Story Delving
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Follow the momentum of your chosen story and to stay present to the ways in which it's unfolding. This might be dusting off old journals, photo albums, or emails, engaging in supplementary research of some sort, or exploring sensorial elements. With this, see if you can create an outline for your story.
Keep updating your list of stories (and don’t forget to bring this to class!)
Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments
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Blackout Poem: Use a discarded magazine or newspaper to select key words and phrases for a blackout poem, discovering hidden messages about your creative project.
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Symbol Exploration: Identify key symbols or objects in your project, then delve into their metaphorical meanings and how they enhance your creative piece.
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Vision Board: Gather images, words, and textures to build a visual board that reflects the themes, tone, or essence of your project.
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Creative Ritual: Create a ritual or routine to help you begin working on your project every day. What actions or items help you get into the zone?
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Shitty First Draft: Embrace the messy beginnings and as quickly as possible, create a “Shitty First Draft” letting your ideas flow without judgment.
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Sensory Exploration: Describe your creative project through all six senses (sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, intuition) to explore its full sensory impact.*
Metaphor Mapping: Pick a card (from a tarot deck, perhaps) and explore how its metaphor or image relates to your project or creative process.
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Companion Piece: Imagine a companion piece to your project—something small that complements or contrasts with your main idea.
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Object Storytelling: Choose a meaningful object in your possession and craft a narrative that connects it to your creative project. What role does it play in your project’s universe, and how does it symbolize or influence the themes or characters involved? Explore its significance as a metaphor or tool within your creative work.
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Random Word Association: Select random words or phrases from a book and connect them to your project—allow the unexpected to inspire new angles.
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SoulCollage: Cut out images, words, and textures that explore what this project may reveal to you about yourself in the process of making it.
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Backstory Creation: Develop a backstory or lore for a small, often overlooked detail of your creative project.*
Unexpected Collage: Select a few random images from magazines, newspapers, or scraps and create a collage that visually represents a new direction for your project. Let the images guide you into unexpected territory.
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Acrostic Poem Puzzle: Write a short title for your project vertically and use the letters to create a poem, offering a unique perspective on your idea.
*Symbol Expansion: Choose a symbol that represents the soul of your project and draw it on a piece of paper, then add layers, textures, or visual elements that expand or transform its meaning. How can you build upon this symbol to explore and express the core of your project? Consider how these additions might reflect your project's themes, emotions, or story.
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Treasure Mapping: Create a treasure map of the journey to complete your project, including potential discoveries and treasures that might be discovered (about you or the piece) along the way! What terrain will you have to navigate?
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Tarot Inspiration: Draw a tarot card and let it serve as a guiding force for your project. Interpret its symbolism and apply it to your creative work. How does this card’s message inform the direction of your project? Create a visual or written response to this revelation.
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Medium Swap: Imagine how your project would transform if it were created in a different medium (e.g., painting, dance, music). Explore the possibilities.
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Past/Present/Future: Lay out a three-card tarot spread to explore your project’s past, present, and future. Reflect on how the cards’ meanings relate to the stages of your creative work, and use these insights to guide your next steps.
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Time Travel: Transport your project to different time periods—how would it evolve in the past, present, or future? Explore different eras and their impact.
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Story Boarding: Create a story board for either your creative piece, as you envision it now, or what your ideal creative process would look like in the act of creating it.
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Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from Living an Examined Life
By James HollisA very effective instrument when in the face of blockages and difficult choices is to ask the very pragmatic question: "Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?" I submit that usually we know the answer to that question immediately. If we don't know the answer, then it is important to continue the question, for its resolution will always appear: as a dream image, a sudden recognition in the middle of the night, an insight that occurs in the middle of traffic when the ego is not maintaining its usual vigilance against disturbing thoughts. And then we know the answer to that question. We should choose the path of enlargement, not service to wealth, power, fame, or the accolades of others, because it is what is asked of us by the soul. When we choose the small, we don't have to step into the large, which is quite comforting until we realize we are living small, diminished lives.
To be sure there are many forces in this world that contribute to diminishment. They are well known: poverty, lack of education, prejudice, dealing with a tilted playing field. But the biggest diminishment of all is the deep lesson derived from having been small, dependent, unknowing, and those matrices, repeated through our most formative years, feed diminishment, psychospiritual impoverishment, shame, and unworthiness.
Recall the common message of childhood: The world is big, and you are not. The world is powerful, and you are not. This message, over- learned, abides with us throughout all our journeys. What makes us timorous is the activation of the old paradigm with which we all grow up, that we are small and the world large. That message is corrosive to our sense of worth, our entitlement to possibilities, our right to dream. I am not endorsing grandiosity, inflation, hubris, or any other delusional denial of reality; however, most of us, quite simply, live lives too small for us.
In his various essays on personhood, Jung writes that the summons to personhood is a calling, a true vocatus, in the original sense of a calling from the sacred. To obey this calling is tantamount to religious obedience to that which is larger than we. And therein lies both the path and the conundrum.
We all know people who have excess entitlement, whose narcissistic inflation seems limitless, who do not respect the democracy of the grave. We also know people whose core insecurities have resulted in compensatory inflation. They are the power brokers of the world. They lie to the world because they have to lie to themselves. As the great American philosopher Pearl Bailey reportedly said, "Them's what's thinks they is, ain't.” Their compensatory inflation is not what I am talking about. The attainment of personhood is not self-aggrandizement; it is answering a summons to step into oneself, to honor one's interests, talents, and callings, whether recognized by others or not.
In walking through the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, I am always moved by a work of sculpture there. Titled The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, it is the life work of a gentleman who was a janitor for the federal government. By day, James Hampton swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. By night, he walked with gods and the vision they had vouchsafed him. Slowly, with tinfoil from a thousand pieces of chewing gum and the fragments discarded by a bored public passing through the buildings in his custodial care, he assembled his grand vision. I know no other artist with a vision this grand-including Michelangelo, who at least had patrons with deep pockets. Slowly, privately, he worshipped at the shrine of his particular genius.' This is a man I admire greatly. He did his work, honored his vision at home, in his garage, unseen by any until his death. He dialogued not with public support, or fame, or companionship, but with the really large.
We all have a calling. For some it will be found in our capacity for caring for the needs of the suffering world around us. For others it will be the work of hands. For some it will be the work of the mind that opens doors and shatters shackles. For still others it will be the exploration of the natural world. For some it will be pushing back the boundaries of our limited sense of the possible. But for all of us, there is a large summons.
From childhood on, we all felt that others had it together and we did not, that others knew what they were doing, while we clearly did not. But we have never been admitted into their doubts, their failings, their moments of moral cowardice, their shames. Only when we risk our own journey can we begin to pull back the projections we have on others. Everyone we meet is beset with their own problems. Most of the time they don't want you to know that, and they are also trying to figure out ways not to know that for themselves.
Because we learn early that the safe response often lies in our denial of the reality of our own feelings, we soon align against our personal authority, becoming strangers to ourselves. Because we grow facile in this self-denial, we forget over time that what we really feel matters. As a counterpoise, we must recall that we do not choose feelings. Feelings are autonomous responses of the organism to how things are going from its perspective. We can choose to ignore feelings, project them onto others, anesthetize them, and so on, but we do not choose them. It took me quite a while, as a thinking type, to realize this elemental truth. Having lived in an atmosphere where my feelings could so easily be discounted and realizing also that the expression of my feelings might further destabilize a tense environment, I soon became insulated against them. One turning point occurred in my early days as a college professor, when a student, no doubt meaning well, said, “I want to be just like you." "How so?" I asked. "To have no feelings,” he said. I think he meant "cool" or something like that, and while I could not believe that his assessment was accurate, still his perception of me had to be based on something. It was, of course, one of many cracks in a policy of self-containment that had proved protective, but whose buffers had constituted a pathologizing gulf between persona and inner reality.
The memory of intimidation by the large constrains us all. To ask the question at critical junctures in our lives, of relationships, of careers, of lifestyles, may prove of decisive significance: Does this make me large, or does it make me smaller? We all remember moments in our lives when the choice was for the smaller, often safer, route, and the fact that we remember, that something in us aches, is itself a clue that the summons continues. No history of deflected choice, no life of shame, no patterns of self-defeating choices can be used as an excuse to remain small, psychologically speaking. Once we know, once we remember, we cannot not know.
To reiterate, the choice of the large is not in service to grandiosity or to inflation; it is quite the contrary. It is in service to our growing recognition that something else besides security, fitting in, and protection asks our recognition. Rather than be enslaved by our fears, in service to our limiting heritage or our debilitated, even devastated, history, we understand finally that we are called to something large. Our attitude toward others then changes. We grow less fearful, less suspicious, less needy, because we know that we have a calling to some- thing else. It is natural to have fears of the world. Only a psychotic person would not. But it is a violation of our souls if we live our lives governed by our fears.
Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through and then realizing that we are on the other side of that issue. While the child is dominated, even the loss of the approval of others, the person who goes through finds devastated, by something within that supports, approves, and carries.
Friedrich Nietzsche had a peculiar aphorism that he expressed through his character Zarathustra. We are, he observed, a going under and a going through. We are an abyss, and we are the tightrope across the abyss. What are we to make of those conundrums? It is my belief that we go under by dying unto our old fears and old beliefs, and we go through by living our lives as best we can manage. I also suspect that by "abyss," Nietzsche underlined the magnitude of being. Nearly a century later, Martin Heidegger observed that the abyss was an "openness of being," rather than that which swallows us. When we remain prisoners to our complexes, and their history-bound, unimaginative purview, what else can we do but repeat our fugitive history? When we summon the timorous ego to the magnitude of our soul's intent, we step across something deep within ourselves that abides in the midst of the abyss-the most difficult going through. All those whom we admire in history had to go through something, and when they did, they learned on the other side that they were still there, though the world was different. Then they began to step into their possibilities and felt more completely the support of energies within.
In all of these years, I have met only one person who had this sense of the large within her even as a child, and the courage to live it. She called this inner voice, this guiding genie, TWIHAT: an acronym for That Which I Have Always Thought. For reasons I do not know, this stalwart sojourner sustained a trust in that voice we all have within us. She trusted it, lived it, went through hard times with it, and came out the other side, as we all will if we risk trusting our own individuation process, our own guiding spirit, and our invitation to choose the large over the small. Then we serve not our egos, but our world, and bring a greater contribution to it.
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Excerpt from No More Secondhand Art
By Peter LondonTo “draw within” is to draw upon a source of wisdom that no one else could possibly have; it is a step that places you in a quiet and exclusive domain. Here, there is no one else to turn to. No one, however loving or intelligent, can accompany you on this inward journey. And the very solitariness of the quest brings about a sense of your own self-sufficiency.
As true as it is that we live within a community of others, it is equally true we are born and die alone. There are essential privacies that we are destined to maintain. These deep troughs of uniqueness are our particular gift and genius. So much of our life is standard, requiring conventional thoughts and behavior, that we forget that each of us is one of a kind, one whose life with either manifest our unique display of intelligence and enrich the story of humankind or fail to embroider the fabric of being human.
Creative engagements wake us up to the task of contributing to human history by accepting the challenge to compose our own story—a challenge that, if accepted, remains without takers.
Questions designed to provoke answers that can be measured against a norm and against each other make life competitive. We often use the answers to these kinds of questions not for their own worth, but as instruments with which we measure our status relative to others. There is really little intrinsic value in knowing the dates of inauguration of all the presidents of the United States, but if you are the only one in the class to do so, you are the smartest kid in the class, which is certainly of value in the world of status seekers.
Creative responses are those which have no comparative worth. They are of utility only to the person who responds to them. These responses may themselves be questions: “Why did I say that? What does that form, that gesture, those colors, that silence mean? Why do I feel a need for the presence of that blue, when it seems not to fit the rest of the image?” As a consequence of being touched in such a way as to uncover and awaken the person who, at root, we are, the unique potentiality that we are becomes manifest in the world, to us. The mere fact that we have been given life doesn’t mean that we realize the nature of the life we are given. The creative process has the potential to wake us up to the vast unexplored domain of our own nature. No one has been there before, no one can enter it except us. No one can challenge our story. We are the only ones who can explore this territory to tell the news. The encounters remind us of this by indicating points of access, doorways to our natural domain, and by carefully designing encounters, we can provide ourselves with handles to doors.
[pp 46 -47]
Sources
Hollis, James. Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey. Sounds True, 2018.
London, Peter. No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within. Shambhala Publications, 1989.