Creatively Organized Spaces
Spring fever and the extra hour of daylight spur many of us onto spring cleaning, especially right now while we are spending more time at home! We are still in the height of Spring Cleaning frenzy so if you haven’t yet tackled the closets, there’s still plenty of time before the heat of the summer and seasonal vacations and kids summer breaks are upon us!
It’s been a challenging year and allowing ourselves to plan for the future still doesn’t quite feel natural. So for those of us use to planning, this state of uncertainty feels uncomfortable and possibly even scary. Yet, there are a lot of different ways to plan for the unknown. One way is to envision where you are headed. This type of planning is less rigid than sitting down with a calendar and deciding on goals, penciling in when you want to achieve them, and mapping out how to get there. A vision board is a wholly different kind of map.
Over the past five years, I’ve led quite a few vision board workshops at conferences, meetings, and art studio’s, one thing they always have in common, they are so much fun and unexpectedly powerful! Everyone from Oprah and Ellen to life coaches and artists uses vision boards as a creative tool to help gain clarity on setting intentions and goals. Have you created a vision board before?
When I create a vision board and lead a workshop I begin with helping you get clear about what you want to see happen in your life. Our imagination gets lazy and when that happens we sell our-self short of amazing possibilities! Imagine bigger, brighter, easier outcomes that are more joyful! Imagination is a muscle that requires regular exercise.
Think of making a vision board as a fun workout for your imagination!
The process of creating a vision board is a powerful tool for setting our intention and creatively visualizing that outcome. For some of us, these might be “goals.” For others, it might be an “intention” or a “feeling.” Through words and images, we can map our vision. This process helps us find clarity about what we are creating in our day-to-day lives through the choices we make. Our vision boards become a powerful touchstone to bring us back to our intentions when we feel we are off course or unclear.
When we get stuck or overwhelmed in the process of working through change in our lives, it can be refreshing to get out of our thinking mind and into our creative body. By asking ourselves what we want things to look like and how we want to feel, we embrace and tap into our creative connection with the universe, god, whatever that might mean to each of us.
So I am offering an online vision board workshop on Sunday, December 27th from 1-5 pm EST. It’s a pay what you can and I am inviting the first 12 people who sign up (here) to join me. If you can pay something (suggested $26), great but it’s not required. I want to see more powerful positivity manifested in 2021, this is my small contribution.
Even if you can’t join this time, I will offer the workshop again online soon. For those of you who want to do this on your own, the following instructions will get you going!
STEP 1: Gather : Flip through magazines and cut images and words that “speak to you”. Collect anything that delights or calls to you and have fun with the process.
STEP 2: Sort : If you run out of magazines or feel like you have “enough” begin to sort through setting things aside into three piles:
KEEP/LOVE!-These images and words feel right, bring you joy, you feel connected and they make your “heart sing”- trust your intuition.
MAYBE-These have an element that has attracted you but don’t quite excite you as others.
DISCARD- on second thought, something doesn’t feel quite right about these, it’s okay to put them away for later.
STEP 3: Arrange : Group images and words together as you begin to place them on your board. As you do this, you’ll get a sense of how the board should be laid out. You can follow a more aesthetic look or go about this in a random manner, there’s no right or wrong!
STEP 4: Attach : After you’ve arranged all the items in a way that works for you, paste everything onto the board. Take your time, attach smaller pieces to larger, think in layers.
STEP 5: Display : Hang your Vision Board in a prominent place where you’ll see it regularly, like the laundry room a closet, or inside a door.
The vision board process can help us find clarity and communicate our ideas in an effortless and creative way by tapping into our intentiohns, dreams, and envisioning them. The process doesn’t have to be exact or precise to work either! We can manifest how we want to feel, where we want to live or what we want our days to include. Vision boards can work in many areas of our life. I keep a small sketchbook that I create two-page spreads based on categories I dream about such as love relationships, home, travel (on hold for now;) and more.
Please give this a try and share your results with me if you like! Email me photo’s of your vision board or share via social media with #hkpscreativevisioning
An honest approach toward facing our fears can be one of our highest acts of self-kindness. What other actions define kindness for you? One way I’ve experimented is through cultivating the art of boredom as an act of self-kindness because I don’t usually allow myself time to “be lazy” or JUST BE. Freedom is kindness. To sit in a chair or lay on the ground and daydream, watch the birds, observe the world as it “passes by”! During this time of COVID, I’ve allowed myself space and time to cultivate this with less guilt. Non-Judgement is Kindness. The world is not really passing, I’m just playing the observer role, which removes me from having to judge, think, solve problems, or change anything…I get to be and that is one of the greatest acts of self-kindness we can gift ourselves, especially right now.
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.- Dalai Lama
Many a movie and catchphrase have been coined around the idea that Kindness counts, but especially lately, I think we are jaded and might consider these phrases cliche-which of course they are-while they also remain true. I’ve been thinking a lot about what kindness and happiness mean and how they are different from culture to culture.
For some cynics, the pursuit of happiness or random acts of kindness don’t really mean anything or make a big difference to the world. I would argue that the butterfly effect* of our actions ripples out from one person to an unknown degree. Our definitions of kindness don’t have to be in lockstep for us to agree that kindness counts.
I love how writer Savala Trepczysnki (she/her) invites us to create what she calls a ‘dignity practice‘, which she describes as a process of setting boundaries around certain behaviors or actions as a way of honoring ourselves and our boundaries. Boundaries are kindness. This practice is a courageous act of self-kindness, one we should not take lightly or sugar coat!
Haven’t you ever had a really crappy day and someone just gave you the most genuine smile, held a door for you, or gave you a small compliment that really changed your attitude for a moment or even for the rest of the day?
We have all experienced the power of kindness to uplift, make us feel calmer, less anxious, happier, and more loving.
I hope you will consider how you can cultivate kind actions to uplift your wellness and that of others.
*I’m endlessly coming across chaos theory and wonder if this has something to do with my need to find order in the chaos of the world.
In pursuing my MA, I’ve come to understand that the work I am doing is my life’s work! It’s exciting to be in a place in time when you realize that all paths have led you to this moment, the perfect experiences and guidance that will help lead you forward to pursue your vision and dream. That is truly how I feel about this process and I want to share the blurb that was included in a recent school newsletter, highlighting myself and one of my cohorts. Since I am only 1 1/2 semesters into my masters, I don’t yet have my thesis declared but think of it like this diagram-a three-legged stool, with my research focused on each of the ‘legs’.
My research stems from observing and interacting with artists as they craft a space known as the studio. In this space, the work of making crafted objects takes place through a universal and personal creative cycle of order and chaos. History and contemporary culture have much to say about the mess and order of the creative process. Having spent nearly ten years evaluating and co-producing these spaces to identify and construct systems that support organization of material culture and productivity, my curiosity led me to interview over fifty artists about how they construct these spaces, their habitus, their process of setting up their studio and their interaction with objects and materials in their space.
I am curious to learn more about the legacy of objects and spaces left behind by artists. How can individuals and institutions support craftspeople in establishing helpful working guidelines for maintaining legacies of material knowledge and material culture? By drawing upon research in the domestic and workspace design fields, I hope to gain a better understanding of how our identities are defined by the spaces we craft, in both domestic and public artists’ studios.
Homing-an act of resistance in a fast-paced world.
What is home?
It a place where we can set our own pace.
What is home?
Homebodies make time and space to create a home through their senses.
What is home?
Home is the objects we carry with us.
What is home?
Ritual creates home-home is a relationship between bodies, spaces, and objects.
A collaborative video project between Heather K Powers & Sarah Kelly, created January 2020, Asheville NC during the MA Critical Craft Residency.