Claiming + Activating Space to Create
On time and intention
As I find the flow of a season, I love to draw a card as I set my intentions. Lately, this has been drawn from The Rose Oracle deck by Rebecca Campbell. Decks like these come with dense little books for looking up any card’s meaning. Looking up the meaning of my winter card, I noticed a section on using the box as your portable altar. The container itself becomes an active way to hold the cards that you pull.
This past week, when it felt like every moment of my day was accounted for, I found myself saying I didn’t have time for the things I wanted to do. But it’s not so much the pockets of time that are hard to find as it is the intentional space and breathing room to ruminate, to create, to breathe.
As the week came to a close, I began preparing for a local art journalling workshop I was teaching. When I considered how we should spend our time together, I realized the greatest gift we all could share was that gift of intentionally created and protected space.
We began by acknowledging the space we had created for ourselves,
to appreciate it
set intentions for it.
One of ours was to create beauty for ourselves, to find beauty in the community we formed by showing up together, and we were reminded:
We are all born inherently creative. We all have the capacity to bring beautiful things into the world and should be unapologetic about wanting to create them, whatever they are. . . .the truth is that beautiful things endure.
—Alan Moore, Do/Design/Why beauty is key to everything
Once you manage to find the time, the simple acknowledgment—to truly claim the space—means that it becomes potent with possibility.
We are free to revel, find joy, meditate, explore within it. The space becomes activated and we find a creative flow.
How fitting that during our workshop, we were indeed creating portable altars—filled with mindful marks, collage bits and curiosities, our thoughts and wishes and ideas.
We need only that space to begin, and then we can carry our altars with us to re-enter at any time we need to find it again.