on finding the right clues along with our sense of direction for getting out on our own.

Intermingled and prior to that, as a pre-teen, I made tedious, complex mazes that filled up entire notebook pages and then asked my parents to make Xerox® copies of them so I could do them later. It was a fun thing for me, I would spend hours drawing out the home path, then filling in elaborate dead-ends and fake routes.

Now that I’m *ahem* older I love the metaphor a maze presents for the unique paths we take along our journey. When you think about it, there is one true, deeply intuitive path we are each following. Many times we stray from it, we get lost, or we might get fooled or lured into taking false paths that lead us away from our core values, or our natural instincts. Sometimes we get stuck (cue rescue flag pole). Some of us simply choose to meander—whether we’re unfocused on our goal, or enjoying some extended opportunities while accomplishing our goals. Now and then these alternative paths lead us back to our original destination, sometimes they just end and we have to go back and figure out where we went off track. No biggie. Because, in the end, if we were to turn around and trace our steps, we would see this amazing journey that brought us to our end goal. We might gaze across a series of repeating patterns, mistakes, and doubling back; but we could surely appreciate the beautiful design it created. One that is so purely our own blueprint embedded beneath our creative decisions, growth, and actions at that moment of our life.

Life invites us to be amazing! Don't retreat into creative non-action because you are worrying about choosing the wrong path (or project), if it turns out to be a dead end or takes you away from your values, turn around. Create your own path, create your personal maze, YOU know the best route to your creative success. Make it fun, make it happen!

Nature Time: Moon Meditation & Thesaurus of the Senses

Below are the last two Nature Time exercises moved over for any comments you'd like to share! IWe would love to hear how these exercises opened up a creative flow (or not) and how you decided to use the exercise!

Thesaurus of the Senses

Create a thesaurus of the senses (Strangling My Muse). This week’s exercise is taken directly from one of my fave creative beings and online inspirations, Sandy Ackers. I could only add, in keeping with the Nature Time element, that this is a great challenge to create a nature-themed thesaurus too! Enjoy this creative challenge from Sandy’s blog:

“How many words or phrases can you come up with to describe the color of the sky? See how many words or phrases you can produce for each of these: the color of the sky; the taste of sugar; the smell of rain; the feel of air; the sound of laughter; the shape of eyes. This is a great exercise when you don’t have much time. And if you keep thinking up words to describe the sight, sound, taste, feel and smell of various items, you can compile your own thesaurus of the senses—a wonderful reference when you need interesting words for your fiction, essays, poems or other projects.”

Moon Meditation

The moon is a great mentor in living your life to its fullest. Find a comfortable spot in the moonlight and try this moon meditation: Our silvery moon has long been the source of inspiration for artists, philosophers, and poets. Both science and art continue to seek ways to study and interpret its profound affect on our lives. Think about the people in your life, and how they inspire you; awaken those same inspiring qualities in your self. Meditate on your ability to express yourself as passionately as those who inspire you and others will not be able to resist supporting you in achieving your creative calling.

 

Your Creative Voice: Teachings From The Scorpion

When we feel a connection with the natural world, we begin to appreciate its value and every species’ right to share our world. We wish to protect its future as our own, and we will find a creative way to share this passion with the world. What we learn from nature gives us insight into ourselves.

Like some art, the scorpion is a creature often misunderstood and reviled. But once we learn to appreciate its value and its rightful place in our world, we feel connected and can learn much about ourselves. Like the scorpion, you are a truly amazing being and key to your environment. Everyone and everything you share your creative “habitat” with may have an impact on how you express yourself and vice versa.

Daily interactions shape your inner nature, the core from which you pull from each time you take action in your life. Who or what are you allowing into your environment and how are they shaping or influencing your creative process? Read on for encouragement and advice from an unexpected source, the scorpion.

TEACHINGS FROM THE SCORPION

1. Scorpions rely first on their strength for nourishment, using their strong pincers to capture and hold prey, not their venom.

Respond with your inner strength for facing challenges, do not sting with your words. As creative beings, we are usually our own harshest critic, quick to tear apart any creative effort. Be strong and do not succumb to venomous comments or thought, be honest and thoughtful with what you create, these are your most vulnerable expressions. Nourish your talents with inner confidence and by capturing and holding onto supportive critiques and trusted guidance.

2. Throughout human history scorpions have had their share of both negative and positive “press.”

Consider this when dealing with an undesirable situation or unwarranted criticism. Become aware of all perspectives, yet don’t let others take away your creative voice!

3. Scorpions molt throughout their lives as they grow. Newly molted scorpions must keep stretching while the new exoskeleton hardens to ensure that it can move when the hardening is complete.

Shed old skins as you grow. Create opportunities for multiple transformations that inspire you. Stretch your creative boundaries. Allow yourself room to grow as you fulfill your creative calling.

4. Burrows are a very important aspect of the ecology of desert scorpions, offering shelter and protection while molting and from predators.

How often do you allow yourself time for a little “burrowing?” What can you do to ensure those quality, restorative moments vital for maintainining your creative energy and focus? Creative beings tend to be emotionally sensitive—protect this treasured way of directly experiencing the world around you, this is part of your personal inspiration—retreat and “burrow” when you need to regroup or reclarify your creative voice.

5. Scorpions tend to change their habits rather than their form in order to adapt to a new habitat.

This is a great reminder to stay flexible while pursuing your creative goals, rarely do things go as planned. Expanding your comfort zones and growing as an artist means adapting and navigating new territory! Find new inspiration akin to a new habitat in order to punch up your creative survival. Shake it up a little, avoid those habits that drain your creativity. Don’t change the positive, Über-cool YOU, adapt by changing the habits or your studio’s appearance/workability that is stifling your creativity.

Adapted from: “Teachings From the Scorpion” M. Hedgecock, 2009
Scorpion photo: M. Hedgecock

Creativity Tool: Spirals

Spirals have inspired artists for ages, first appearing in megalithic art in the form of petroglyphs. Spirals have symbolized the sun, growth, evolution, hypnosis, and the universe. In nature, spirals can be found everywhere—perhaps the source of ancient inspiration—and are usually described as whorls when found in plants and animals. In mathematics, “a spiral is a curve which emanates from a central point, getting progressively farther away as it revolves around the point.” (wikipedia.org)

What does a creative spiral signify for you?

How could you use spirals in your art or writing?

How would spirals appear in your work as a chef, or a dancer, as a sculpture?

SOMETHING TO TRY: seek out spirals, any size, shape, or form for 3 days. Take notes, photographs, sketch, or mentally list your finds for possible jumping off points for future projects. Where do you notice spirals most, in nature or man made environments and structures? Do you find more while you’re purposefully looking for spirals, or when you’re occupied with other tasks? What do your answers tell you about your creative process?

Full article here.

Nature Time Exercise: Nature Journaling

Last week's Nature Time exercise moves over for discussion. Let us know how you took time to break out your inner nature journaler....

If you’ve never kept a nature journal, consider it a great way to build your writing tool box! It can be as simple as documenting a quick note of the first time you notice your favorite wild blossom, or migrating bird in your yard, or the first rutting calls of elk.

Nancy S.M. Waldman (The Practically Creative Quarter) found she did it for two reasons, one having to do with creative writing. She writes, “When writing, it’s often useful to have at your fingertips real notations of when the Indian Hawthorne blooms in Texas or if it’s believable that the first snowfall of the year might be as late as January in Connecticut or if a character could be hearing the frogs at dusk in Nova Scotia in mid-April.”

This is a fantastic way to connect nature to your craft and I encourage you to start a nature journal today to see where nature inspires you…