A Year at McGuffey’s: The Artist Statement

2 Comments

I love writing artist statements for other artists. I hate writing artist statements about my own work. It’s torture. How do I put into words the story I am wanting to tell through line and shape and form? How do I find the language to describe the process by which I chose a particular color? A specific texture? How can I describe what the work means to me when I’m not yet certain I know?

It’s not easy.

Visual art transcends the written word. Art is its own language. A language that is difficult to translate.

In the middle of July our Incubator group was tasked with writing personal artist statements for the McGuffey website. For the past few weeks I fought with mine. It finally came together yesterday. I submitted my three hundred and fifty nine words and hoped for the best. I tried to be concise and tried to avoid all the things I dislike about most artist statements. That being said, ‘ash of memory’ was a darling I could not kill. Here’s what I wrote:

Fail better. Samual Beckett’s words of advice are Mimm Patterson’s goal for her year as an Incubator Artist at McGuffey Art Center. Mimm, who moved from California to Crozet in 2022, is a mixed-media artist, writer and trauma-informed yoga therapist. She is also someone who knows failure. 

“In my thirties, before I moved to Ireland, I worked as an artist” she says. In the 1990’s Mimm was the quintessential struggling artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I survived but I didn’t thrive. I think I lacked the self-belief required to create from a place of authenticity. I wasn’t brave enough to be vulnerable. But now I possess a grounded sense of purpose and the tenacity that comes with decades of life experience. I won’t feel shattered if I fail. I’ll feel stronger knowing that I tried.”  

Mimm’s work is informed by the belief that truth is malleable. Once we understand that our own truth is unfixed – that it is determined by the perspective from which it is viewed – we are able to reconcile our past with our perception of the present. 

This concept is critical to her current work, an exploration of her family and the dark mark its ash of memory has left on Mimm like an inky fingerprint that can’t be washed away.

“In some ways my new work is a practice of self-study. When my mother and I reunited after twenty years of estrangement I learned my family’s history for the first time. When she passed in 2019 she left behind several thick volumes of photographs and documents dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. I am learning who I am and how I came to be through these images and the stories they tell.”

Over the next year she hopes to share those stories through a body of work that inspires connection and shines with clarity and resonance. 

Mimm holds a BA in Studio Art and Education and a MFA in Transpersonal Psychology. She is an ICF certified coach as well as a SoulCollage® and Guided Autobiography facilitator. Mimm shares her new home in Crozet with her partner Ben and their twenty-year-old cat Bruce.

A Year at McGuffey’s Art Center: A Body of Work, Everyday Distractions and…Squirrel!

4 Comments
One of the distractions – a cuff bracelet made from the silk fabric Ben brought home from India.

When Ben returned from India in January, he brought with him half a suitcase of stunning silk remnants, trimmings and buttons. At the time I thought I might use the fabric and findings to make drawstring bags embellished with embroidery and beading. But I overestimated my machine sewing skillset and underestimated the difficulty in manipulating the slippery, fraying nature of silk. And so the fabric was neatly folded and stacked in a basket while I waited, frustrated and disappointed, for my ability to catch up to the demands of the material. 

Instead I satisfied my creative itch with coiled basketry and hand stitching. I made a few kumihimo braids and continued to play with image transfers. I tripped from one technique to another like a dog uncertain of which squirrel to chase. Yesterday I attended a fantastic  encaustic workshop with Karen Eide at McGuffey Art Center and I’m considering an online weaving course through Fiber Arts Takes Two with Harriet Goodall that begins in September.

All squirrels. Wonderful, fun, enlightening, creative squirrels. Squirrels that might be useful as I press forward. Or they might sploot and cool down my fevered creative energy. If there was a way to ignore the squirrels – the distractions – in order to stay focused, less impulsive and more intentional I don’t know it it would be useful. Maybe the distractions are good – even the splooting squirrel distractions.

But over the next eleven months, as one of six Incubator Artists at McGuffey’s, I need to create a cohesive body of work as part of our final group exhibit in June 2024. With that in mind, do I need to stop chasing squirrels?

An encaustic collage created with Karen Eide’s guidance over the weekend.

An artist’s body of work traces in color, form, line and texture the artist’s creative journey. Piet Mondrian is a good example. You know him for his iconic red, yellow and white grid paintings. Maybe his Broadway Boogie Woogie. But look at his earliest paintings of trees. Or his gingerpot. And we begin to see the process. The conviction. The exploring and the questioning.

An artist’s body of work can also be a gathering together of color, form, line and texture that contains the artist’s creative response to a chosen theme, specific experience or period of time. A reflection of sorts. An epilogue. Kansas City artist Mark Kielkulki is a good example. His works on paper are grouped almost as chapters in the story of his painting life. At the same time, when you look at his overall body of work, no matter how many themes he chooses to explore, there are underlying motifs that speak to isolation, Wes Anderson-esque oddities and shifting perspectives.

Thirty years ago I created a series of manipulated photographs based on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Later I created another series featuring Jim Morrison of The Doors and the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. I was young and cocky, insecure and envious. I was in a race against time and a duel to the death with every other young artist. I was desperate to look the part of the artist, more interested in the external experience and eager to provoke. I’m grateful that, as far as I know, this work no longer exists. 

Because this time around feels different. I want my body of work to evoke. Not provoke. I don’t care what I look like and I’m eager to encourage rather than envy the five other much younger women who are will be my studio-mates at McGuffey’s this year.

I’m looking inward, not outward, this time. Maybe that’s why I should embrace the squirrels who come along to distract me. They offer me moments of peace. Of reflection. They give me space to consider the story I want to tell in the body of work I am creating.

A Year at McGuffey’s: My New Tribe

3 Comments

Ben and I are days away from our first anniversary in Virginia. We’ve been here for one full tour around the sun. And yet I’m still settling. Still moving furniture around. Still figuring out the best cabinet for our pots and pans. Still looking for connection. For my Virginia tribe and community.

The final decade of the California life I left behind changed my destiny in ways I couldn’t imagine. It made this move possible. I met my beloved Ben and adopted my beloved feline Bruce. I cyber-stalked John Berg until he invited me to teach at Samyama. And it’s there I matured as a teacher and as a human. It’s there that I found a family of friends. A group of like-minded souls. We laugh together, commiserate together and attempt to navigate the journey of life and the practice of yoga one ardha chandrasana at a time.

And somehow, through births, deaths, illnesses, weddings, divorces, menopause, high school graduations, moves not only across the country but to the other side of the world, our community holds itself together. We even made it through a pandemic that put our lives on hold. Thank goodness for technology because it helped us navigate COVID. The shutdown is history and yet we are still signing in to Zoom and still showing up for ourselves and for one another three days a week to share asana practice. It blows my mind. 

In some ways the strength of my California Tribe makes finding connection here in Virginia less important. In some ways it makes finding connection here more difficult. Why make the effort when everyone I care about is one text, one email or one Zoom click away? Do I even need a new tribe? A new community? And if the answer to that question is ‘yes’ does it mean I need to surrender the community I already have or can the two co-exist?

We create community to build social connection. To know that we belong somewhere. Our tribe anchors us to the place where we began and at the same time supports us when it is time to take flight. We need community in order to find fulfillment within a group of individuals with whom we share similar attitudes, values and aspirations.

And so – yes – I need to find community here, in Virginia. And also – yes – it can coexist with the community that I love in California and to which I already belong.

I knew the move to Virginia would afford me more time to breathe life back into my artist self and reacquainting myself with her has been revelatory. I didn’t know how much I missed being able to tell my story through a visual medium. But isn’t creating art a solitary practice? Where does an artist go to find her tribe?

One morning in late March while searching for something else on the internet (isn’t always that way?) I found McGuffey Art Center’s Incubator Program. McGuffey’s has been thriving in an old brick school leased from the City of Charlottesville and a few blocks from the city’s famed pedestrian mall since the 1970’s. The Incubator Program, now in its ninth year, offers emerging artists shared studio space at a reduced rate while supporting their growth as artists through exhibitions, networking and education. The morning I found McGuffey’s I also discovered that applications for the 2023-2024 Incubator Program were due that weekend. I didn’t waste any time and without overthinking or second guessing myself I submitted an application.

I’ll be picking up the keys to my studio this weekend. It’s a very competitive program and I am proud to say that I am one of six artists chosen.

Does this mean that I’ve found a new tribe? We’ll find out.

Mark Making

Hang around with enough artists, eventually you’ll hear the phrase ‘mark making’. It’s the bane of my existence.I know the words roll off the tongue. I know the alliteration hums. But as much as we want the term to describe some magical, mysterious portal to the creative process, the phrase ‘mark making’ describes nothing. Two words puffed up to mean something special, in reality the phrase is nothing more than empty air.  Using the term to describe what it is we do as artists diminishes our work. 

We paint. We draw. We sculpt. Along the way we scumble and scratch, we carve and stitch and scribble and brush. We etch and boil and glue and cut. We try to communicate in a way that moves beyond words. We blur edges. We skew and flatten perspective. We hope that what we pull from our own heart touches someone else’s. Are we making marks? Of course. But mark making is so much more than what’s left behind on a canvas. 

And mark making isn’t restricted to fine art. We all make marks. All the time. And the marks we make don’t require a loaded paint brush, threaded needle or stick of charcoal.

Bump into the sharp edge of a coffee table with your shin and as the welt begins to form you might say, ‘oh, that’s gonna leave a mark’. Lean a dirty palm against a white wall? You left a mark. 

In the same way that you don’t have to be an artist to make a mark, not all marks are seen. Sometimes an angry storm of words or a hardened glare will leave a mark on another person that is invisible to the eye. Those marks are like tiny paper cuts on the psyche. 

When I’m creating I can erase, paint over, or cut away the marks I make. I can use a seam ripper to remove misplaced stitches. When I choose hurtful words or glances – those are marks that I can’t make disappear. So in the same way that I try to make considered choices when I create, I need to have the same consideration when I speak. What about you? Have you left any marks that you can’t erase?

Neurographic Drawing

At the start of the year I set the intention of building a writing practice that would allow me to post every two weeks. I created a spread sheet of topics around these obvious themes: yoga, coaching and craft. I hoped I would have the strength and energy (and the technical prowess) to have a brief video accompany the posts I wrote about aspects of our yoga practice. I managed one video, but my posts over the past six months have been consistent. Not what I intended, but consistent. Until now.

Writing, like yoga or art, is a practice that requires our presence. We have to show up. And I find it difficult to show up for writing practice when my brain is full. And right now my brain is full. My beloved and I are three weeks away from a major life transition – our move to the ‘other coast’. Our home has become a storage unit filled with boxes and I’m obsessed with worry about how Bruce – our amazing, elderly, deaf ginger cat – will manage the flight to Virginia and how he will adjust to a new home. There are so many details that need to be attended to that there is no room in my brain for putting words down on a page.

And don’t even mention my preoccupation with…well…everything else.

And so I’ve decided to draw. My art supplies are packed and so all I have to work with are a few sharpies and a mechanical pencil. But that’s all I need for neurographic drawing. The technique, a distant cousin to SoulCollage®, begins with just a thought. A quiet thought, a few shapes and a single line. So simple and yet it doesn’t take long before my energy settles. The jumbled words and racing thoughts become quiet, and I’m lost in the shapes I’ve drawn. I’m lost in the moment, which is a nice place to rest.

Creating as a Contemplative Practice

5 Comments

As a young girl I spent weekends at my grandmother’s narrow red brick row home, the one at the end of Poplar Street in Allentown, Pennsylvania, while my mom and step-dad went on the road with their country and western band. To cure my boredom, on Saturday afternoons my grandma would take a small bottle of Elmer’s Glue, some colored construction paper and a pair of child’s safety scissors from the metal cabinet tucked in a corner near the back door and put them down in front of me while I watched at the kitchen table.

Sometimes she poured all the dots left in the bottom of my grandpa’s hole punch into a bowl. Even better was when she gave me the hole punch so that I could make my own dots from the pages of a well read McCall’s magazine. Sometimes my grandma crushed the egg shells she’d saved from breakfasts that week, separated them into three or four Dixie cups and adding a few drops of McCormack’s food coloring to each one.

And then she left me to my own devices. I was free to create textured mosaics with the egg shells or to follow the outline of a pencil drawing with my pile of dots in all shades of color and tone. I sat at that table for hours while my grandma worked around me, grilling sliced onions, mixing horseradish with catsup and frying my beloved Minute Steaks while rolls toasted in the oven for my favorite Saturday dinner. 

The act of creating – whether it’s an egg shell mosaic or an egg filled soufflé, a loom knitted beanie or a black bean burrito – can be a balm that shifts our focus from ruminating on the past or worrying about the future to the moment in which we are living. This moment. The present. There is, however, one caveat. While our intent when we’re creating may be to produce something that we’ll gift to others, the act of creating must be something we gift ourselves. Because creating is a mind-freeing act of self-care.

It took me half a century and a global pandemic to figure that out. 

I think what catches us up when we consider creating something out of nothing is our predilection for wanting to make something perfect. Wanting to create precisely what we see in our mind’s eye. The perfect portrait. The perfect flower arrangement. The perfect layered cake. The perfect dance. When we abandon those ideas of perfection and decide instead to lean into the question ‘I wonder what would happen if…’ creating becomes contemplative play. As the chaos we’re living through continues to storm around us, creating as contemplative play becomes a gift of self-care that reduces anxiety, changes perspective and sparks joy.

Right now I’m spending my ‘creativity time’ playing with needle and thread, fabric and photographs. I’m learning new skills like felting and sashiko and boro and remembering old skills that I loved as a child like embroidery. 

When was the last time you dug out that set of colored pencils you keep stashed at the back of your desk? Or finished the blanket you began knitting two years ago? Or made your grandmother’s lemon bar recipe? Or dusted off that guitar? Or done any activity that lights up a different part of your brain and moves you from the routine to the sublime?

It’s time.

Your Creative Heart

When I was a child I loved September. I loved school shopping. I loved the smell of a new lunchbox, fresh new clothes, breaking in new shoes and the sharp graphite tip of a bright yellow number two pencil whose perfect pink eraser was still intact and whose pristine finish had yet to be marred by my biting incisors.

But that was then. This is now. And as we enter the second September of the pandemic, it’s a struggle sometimes to hold on to my optimism, my hope and my motivation. I know I’m not alone. Let’s face it. The past year and a half has been one heck of an endless slog.

What do you do when you know you’re reaching critical mass? When you know the stress of all we’ve been through and all we’re bearing witness to weighs too heavily on the heart?

Inspired by a friend whose journey as an artist has been so much fun to watch, I pulled out my own art supplies. The creative process, whether it’s at an easel with a fresh gessoed canvas, in your kitchen whisking a roux or with pen in hand and a story to tell, is the distraction we need. It offers us room to breathe. The creative process slows down time and provides space for honest reflection. It provides the clarity we need to be honest with ourselves about how we are experiencing life in this New Normal.

Where is your creative heart? Music? Visual arts? Cooking? Writing? Is it time to get your creative heart beating again?

Lately I’ve been seduced by the practice of ‘slow stitching’. Letting time pass one slow stitch at a time. My Aunt Mimmie taught me how to embroider when I was young and slow stitching has nudged awake a joy I’d forgotten. I’ve also been working on a series of mixed media pieces called ‘Family Album’. This collage is from that series. The man on the left is my great uncle William Harrison Barber, known as ‘Henry’ to his friends and family. The text on the right is from the last postcard he sent to his brother Robert. From the moment I found his postcard in my mother’s collection of family ephemera I felt a connection  to this man. I can’t explain it. I just did.

Henry wrote the postcard in 1903 from the Oakes Home for the Consumptive in Denver, Colorado. He tells his brother, “I don’t look like a sick man but appearances are very deceptive with lung trouble.” His doctors tell him he is not improving and advise that he head to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Henry knows that if his health doesn’t improve when he is in New York, he will never see Colorado again. He’s only twenty-three. And he never makes it to Saranac Lake.

His story has given me pause to reflect on what we do to survive and the connection between good health and creativity. 

Throughout the pandemic it’s been my adventures with basket making and needle felting and wet felting and eco-dying and collage that have brought me comfort. They’ve kept me sane and quite possibly alive.

William Harrison Barber was a musician. He left his studies in Boulder to pursue a career in music and found some success with his ditty ‘Dainty Flo from Idaho’. I’m sad that music didn’t save his life but I bet it brought him comfort. 

Can exploring your creative nature be a comfort to you?

Creating Connections with an Old Bag of Tea

5 Comments

We power through cups of tea at our house. I’ve been saving the wrinkled and wet used tea bags in a bowl. Don’t judge me. I have my reasons.

Not quite finished. The dark flecks are tea. The red pigment comes from pounded rose and geranium petals.

In June I began a year long virtual course of study with India Flint. India is an artist who works with plants and found objects to create beautifully dyed paper and cloth. India’s course of study is why keen eyes might find me in the wee hours of the morning gathering handfuls of eucalyptus leaves from along the bike path that parallels El Camino Real and stuffing them into the pockets of my baggy cargo pants.

India Flint, and this course, is why I save used tea bags.

India’s teaching style is that of a storyteller. Rather than providing precise step-by-step directions – like the sort you’d find if an Ottolenghi cook book – she weaves a tale of her experiences with the plants she is using, the mistakes she’s made, the lessons she’s learned. She gives permission for us to take what we need, to leave the rest, and to be inspired by her life’s work.

I’m inspired.

Our first journey was through the making of a book. I didn’t have much of what was needed – proper paper, a sewing machine, a very sharp pair of scissors – but this course is filmed with such care and beauty it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t playing along. I was still learning.

Which is how, this morning at 5 AM, I found myself carefully deconstructing a dozen or so tea bags, emptying their contents into a bowl and spreading the fragile paper out like one might smooth a bedsheet.

But there is more to this story:

Over the weekend my friend Diane – a talented and dedicated artist – gifted me Beth Pickens’ book Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles. This is a book that weighs much more than it should and its Times Roman font is a point size or two smaller than my eyes enjoy. The first chapter, however, is about time. Something I’ve been pondering lately.

And here’s a little more to the story:

I had lunch yesterday with a friend I’ve not seen since before the shut down. Carolyn and I laugh when we’re together. We laugh a lot. But yesterday, as we were talking about how the pandemic changed us, we thought of something that stopped us in mid-giggle. The shutdown gave us time. And now time feels more precious. Both Carolyn and I are discovering how different life is when we treat time as a gift and not a commodity to burn through. We’re learning to say ‘yes’ to what we love. Even if that means saying ‘no’ to something we love less.  

And that is how I found myself at 5 AM this morning gently opening the tea bags that had been drying for a day instead of reading emails and absorbing all that had happened in the world as I slept. India’s course is inspiring me to explore. Diane’s book is encouraging me to love my inner artist. My conversation with Carolyn is reminding me that time is precious.

Deconstructing tea bags is a slow, careful process. While I sat at my desk, my Ottlite breaking the pre-dawn grey, I fell into a sort of meditative reverie. I thought about the tea, how far it had traveled – the Ashwaghanda from India and the green from Japan – I thought about the farmers who grew and harvested the tea then bundled it off to factories to be processed. I thought about the work it takes to create the paper that holds the tea and about how I was moving the process of creation forward by turning the old tea into dye and the these fragile scraps of paper vessel into a new vessel.

It was a profound moment to experience that deep sense of connection. It felt new to me because it wasn’t cerebral. The connection came from my heart. 

I hope I can hold on to that feeling of connection.

The Gift, Part I

2 Comments

On Monday the 16th of March I left home halfway through the government’s daily COVID-19 press briefing for the thirty minute walk to Feinberg Medical Group where I teach yoga and meditative crafts to chronic pain clients.

When I walk to the clinic I am listening to the sounds around me. I hear dogs scolding me with frantic yips from their living room perch. The 1:40 southbound CalTrain screams its way toward its next stop. Traffic races down Alma and music pumps from transistors balanced on the tailgates of pickup trucks parked in front of green manicured lawns.  

The path I walk takes me past Palo Alto High School. Before the coronavirus closed Paly the school’s track would rumble with the footfalls of athletes, the coach’s loud shouts of encouragement and snide laughter from the bleachers. 

Decades ago I walked with a cassette tape Walkman and then, when they arrived, a CD Walkman. I graduated to an iPod and progressed to a Nano a few years after that. If I was walking my ears were plugged and my brain was pulsing with U2, Jackson Brown, the Eurythmics or (and this will really give away my age) Howard Jones. When I grew tired of music I’d listen to news. Music or headlines – it didn’t really matter. My brain was happier stuffed with something other than my thoughts. On the day I realized I’d arrived for my walk at Shoreline without my Nano I almost turned around. How was it possible that I’d be able to place one foot in front of the other without my Nano?

Somehow I managed. That was the day I realized the cry of seagulls and the sound of the wind circling through the rushes was better than Bono wailing about bloody Sundays and the incessant peal of the next breaking bulletin. 

And that’s why I missed the news of the Bay Area’s imminent lock down on Monday. I was too busy listening to the thrum of life. That’s why I was surprised by the frantic energy pouring from Trader Joe’s doors as I passed. It explains why, by the time I arrived at Feinberg’s all that was left for me to do was turn around and return home. The functional restoration program – the program of which I’m a part – had sent patients home.

Like so many others, in twenty-four hours I went from having an overflowing calendar to one that was near-enough to empty.

We’re facing a tremendous challenge. Nevertheless, six days in and I’m realizing what a gift I’ve been given.

Intuition Manifest: Putting Form to Feeling

fullsizeoutput_918

My Worker Self: Committee Suite “I Am the One Who Works but Forgets to Live”

I don’t remember what I was searching for the day I channeled my inner Alice and tumbled down the internet rabbit hole. All I know is that I fell far and fast and since that day I’m compelled to squirrel away magazines from waiting rooms or to visit every Goodwill on the Peninsula to peruse stacks of musty National Geographics. More likely than not, when I’m home alone you’ll find me surrounded by images torn from those magazines and an array of glue sticks, rubber cement, 5×8 inch mat board, xacto knives and scissors. Because the day my inner Alice tumbled, she landed at a place called SoulCollage®.

Brought to life several decades ago by a woman from Northern California named Seena Frost, SoulCollage® is an art form and visual journaling practice that requires nothing more than the ability to trust. But I am slow to open. Trust is something that, at times, I lack. 

Skepticism is not a trust issue, however, and it’s a personal characteristic I hold dear. My inherent skepticism compels me to question everything and keeps me from sipping the Kool Aid too soon. But maybe my skepticism has its own shadow side. Maybe it keeps me stuck (I should probably do a card on that!). 

It was a surprise when, on the day that I said “I am the one who…” for the first time, my ‘stuckness’ softened.

SoulCollage® touches on my love for art. It taps into my understanding of transpersonal psychology.  SoulCollage® pulls me from the sidelines and makes me an active participant in my spirit dance with interoception, intuition and gut instinct. SoulCollage® is a way to give form to feelings we experience but can’t always name.

fullsizeoutput_938

Stand and Smile, My Observer Self: Committee Suit “I Am the One Who Finds Humor in the Absurd”

Meanwhile, there’s my aversion to circles. You know the kind I mean – the ones where we sit around and talk about our feelings.  I found myself on the doorstep of SoulCollage® facilitator Beth Breedlove’s welcoming home for her introductory workshop this past September.  As other participants arrived we were asked to select a variety of images from three large Tupperware bins resting on card tables in her kitchen. We pulled one image from our collected bundle and then gathered in her light-filled living room.

Circles make me queasy. I wanted to bolt.

But this circle was different. Maybe it was Beth’s calm manner, or the beautiful Native American rattle we held when it was our turn to speak, or the air of curiosity in the room. Beth leads SoulCollage® workshops from her home on a regular basis and one or two of the women with us had participated before. But for most of the women everything was a brand new adventure. I tapped into that energy and let myself explore the unknown. I swallowed my skepticism, settled my soul and opened my mind.

Beth led by example. She held her image and began to speak, “I am the one who…” By the end, after all six of us had spoken, I was beginning to understand the potential of the practice. 

fullsizeoutput_8fb

My Great Uncle as Witness, Preparing for War: Transpersonal Card

But it’s difficult to explain, isn’t it? The experiential nature of SoulCollage® makes it difficult to define with words.

I decided it was best to arrive at the four-day SoulCollage® Facilitator Training at Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose, California a blank slate. After Beth’s workshop I continued to make cards at home but questioned not only what to do with them but if I was even making them ‘right’. So in the days leading up to the training I dropped any attachment I had to the story I’d told myself about the doors my training in San Jose might open.  I was excited, but it was an excitement tethered to the unknown.

I was honest. I wondered to myself if SoulCollage® was another angle on West Coast weirdness. On the afternoon of the first day I confessed out loud to my fellow trainees, our teacher Mirabella and her assistants, that I was skeptical, cynical and judging. We laughed, I explained my proclivity toward being skeptical and promised to shake off the rest.

But it wasn’t until our first chance to read our cards that I fully grasped the power each collage contained.

SoulCollage® channels the subconscious. It gives voice to aching silence. SoulCollage® allows us to find dreams believed to be lost, to chart a course, and to find comfort in the knowledge of discovering our own path.

It took a few days to process the enormity of what I discovered about myself in San Jose. Since then I’ve continued to make cards, to pull a card and to journal every morning. Until my facilitator training I was a morning news and coffee junkie. This new pattern brings peace and quiet contemplation to mornings that just a few months ago were loud and anxious.

SoulCollage® puts feeling into form. It transforms intuition from something like air – invisible and impossible to hold – into something seen and solid.

When we can honor our intuition by giving it shape and color, we honor our own truth.