Fatherly love
HAPPY FATHERS DAY!
Swing
Author Archives: oddlyMama
Sianna Sherman on Storytelling (+ My Illustrated Notes)
Yoga and Storytelling: My Notes Illustrated- part 1
Yoga and Storytelling: My Notes Illustrated- part 2
I listened to a podcast recently of Sianna Sherman on the Power of Myth and Storytelling through the International Association of Yoga Therapists and in true illustrated note taking fashion, drew and wrote what I heard. Above are some snap shots from my notes.
Sianna makes some interesting points about the healing power of story in the context of the yoga tradition. I would add that mining ones personal life stories and sharing them with others are equally as valuable, and perhaps more personally transformative then reading an already famous, classic story and trying to find yourself in that story. And while I’m all for plummeting the riches of ancient religious texts in search of meaning and applying it to ones life, ( if that is your thing) I think we all carry this kind of wisdom inside of us already if we can learn to access and also share it with each other then we our lives as we know it will be transformed. No analyzing of ancient yoga texts required. You can find more out about this process here. Below are a few of my favorite points from Sianna’s talk:
- Stories are alive.
- Stories feed life.
- When stories are told it helps the world to flower.
- When we hold the space for the flowering of the story inside us then it catches [something important] inside. [edit-mine]
- Discovering the teachings of yoga through storytelling is a creative way for the soul to come to life and for us to have insight into our own lives through the story.
Gravity
A poem for your Aliveness
Here’s to your aliveness!
May you experience you whole life as a practice for this very moment:
To rewrite the blueprint that has been etched across you hearts, you bones and you mind.
To mend that great divide, one cell at a time.
To be able to give yourself full permission to put away the ruler, and throw away the mask.
To feel wildly uninhibited
To shout, “My experience matters” and “I belong!” as you fling open the rusty, 200 pound door you have crammed your life behind.
Then, most importantly; may you have the courage to lay the palm open and to risk receiving.
To dive beneath the surface of things and learn to trust again, regardless of what life has in store for you.
To let the warm liquid of life flow like milk, all the way down to the belly.
To say “I’m choosing to let love in now”
Swing
Falling in love with your baby
The Half-Dead Girl in words and pictures (and how to get out of the abyss)
I had a dream once of a half-dead girl who everyone thought was dead but came alive every now and then. I was keeping a dream journal at the time and this excerpt is a page from the journal in words and illustrations. As you might have guessed the story is about Depression and points to how one gets in and out of the abyss. My handwriting is a little hard to read so plan on typing up the full story and will upload more excerpts as I complete them.
Page two of my Journal in its original form
A tribute to Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen’
Every artist must hone their craft and draw inspiration from those that have come before. I was going through my old sketchbooks the other day and came across this study I made years ago as a way of perfecting my craft. So in true Copy-the-masters tradition I give you a collection of random sketches I made from Maurice Sendak’s famous children’s book In the Night Kitchen. Though Where the Wild Things Are, has enjoyed momentous popularity, I’ve personally always preferred this book. Perhaps it’s a combination of the totally innocent male nudity, cityscapes of food and the fabulously corpulent baker. A lot more enjoyable then wild and scary monsters gnashing their teeth.
Darwin’s Complaint, and other favorite things by Maira Kalman
I found many interesing treasures in Maira Kalman’s book My favorite things. The book is a walk through both Kalman’s personal history and aesthetic taste in words, illustrations and photographs. It reminds me that some artist’s are both collectors as well as archeologists, and edified my own propensity to collect random things that most people would call “junk” (much to my husband’s dissapointment). I was particualrly touched by her penchant for collecting broken chairs. But by far the thing that most facinated me was a letter that was written by Charles Darwin. It is a complaint that reads like a diary entry about an obviously difficult time in his life. His dissiluusionment is apparent, but so his his sense of humor. I’ve included a copy of it below. The quality is rather poor, so I suggest you check out Kalman’s book for the better version and to see the many other curiosities she’s collected.
Charles Darwin’s Complaint
This is part of a Illustration I’m currently working on that is the visual counterpart to a guided embodied meditation practice. I post more images as I complete them and be cure to post the final Visual guide.
I just finished reading this book by Cheryl Strayed: Tiny beautiful things: advice on love and life from Dear Sugar, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book is a memoir which is cleverly disguised in series of online advice columns that she wrote for the Rumpus. Though I am not a fan of advice columns, or memoirs, I appreciated Cheryl’s skillful blending of the two genres. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book. Of course, I was most interesting in her perspective on parenthood.
On Being Raised by a single mother: Advice to a single mother who is struggling.
“As a single mother—and by that I mean truly a mother alone like you, Oh Mama, one does not share custody or co-parent—she had to be her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be. And you know what’s never endingly beautiful to me? She was. She was imperfect. She made mistakes. But she was her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be.
And that is the gift of my life.”
On having expectations as a parent: Advise to a man who had lost his son in a tragic accident.
“Letting go of expectations when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
On deciding to become pregnant in her mid-30’s :
“I decided to become pregnant when I did because I was nearing the final years of my fertility and because my desire to do this thing everyone said was so profound was just barely stronger than my doubts about it were.”
“If a magic baby fairy had come to me when I was childless and thirty four and promised to grant me another ten years of fertility so I could live a while longer in the serene, feline-focused, fabulously unfettered life I had, I’d have taken it in a flash.”
On the path not taken:
I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.