Category: Peace
Friday, May 17, 2019 | Art, Big Thoughts, Coaching, Confessions, Feminism, Organizing, Peace, Space, Spirit, Word of the Year, Writing |
Sometimes my skin feels too porous, and emotions pour in almost painfully. Yesterday, I started reading a personal essay in the newspaper written by the mother of a child on the autistic spectrum who was being bullied by classmates, people he thought were his friends. I had to stand up and walk away, so strong were my feelings of sickness and pain, gut-deep, a grief and horror that seemed to wash through my bloodstream.
I stood by the sink and wept.
Stories of exclusion, cruelty, judgement of others trouble me so deeply I can hardly tolerate the pain. I guess here in my mind, I live in a world in which people see each other, are kind to each other, have compassion for each other; but in the real world, there is a lot of pain inflicted even by people who are trying to be kind; pain is also inflicted by people who only want to be left alone, people who don’t want to engage, people who don’t care, who are struggling with their own troubles; and there is pain actively inflicted by people who fear and hate others for their differences, people who don’t want to understand or learn or listen, people who actively target others, weaker and more marginalized than themselves.
I can’t make sense of it.
It just doesn’t make sense in my brain.
I don’t have solutions. I can only to attempt to make spaces for that version of the world that exists in my mind to exist in real life. I’ve tried in the classroom, on the soccer field, inside my own family, and in this storytelling workshop. I know I’ve gotten things wrong. I suspect I’m sometimes the person who’s inflicted pain when trying to be kind, and acting in ignorance. But I’d rather try than hide. There is no alternative that makes sense to me.
XPagePerformance2019WEBAD
For the past 11 weeks, I’ve been privileged to be part of The X Page Workshop. It was envisioned as a creative and collaborative undertaking that would bring together women from different cultural backgrounds, all of whom are making lives for themselves and their families in Canada. Each week, a group of almost 30 of us have met to work on writing and staging stories. Together, we’ve made something that’s rich and enriching. Just with stories! Just with stories and goodwill, trust, kindness, and effort. When we’re together in the beautiful space at the Centre for Peace Advancement, as we have been every Tuesday evening since March, I feel immersed in the possibility of the world inside my mind becoming a real place. It feels like a real place, then and there.
Just thinking about being there brings me a sense of peace and ease.
It isn’t perfect. Why should it be? This world in my mind has conflict, but it also has ways of talking about conflict, because there is trust, and the trust is constantly being earned. Each small thing offered, in this world in my mind, is actually a really big thing. Our gifts to each other don’t have to be grand gestures, large acts, or come from a place of material wealth.
I think the best gift we can give to someone else is to see and acknowledge them without wanting or trying to change them in any way.
Unconditional love.
To live in this world in my mind, I have to try to live with unconditional love. And that means feeling too porous sometimes to the brokenness in the real world. That means loving what’s broken, too, unconditionally. And that hurts. But it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me at all.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Apr 18, 2019 | Adventure, Art, Big Thoughts, Cartoons, Coaching, Creativity course, Drawing, Fun, Lists, Lynda Barry, Meditation, Peace, Space, Spirit, Teaching, Work |
End-of-term launch party.
I’m done teaching for another term. My course was on the creative process: how to set goals, envision a major project, and lay the groundwork necessary to complete the work. I spent a couple of days this week and last meeting with students to hand back their final projects (stories in comic form), and to chat about the term. Some themes emerged in our conversations. Here’s what we learned.
The importance of mistakes. So many students talked about how important their mistakes had been in shaping their project, how an apparent mistake had turned out to be important or valuable to their drawing, or how freeing it was to allow themselves to make mistakes. My theory is that through mistakes our unconscious mind gives us important information we couldn’t otherwise access; and drawing is the perfect medium for this communication with the self, because we see our “mistakes” pretty much instantly, and have to figure out what they’re trying to tell us.
The freedom of stepping away from perfectionism. Students also expressed how freeing it was to embrace their mistakes, or even how freeing it was just to give themselves permission to make mistakes. Creating a major project by hand is time-consuming and laborious, and if you don’t accept the mistakes you’ll inevitably make, you’ll never finish what you’ve started.
The calm that exists inside creation. Every student in the class put a lot of time into their projects, and some put in vast swathes of time, far more than they’d anticipated, or really, that was required to meet the project’s guidelines. (In other words, they didn’t care about the rubric, they cared about the work itself.) Students talked about losing themselves in what they were doing. It didn’t feel like work. It was fun, it was relaxing. The time flew. There is a meditative quality to making things by hand, to being focused in this way; engaged.
The time for this is always with us. (To paraphrase Lynda Barry.) This feeling of calm, this experience of getting lost inside a pleasurable task, is available anytime. And yet, we seem to need someone to remind us of this, we need a reason to get engaged in this way, a task, a project for a class to give us the excuse to get lost in making something that requires focus and effort, that is time-consuming, and that ultimately may have no material or monetary value. We feel like we have to prove that it’s worth it. I wonder why? When it seems so obvious, looking at these wonderful students and their amazing artwork — their unique, truthful, serious, funny, silly, brave, thoughtful beautiful art — that it is worth it.
This course gave the students permission to make art. To draw. To colour. To turn their lives, their observations, their ideas into cartoons. Many expressed how valuable this practice was for them, and how much they hoped others would get the chance to take the course too. “Everyone should have to take this course!” “You have to teach it again for the sake of future students!” In truth, I’m not sure what I taught was a course so much as a concept: what I tried to do was make space for the students to make space for themselves.
Anyone can draw. Most of the students had no idea what they were signing up for when they entered my classroom on day one. They thought they were taking a creative writing course; the course description was vague; they were surprised to learn they’d be doing so much drawing. They weren’t sure they could do it. Many hadn’t drawn since high school, or even grade school. “I never thought I could draw well enough to …” And to a person, they could — they could tell the stories they wanted to tell through cartoons. (“Well enough” went out the window; “well enough” had no place in our classroom.)
Pride in accomplishment. The final projects undertaken by the students were big!! This was no small undertaking. And everyone did it! The deadline got met, and each project proved to be as unique and individual as the person who created it.
Thank you, Artists of ENGL 332! Thank you for your trust. It was an adventure.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Apr 2, 2019 | Art, Cartoons, Coaching, Creativity course, Fire, Fun, Lynda Barry, Peace, Spirit, Word of the Year |
Tomorrow morning (Wednesday), my students and I will be presenting our artwork at St. Jerome’s. It’s our last day of class this term, and in Monday’s class we worked on making artist’s statements (that’s mine, above). My instructions went like this: Include your name; Include a sentence or quotation that offers insight into who you are as an artist — why you make art, or why you believe art matters, or what motivates you, or inspires you; Include illustrations/cartoons.
The results were, in my opinion, brilliant. Within less than 45 minutes, students had created tabloid-sized, unique, creative, personal statements, illustrated with humour, freedom and personality — utterly delightful. I can’t wait to hang up these statements tomorrow. When I expressed surprise that so many of the students had managed to finish their work during the time allotted, they said they were used to it by now. Virtually every exercise I run in class is time-based — you have 7 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes. Done. During one particularly gruelling exercise, I remember joking that the title of the course shouldn’t be Creativity Unplugged, it should be Creativity Under Pressure. And then a student requested I play “Under Pressure” by Queen/David Bowie. And I did.
And we got the work done, whatever it was.
Yesterday was an opportunity to reflect on what we’d expected coming into this course, and what had actually happened. I feel that these public “check-outs,” by their nature, encourage people to say nice things, so I take it all with a grain of salt, but it was gratifying to hear that students had absorbed from the course exactly what I’d hoped to offer.
I hoped that discipline and routine and structure would nurture creative practice, and curiosity. Yes. (Though one of the students said he loathed the timed exercises.)
I hoped that students would find the exercises relaxing, meditative, so engaging that they’d lose track of time. Yes.
I hoped that students would rediscover their inner child. Yes.
I hoped that students would be delighted and surprised by the things they were making. Yes.
I hoped that students would see progress in their technical skills. Yes.
I hoped that we would laugh a lot. Yes.
I wanted to let the course unfold naturally, to go with the flow, the way I do when I’m writing and drawing, and I think that I got a whole lot closer to this goal than I ever have before, as a teacher. I wasn’t even that scared or anxious … most of the time.
And tomorrow morning we’ll display some of what we made, do a little more drawing, a little more talking, give away a few prizes, and enjoy being together one last time before the term ends.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Mar 19, 2019 | Art, Big Thoughts, Cartoons, Confessions, Creativity course, Family, Friends, Meditation, Parenting, Peace, Space, Spirit, Teaching, The X Page, Work, Writing |
Too much. There’s too much on my mind. The kids were home last week on March break, and I looked at the surfaces around our house, covered with debris, and I thought, this could be a metaphor for the surface of my mind. I’m drowning in details, in crumpled to-do lists, in scattered responsibilities, in unmet needs, in forgotten or neglected tasks.
My solution is multi-pronged, and does not, as one might think would be prudent, involve a lot of cleaning. Whenever I clear a surface, more debris appears.
Instead, my solution is in connection. Connection outward and connection inward. I go to a kundalini yoga class, and chant, whirl, and root myself deep inside my body. I go to church and rest within an hour of spiritual reflection. I draw and I write. I go for a walk with a friend. I meditate. I help lead workshops, and I stand at the front of a classroom trying to connect students to the transformative magic of their own creativity.
I’ve been sharing a journal with one of my children, as a way to “talk” back and forth about big subjects. Our household currently has three teenagers, a time of life that is especially full of big questions — what is the purpose of my life, what am I supposed to do next, who am I, where can I find meaning? There aren’t one-size-fits-all answers to these questions, it seems to me, so I can only offer ideas, suggestions, places to search.
One of my teenagers said to me, earlier this week, that people are looking for connection with something bigger than themselves. That’s it, isn’t it. That’s the general answer. I think it’s why religion has played such a critical role in human society: religion is explicitly about connecting with something larger than oneself. Most religions involve community, ritual and practice, and some personal sacrifice; all of which are important ingredients, in my experience, to feeling connected to a larger purpose and meaning. It’s important to be aware that there are healthy connections, but there are also dangerous connections (if you’ve connected with something that demands that you hurt or denigrate other people, or yourself, for example, that is not a healthy connection with a larger cause).
Sitting in church on Sunday, I thought about who I am becoming as I age and grow more rooted within myself. I’m not someone who needs a clear surface to thrive. I don’t need to live in a clean house. But I am someone who needs to pay attention to the things that are causing the clutter, the people whose lives coincide with my own, whose interests interest me, the people who share my space (and I don’t just mean my own family); I carry their cares close, in other words. The debris isn’t all mine; I’m not even sure a quarter of it really belongs to me; certainly I generate far less than I take responsibility for. And that’s where I need to take care, be more mindful — recognize and accept responsibility for the choices I make, and recognize and let go of that which is not mine to tidy, clean up, or carry.
Somehow, it’s my spiritual self that recognizes what matters. Yet the spiritual self is the easiest to neglect, and the hardest to talk about. Here’s what I’ve been telling myself to maintain those connections, inward and outward, that give me meaning and purpose: If you don’t have time to meditate, you’re too busy; if you don’t have time to go to church, you’re too busy; if you don’t have time to talk to a good friend, you’re too busy; if you don’t have time to be alone, you’re too busy. (Here’s the thing: even though I’m busy, I almost always have time.)
xo, Carrie
Sunday, Jan 6, 2019 | Cartoons, Creativity course, Dream, Exercise, Lists, Lynda Barry, Meditation, Music, Peace, Play, Sleep, Space, Spirit, Word of the Year, Writing, Yoga |
Puppy photo unrelated to post. Rose with her best friend Murphy, who is six weeks older and three times bigger.
Hello, 2019.
Hello, pleasant glass of white wine near the wrist. Hello, Saturday evening.
Hello, my lovely kind encouraging friends who somehow have found me here, in this online state in which I exist, occasionally, as if I’ve peeled myself apart to become a thing both corporeal and ethereal at once.
Today, this is what I did with a spare hour or so — drew a cartoon showing the Classroom Rules* for my new course. It seemed like a good use off my time. Why not? *with thanks to Lynda Barry for the inspiration
My new word of the year has arrived! Last night, I spoke it out loud at my Word of the Year group, so it’s official.
SPACE
Another one-syllable word: FIRE, 2018; STAND, 2017; PEACE, 2016; LIGHT, 2015. I must be drawn the solidity of the single syllable, because the choice hasn’t been deliberate. I only just noticed. The word SPACE called out to me this past fall, when I felt overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities. I was craving not physical space, but spiritual space, mental space, space to think clearly and slowly, space to formulate, to spread out my ideas and gaze upon them, space to be whole, calm, peaceful. It has emotional and figurative connotations for me, rather than concrete ones.
But a word has a habit of showing more of itself than one can guess.
What will I make space for, in my mind and in my heart, and in my days? A friend on FB posted 100 things she intends to do this year, but I don’t think my list is so long.
- draw cartoons for class
- draw cartoons for larger project
- listen to music
- find new favourite songs, add to playlist
- revise / rewrite novel project
- write new stories for a partly-completed collection
- read peers’ work, share work with peers
- apply for grants
- go to Lynda Barry workshop this summer
- retreat weekend solo
- retreat weekend with friends
- yoga in front of the fire
- kundalini yoga
- read novels
- host a poetry night
- eat dessert with my family
- cuddle with Rose
- go for walks, be outside
- write in my notebook
- play the piano and sing
- visit my grandma
- meet friends
- connect with people
- lift weights
- cook vegetarian suppers
- play
- meditate
- sleep in
- go to Spain
- take a trip with my family
- go camping
- sit around a campfire
- lie on my back and look at the stars
- let myself dream
Today, I’ve done #1, #3, #16, and #28, and #16 is about to happen! (Panettone!)
xo, Carrie
PS Read this poem by a former student. It’s so beautiful, I keep reading it over and over. Sending huge gratitude to former students who continue to reach out to share their work with me. Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.
Thursday, Nov 15, 2018 | Adventure, Art, Big Thoughts, Cartoons, Confessions, Creativity course, Meditation, Peace, Spirit, Teaching, Work, Writing |
Who will you be in 25 years? This is an exercise I’ve done twice this fall, with different results each time. The first time, I was led through the exercise by someone else. Today, I led my students through the same exercise.
Here’s how to do it, if you want to try:
Draw a self-portrait as if you were posing for an author photo on the back of the book you’ve always dreamed of publishing. Use crayons. If you have a notebook, draw the portrait on the very last page. (10 minutes)
Next, write your author bio blurb. Remember to write in the third person. Cast yourself deep into the future (25 years or so), and discover who you imagine yourself to be. (10 minutes)
Here’s mine, from today. (Note: I draw self-portraits as if I were 25 years younger …)
Carrie Snyder has devoted her life — or the better part of it — to the pursuit of an ideal self that she first imagined into being as a seven-year-old child, when, as a reader of far-ranging taste with a wild imagination she said to herself (and to anyone who would listen): I’m going to do that too! I’m going to write books! While the perfection of her notion would prove impossible to achieve, the truth of its imagery was uncanny (she saw a forest path and a treehouse hideaway, which, as she grew, became representations rather than literal spaces). Through writing, Carrie found herself transported, frequently, into a deeper understanding of her relationship to the world itself and to its many mysteries. She came to a kind of peace with its mysteries, by holding them to the light and examining their facets with care and attention — and love. Love figures heavily in Carrie’s work, specifically in her discipline to craft, and to sharing the joy of a discipline with others. She has not yet finished, and she hopes she never will. What has changed, with time, is her understanding that finishing something is temporary, and that what lasts is the pull of discovery itself. The process. The adventure of it. She will never be satisfied nor think her work on earth complete, and that is the fuel that invites her to continue — to be the ideal self she imagined at age seven: an artist. Someone who by alchemy transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Someone who sees what is possible. Someone who looks at the world and loves it with her attention.
Here is the original exercise, completed in October, with a different result (except for the youthful portrait).
Carrie Snyder, despite crippling bouts of self-doubt, has managed to put herself forward, into positions of service, of leadership, roles that demanded the ability to see herself as more powerful and more capable than anyone else did, and by believing, to become. She was not always confident. Was not always the presence she presented. At times, she thought she was doubled, the face to the world not the face she turned to herself. Was it possible to live doubled like this? What did it mean to do work that challenged and frightened her to her very core — could she get up the next day and rise again? But something deep inside ran like an engine or furnace, the flame of desire, the flame of meaning, and she knew she could live in no other way — could she? She tried listening to reason, to her heart, to her spirit, but the fire was the constant that gave her life, renewed her desire to inhabit bodies and minds bigger and braver than her natural own. She said: If I can do it, then I will. She said: Be the change you want to see. And she was. And that was marvellous to her. Because if she could do this, anyone could — anyone loved and believed in and cherished. Carrie Snyder cherishes herself, believes in herself, loves herself and that has made her strong enough to love, believe in and cherish each of you —
each of you —
each of you — beautiful, aching beings
xo, Carrie
PS It’s tempting, when presented with two things, to compare them … but let’s not. I like that both of these projections into the future are, in fact, deeply embedded in the emotional reality of a present moment. Like putting a thumb-tack onto a map to say: I was here.
