What Kind of Joy?
In my book, there’s joy and there’s JOY.
The first arises spontaneously out of doing something I enjoy: preparing raw food, hiking in the woods on a brilliant spring day, or creating custom illustrations for someone’s book. It’s a great feeling, and I encourage it as much as possible throughout my schedule. This kind of joy can also come from a particular situation I find myself in, like being lauded by friends, getting the opportunity to truly serve someone, or coming upon a field of gorgeous flowers. This is circumstantial joy.
JOY, on the other hand is direct from Spirit. It matters not what the circumstance, JOY keeps bubbling up. I see it as an artesian well, constantly bubbling over into every experience I have – “good” or “bad”. This is a gift from God, letting me know that I am indeed doing diligence, paying attention enough to maintain conscious connection. Once I opened to True Source I was flooded with it. There is nothing else as sweet, except when, like two hands connected by the heart I experience both joy and JOY together. Ah! Now that is another word: BLISS.
May all of your days contain extensive moments of Bliss!
Where do the ideas come from?
Over the years I’ve learned that there is no end to ideas. They just keep appearing in the thoughts. I used to think that I had to act on every one of them. I drove myself crazy for years, thinking that I was somehow shorting someone if I didn’t play out every single good idea I had. Sheesh!
I’ve finally come to realize (slooooooooowly) that just like every thing else in nature there is lavish abundance of everything that is a gift from the True Source. The apple tree is not faulted for producing more apples than get consumed by folk and wormy, furred or flying ones. The beach is not somehow at fault for hosting all those grains of sand. I am ok when I don’t act on all my ideas, and it is natural that I have many of them.
When I am creating for a custom creative job of some kind (art, illustration, graphic design, web design, etc), I am always gifted more than one idea. It has been my challenge to reduce the number of choices, because people seem to be overwhelmed by too many of them.
Today my job is one of a simple kind of creativity: I am doing a calligraphy assignment – hand addressing 130+ envelopes. This is more time consuming than I ever imagine. I don’t have to come up with too many ideas for it though.
Tomorrow my job may just be coming up with more ideas!
The Joy of Lettering and Things Like That
Today I am in the midst of hand lettering 130 envelopes in fancy calligraphy with a real fountain pen and teal ink. Somebody’s gotta do it, and I LOVE that I get to. There is something about just sitting in contemplation with pen in hand and address list before me that gets me in that joy flow. True, I might experience a tired hand or something, yet it is well worth it.
Brand Me Successful
I decided to improve my brand. Me, Dena McKitrick: not one of my businesses, but me, the individual.
Recently, I have been thinking about who I am on the inside vs. how I appear on the outside, with the focus on congruency. Am I congruent with myself in appearance and deed? What experience of me do others have? And even more important, does that experience reflect who I truly am? I’ve worked a lot of years to be more in integrity with myself and others. Is that apparent to the world. That is part of my brand.
It’s not all just about a visual image. I mean, yeah, we all recognise the famous logos of the world, and that is part of their brand, but it is not anywhere near all of it. It includes things like how they treat their customers, how quick they respond to a call for help, and what they do with their profits.
So, how does that translate to me, the individual? Simple really. I am looking at things like how I treat those around me, how quickly I jump in and volunteer to help at a meeting, and whether or not I “put my money where my mouth is.” It’s not that I haven’t looked at those things before. I have – lots.
Lately, though, I seem to have come upon a deeper level of self-reflection, which is aimed at being as aligned as humanly possible with who I have been guided to be and do, and to shine that person into the world with clarity. That’s the brand I wish to present: the best me possible.
Joy is a Fountain in my Heart
Many, many years ago I was first starting on another path toward living my life in integrity with my spiritual self when I came into an inspired epiphany: that I could choose how I experience my life. Simply put, no matter what it is that I am walking through, I could choose what my outlook would be, what my perceptions of it would be, what I experience. It occurred to me that I could metaphorically “get a new pair of glasses” to have a new view of the same landscape.
I decided then that I choose joy! I could be scrubbing the porcelain repository with anger or miserable victim thoughts, or I could be scrubbing the same vessel while singing and giving thanks for my health that I could accomplish the feat. It is ok either way. I still get a clean bathroom. So, I decided to sing at it. I decided that I would dance through the grocery store, and that I would love what I do and do what I love.
We’ve all heard the saying, “calling the glass half full, or half empty.” I knew that then, but somehow getting that I could choose joy really turned my experience of my life around. So, when I am doing things that just don’t feel good at all, I still work on putting on my joy glasses. And when I get to do things that make my heart soar like creating a really superb graphic or writing a song, the joy part is easy.
The Joy of Doing Art
I love to sing. I love to dance. I love to write a well-turned phrase. And I love to express through pen or brush or camera or carving tool or with my well-worn mouse on the computer. To me it is all the same in that it is a place of joy I enter when I open up to be of service through inspired and guided creative expression – no matter what the media. It is a blissful state of consciousness I enter when engaged in active creativity and I am ever grateful for the gift and opportunity that blesses me with the experience of it.
Even further, the more that I have allowed myself to this blissful state of grace, the more I have discovered that I can feel that all the time. It is as if the world is my canvas, and every moment my brush. Each moment consciously engaged in doing “thine will, not mine” in service.
Combining “Old World” art and Computer Savvy
I started doing graphic design before computers. I’d pull out my rapidograph and carefully, tediously draw a fine line border for a certificate. I would then letter it with my calligraphy pen. I loved doing commercial art that way. I loved pin-striping a car, or hand-lettering a sign, too. It was tactile and challenging and satisfying.
I was working at a newspaper when the first OCRM (optical character recognition machine) was brought online. You had to use a certain kind of typewriter for the machine to recognize what was typed. I was thrilled when I could reproduce the type with my pen, and fool the machine into thinking I was one of those typewriters.
The computer room was this cold, sealed off room where the huge computers were housed. I would scan the type, the OCRM would translate the type and the strips of programmed copy would come out to be waxed and pasted up. The graphics were taken from cutbooks and pasted up too.
Fast forward to 2009. I love taking an image I have penned, scan it into Photoshop, work it, save it, pull it into Illustrator, vector it, clean it up, save it, pick it back up in Photoshop, add layers of color and perhaps photo texture etc., maybe pop it over into Painter, add some texture, and eventually end up with a clean custom graphic. Other days, I just sit out in the yard with my watercolors and joyfully paint. There’s something about the “old world” style of hand work that just feeds my soul.
Art, The Artist, and Daily living
Each and everyday is a new one, with new experiences, new challenges, and a new list of things that I absolutely have to get done yesterday.
I love doing art. It is the center of me. What I mean by that is that when I am fully engaged in creative expression, I am connected and lined up and centered in Spirit, in God, in life, in being the most me that I can be.
When I am not “doing art”, when I have stepped on the hose that delivers God-juice, when I am ignoring my needs and inspiration, then I get feeling all out of sync. If this goes on for any length of time (and sometimes it does), I lose myself and drift back into old dysfunction and depression – a slippery slope for me.
The road out of this is gratitude. I am so very grateful for the wonderful gift of life, and for each brand new day. I am grateful and I give conscious thanks for all of the relationships and situations, opportunities and challenges in this life.
Blending Fine Art and Technology
Every time I approach a new project it seems I must re-enter beginners mind in order to learn some new technological trick. There is a blessing to computers and ALL the stuff you can do online, as it opens up whole new venues that you can explore endlessly. A downside to this is that you can explore endlessly, and not get anything accomplished. I learn in cycles, it seems, and the web world is a great place for going around in circles. As I daily attempt the seemless blending of my find art and technology, I rediscover this conundrum. Time to breathe deep, and grab a cup of tea, while I re-think what it is that I wish to accomplish.
Each New Day
