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| Sunset V March 12, 2014 Oil on canvas |
A difficult sky to translate into paint in one sitting. I had to be cautious in executing this one because the weather was changing dramatically with an approaching cold front - winds whipped clouds across the sky and rain had begun to fall in the west, and the effect this all had on the scale of the work is hard to visualize in this photo of the painting - but where the other
Sunsets are each 4 inches square, this one is about 2 inches by 3 inches.
The palette I use here includes three whites: Titanium, Zinc and Buff Titanium
Three blues: French Ultramarine, Prussian, and Pthalo Blue
One yellow: Naples
One red: Alizarin Crimson, though it is only present in the tree-line at the bottom of the composition in its mixture with French ultramarine and Prussian blue
Routines and Rituals to be Your Best Self
I had excellent discussions in both my sculpture and painting classes last week about the routines and rituals in our lives. It's been 8 weeks since the semester began and I thought the students and I would be able to discuss the parts of our schedules that help us do our work since, by now, routines and rituals may be established that are different from last semester and can serve as a way of comparing what is working now or what might need to be changed moving forward into the remaining 8 weeks of the semester.
The impetus was the result of parallels I drew from John Seymour's
The Self-Sufficient Gardener, specifically his list of the 6 Laws of Organic Farming, and the connection to cultivating a complete self in and out of class. The Laws include
- The gardener must work with nature and not against it
- Nature is diverse and therefore the gardener must practice diversity
- The gardener must husband other forms of life - animal or vegetable - in environments as close as possible to those for which they evolved
- The gardener must return to the soil as much, or nearly as much, as he takes from it
- The gardener must feed the soil and not the plant
- The gardener must study nature as a whole and never any part of it in isolation
Because no student raised their hand when asked if he or she gardens, it was easy to use the list metaphorically for cultivating a responsible self. Specifically, it was at Number 5 that I gave pause and consider the connection to be direct to the self: we must work from the inside out.
This is a great exercise to identify what nourishes you. It's an exercise you can try, follow along to see what you can say about yourself. For me, I discovered there are four - among hundreds - of primary things that nourish me. They include Art, Food, Nature, and Exercise. Family and connections with friends are important, too, and often are the thread that ties these four together. But this is just me, and the exercise is all about you.
I preface this exercise the same way I prefaced the exercise in class:
There is no recipe to knowing how to be your best self. What is successful for you cannot be the same for someone else. So, in a group setting it was helpful to hear what routines and rituals are established only because they served as examples to illustrate the concept, but their relevance to you is minimal. For this reason I will only include a few examples, but taking the few minutes to complete this exercise is going to be more meaningful if you reflect on these things independent of others. I'm a firm believer that the challenge is working on these things ourselves. This is a sentiment shared by many, and the following quotes are culled from texts by authors writing decades apart but saying more or less the same thing about it.
"...the essential struggle is private and bears no relation to anyone else's. It is of necessity a solitary and lonely endeavor to explore one's own sensibility, to discover how it works and to implement honestly its manifestations." Anne Truitt,
Daybook
"The individual recipe any artist finds for proceeding belongs to that artist alone."
"However well intentioned, books cannot give recipes for how to be happy. Because optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual efforts and creativity."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow
There are two parts to the exercise, first...
List the routines that are a part of your day, your week, your month
- These are activities that have become established parts of your day, week, or month
- These are different from habits or roots of distraction or causes of procrastination
"The purpose of routines is to impose order in consciousness through the performance of patterned action. These are the microflow activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day"
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of among many texts
Flow, pp 52 referenced here
Examples may include how your day begins (with breakfast, a commute to work, etc.) or days you assign as laundry days, or a time each month when you get a haircut or even take a pet for their furcut, etc.
List the rituals that you include in your day, your week, your month
- Rituals are routines with intentions, these are special, more meaningful activities. They may be things that are completed when you are doing a routine
For example, when you get a haircut is a trip to the café included as a special treat? Or do you cook dinner with friends once a week, as a student described was a significant part to her otherwise routine eating schedule, or is your day begun with a visit to a favorite website before you get out of bed, or do you have to listen to your audiobook on the way to work?
The Subjects that Draw Us In
From the lists, identify the subjects that draw you in. Identify the patterns that may be obvious, or that are a result of this reflection. What patterns do you respond to?
"The arc to any individual life is uniform over long periods of time. Subjects that draw us in will continue to draw us in. Patterns we respond to we will continue to respond to." Bayles and Orland
Patterns in Your Life
A pattern in design is repetition in a regular and ordered sequence. It could be a routine or ritual or part of these that has repeated regularly for a long enough time that you can acknowledge its significance.
From the patterns you identify, are there any that have persisted for years? Or are some new because of your current living/working/school/professional circumstances? You may or may not be surprised if there are things that persist, especially as we take this look from afar at our routines and important activities.
"Inside is constant, you'll carry the same burdens tomorrow and next year. We simply exist. Watch from an imaginary point somewhere behind your eyes. The scenes change constantly, but the clarity you're able to see yourself allows you to exist the way you want." Bayles and Orland
I've begun to really live the way I want. I believe strongly in our becoming our best self from reflection and living in the present moment - what is referred to in
Flow as 'present awareness' - and the list you create is a step along the path to your being your best. Continuing to the take the time to identify what subjects draw us and prioritize them into our day or week or month will keep us on the path to living a good life together.
