1. morning pages are an old friend and I felt lighter to dump some of the garbage that’s been piling up and poisoning my life.
2. artist date – I used a red crayon as a muse (I love cracking open a box of Crayola crayons and sniffing in the heady aroma of possibilities.) I wrote a list of everything about the color red. I got everything from red carnations and geraniums to Red Square and the red light district. It is one of my favorite things to do because lists set me free to be silly.
3. The surprise came with identifying creativity busters. I’ve done this exercise several times now and felt I’d killed all the demons of my creativity. Then I thought of a time that has been etched in my brain, but I thought it was a good experience. It is one of the things that pointed out my “People Pleaser” to me. I was ten years old and we were late to school because it had snowed. The rest of the kids were all nearly done with coloring a picture that would enter them in a coloring contest for Christmas (we still celebrated it back then). I would have normally used a light hand and left some white space and it would have had a rather muted look. I felt I owed the teacher an apology for being late, so I filled in each area, even the area outside the action in bold strokes. I colored right up to the black lines and left no white space anywhere. It won the prize and I got a packet of richly colored origami papers. From then on I seldom colored in my old, normal way. I left me behind because I only wanted to do what pleased others.
4. I think the exercise that I had the most fun with this time was—If I had 5 other lives to live, what would I be? An elephant caretaker, a restaurant owner and chef, a teacher, a fiddler with a folk music group, a think tank brainstormer.
I loved seeing that I do have new thoughts going on in my brain.
