Susie Monday . El Cielo Studio

One of my New Year rituals is to map my creative path --  where I've been, where I see the road unfolding ahead. It's one of the exercises for my Artist Journey/Artist Journal workshop, and it's one that I've begun doing each year to set my own compass. And it's what I will work on for some time today in the studio. I like the visual nature of this exercise and it seems to loosen me up for more pragmatic, linear, word-oriented goal-setting. Perhaps you'll hear more about that later this weekend!

Here are the basics. The task: Draw , paint, collage an illustrated and annotated map of your journey as an artist.

Six steps to map your creative journey.

1.  Chose a time period -- last year or the last five years -- or take the whole of your life's creative path. Work big, on a poster sized sheet or on a long accordion-folded length of pages taped together. You may need to do a little research: look back at calendars, a blog or journal you've kept, your morning pages, the photos in your albums. Don't read in detail, just skim the territory.

2. Is this the map of a world, a state, a universe, a neighborhood? Set the scale at what seems most pertinent, most interesting at the moment. Draw the shape of that known world map. Is it a circle, a rectangle, an unusual polygon, a universe with your solar system at its center?

3. Start with drawing in the big cities (or buildings or planets), the departure ports and destinations, the major landmarks, the mountain ranges, light years or busy streets you've traversed. What stands out from the background? Name and label these if you can.

4.  Where were the highways, the byways, the crossroads and the roads noted but not taken? The deadends. The distracting side streets, any detours (and were they worth it?) What were the oceans crossed, the rapids and rivers that took you with the flow? Remember you are working on this visually and metaphorically; it may not seem to fit together exactly,  but your job is to keep drawing, painting, pasting and collaging.

5.  By now, you have much of this known world sketched in. Add some details -- historical markers: "What HAPPENED here," "On this spot in 1972."  Name the streets and buildings.  Note who else is wandering around your map -- add the names of friends, supporters, fellow travelers (maybe even a nemesis or two).

 

6. Now look at the territory outside the known map. Where are you headed outside the comfort zone? What other destinations beckon? And, like a Medieval map, there might be some places that deserve some warnings: "Here dwell dragons," "Beware the wormhole, "  "Sirens sing here, wear ear plugs." 

Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;
you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;
in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,
you're just a beginner.

Therefore, show him the simple
thing that is shaped in passing from father to son,
that lives near our hands and eyes as our very own.
Tell him about the Things.

He'll stand amazed, as you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how blameless and ours;
how even the lamentation of sorrow purely decides
to take form, serves as a thing, or dies
in a thing, and blissfully in the beyond
escapes the violin.

And these things that live,
slipping away, understand that you praise them;
transitory themselves, they trust us for rescue,
us, the most transient of all. They wish us to transmute them
in our invisible heart--oh, infinitely into us! Whoever we are.
Earth, isn't this what you want: invisibly
to arise in us? Is it not your dream
to be some day invisible? Earth! Invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your insistent commission?
Earth, dear one, I will! Oh, believe it needs
not one more of your springtimes to win me over.
One, just one, is already too much for my blood.
From afar I'm utterly determined to be yours.
You were always right and your sacred revelation is the intimate
death.
Behold, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows less...surplus of existence
is welling up in my heart.

This poem by Rilke was one of our Christmas meditations. Found, as these things often are, by chance in Earth Prayers from  Around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems and Invocations for Honoring the Earth. A little online research -- it's the last  half or so of Rainer Maria Rilke's Ninth Elegy. If you want to read the entire poem, click here.

On one of the lists that I subscribe to, one correspondent posted this ritual for the New Year. As we turn the sunlight into the next season, remembering that the days will lengthen, the dark will receed, the fields that are fallow will soon turn green with new growth...

I want to record this in order to make it part of our morning ritual during the Journal workshop in  January -- still dark enough to benefit, even though the Solistice is past. I hope she doesn't mind the quote.....

Gather together family and friends and give everyone a stick or twig, 5 or 6 inches long. At one end of the twig tie a red ribbon and at the other end, a green ribbon. You'll need a fire of some kind: this could be done in your fireplace or an outdoor firepit or just the grill on your deck. Toast to the sun or say a few words about the returning of the light, then everyone breaks their stick in two. As you toss the red-ribboned stick in the fire, think about the bad events and negative habits you're eager to lose in the flames. Save the green end as a souvenir, a token of hope, and think about new beginnings.
  
   
 

For many U.S. and Western Europe residents (as well as the popular media), Christmas means snow and snowmen, vistas of white and, perhaps even a little elfing magic. But for those of us in the Borderlands, the weather may be chill, or like today, peasoup and heading toward the 80s. When I want holiday spirit, I can't count on the weather to cooperate, but I can ALWAYS count on Nuevo Laredo. Tuesday's visit was a kick.