So today I had a whirlwind of visitors. They walked in the front door, started examining all of the various items in the house, visited the basement, played with the ukuleles and attempted a game of jacks. The short 15 minute visit was an obvious check-in on their part to make sure the Art Garage was still here for them.
I love the freedom and enthusiasm of children, and I love that the neighborhood kids feel so comfortable that they just flow freely and easily through my presence. I hope to elevate their experience this year by being able to tie it into the work at the Community House. One thing we need for sure over there are seat cushions. We had about 30 metal folding chairs donated to the house. They are great functional chairs, but they sure are hard on the tuckus. I have some great ideas on how to make seat cushions for the chairs and to have the kids decorate them with messages of hope. It will allow them to create and do good things, and think of others all in one go. It will also bring up the issues of addiction that are being addressed at the meetings at the house. Many of these kids have seen the effects of addiction first hand, and I know it will be meaningful for them to see that people have a place where they want to recover. I really hope to begin fully implementing the Virtues Project this year. So many things on the table, whew, and I am filled with nothing but gratitude at the chance to participate so fully and completely in contributing to a healthy neighborhood and community.
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Over the summer I spent some time working on a book project about being more creative in your life. I am a firm believer that creativity is a pathway to personal understanding and self-actualization as we start to bring more of who we are into the world and our work.
Not to mention the fact that creative work simply brings so much joy. The book got put on hold, but it morphed into a course. We will be hosting the course from April to June. It is free and open to anyone interested in living a more creative life, or boosting their creativity, or even discovering their creative side. It should also be a lot of fun. One element will be to give yourself a creative challenge. To engage in one or more creative activities each day. I started my own creative challenge at the start of the new year. I am writing one song, one poem and doing one drawing a day. This has been a eye-opening experience as I am finding some creative abilities I didn't know existed within me. I have been sent a couple references in the past two days to Seth Godin's work around creativity. He speaks here about making a living doing creative work.youtu.be/u7YZ84HTEDI And some more on doing creative work www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdUeq09cGJ0 My favorite writer on the subject is Elizabeth Gilbert. Check out her TED talk here. www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius/up-next Her book is amazing as well. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. It has been a great month of creating and I hope you will join me for the course. www.consciousnessexplorations.com/courses.html Now go create something. So I have been building the non-profit and looking at all the moving parts.
There is The Art Garage, which started it all off. Then there is the Shop Co-Op, another garage space for more trades like activities. Actually, I envision it like small artistic projects, like making shelves, boxes, PVC water sculptures, lamps, and maybe even robots. I see these types of artistic projects providing some of the basic skills that would be used in the trades. It will give these skills and create opportunities for artistry to emerge. There is The Community House itself, where meetings that promote personal growth and speakers that inspire and teach how to create a successful business or simply empower your life and live out your dream. The upstairs space of the Community House is designed for yoga, dance, maybe even the theater arts. What a beautiful space. The space will be open for the youth in the area to socialize and play games from 3-6PM while mornings will be reserved for meetings and job support. Special bi-monthly speakers and events hosted by community members will also be open to the community in the evening. Of course our open board meeting is hosted every 23rd. And last but not least there is 800 Thrush, The Center for Creative Learning. I am so excited about using this space to provide homeschool support, micropod learning, and truly holistic, creative and life-affirming education for children. This space is also for creative learning for adults, and we are soon starting our series for adult learning on our website consciousness explorations. Whew, so many pieces, all coming together slowly. So what is the connection? Arts, entrepreneuralism, personal and spiritual development? I am starting to see the threads, and I will keep you posted once the tapestry has taken form. I am interested in Creativity as a cognitive capacity. This is one of the reasons I support the arts. It is not about being able to paint like Picasso or even how to play the piano. It is about developing a capacity for creative thinking that will benefit not just the individual, but the world.
I recently came upon an article speaking to the source of creativity. They connection was made by the author between imagination and creativity. Check out the article here. They speak about how imagination develops through..."our lived experiences, memories, family history, DNA, openness, curiosity, creativity influencers (positive, negative, inner), and willingness to question the status quo. Willingness to question the status quo? That one is particularly interesting to me. I have always been a non-conformist myself. It has kept me as a bit of an outsider, but now I wonder if this is not the source of some of my most creative endeavors. Something to ponder when we look at the child who just won't "fall in line." Maybe we need to try less to control him, and rather work to give him avenues of expressing his imaginative, albeit alternative, ideas. Birthdays are a big deal at the Art Garage. We like to make the birthday girl or boy in charge of running the show that day. We like to give presents and celebrate with lots of joy. Birthdays are a way of celebrating the individual. Art, being about self-expression, is all about the individual finding his or her voice. So birthdays get the thumbs up from us.
We have two Halloween babies at the Art Garage (really Oct 28th!). So we will be painting pumpkins and then setting them up at the new Community Houses. It is exciting since the closing on the two houses is the 28th itself. Wow, what a month! Purchasing the new Community Houses means a new chapter for the Art Garage activities. These two new spaces will create a year-round youth apprenticeship program among other exciting contributions to the neighborhood. So instead of hosting our traditional closing Art Garage activity in the Garage, we decided to combine the two events. The Haunted Art Garage will now become a Haunted Community House and Painting Party. What an amazing start of our new endeavor! The girls stopped by after school the other day and had projects for class. The youngest needed to do something on her favorite animal, the cat. We pulled out cardboard, sissors, glue and an old cat calendar and started working. The older girl had to create a portfolio for her art class. I set her up in the back of the garage by the big mirror I found by the side of the road, and gave her some paper and charcoal and told her to do a self-portrait. "I CAN'T DRAW!" She said, and nothing went on the paper. Although she had many, many items from the work she had done in the garage, she didn't select those. She had an idea that it needed to be something else. I am not sure what, but I wasn't able to help her and she simply didn't hand in anything. The next day, the youngest came bouncing in to let me know her teacher liked her project, while the older sister sulked and made negative comments. She told me she failed her art assignment. My ego was not happy about that. How could one of my Art Garage girls FAIL ART? I did my best to convince her she had plenty of work to share, that we could simply go back in the garage and pull out dozens of pieces of art. She wasn't convinced. Finally, I sent her away with paper and markers and she imitated the teacher's sample. She informed me her new effort got an A. What is Art? There is an art table in the yard with layers and layers of paint. I was looking at it the other day and it looked to me like a piece of artwork. I painted the words, "What is Art?" to provoke some thought in the Art Garage kids as they sat and worked. I am not sure they pondered the message as they pulled the paint off, but I did watch them peeling off the layers, and leaving the word "Art?" Whenever I talk about art, I hear adults say, "I am not creative." Ultimately they mean, they do not have a certain skill set that basically represents fine art mastery. But creativity, and for that matter, art is not about a skill set as much as it is about seeing things from a different perspective. It is about willing to express oneself in a way other than the convention. Or even if one uses the convention, it is about turning the convention on its head. Art ultimately provides a different way of knowing the world. It is experiential. It is embodied. It is emotional. It is the outward expression of something living in the soul, or the culture, or the emotional life of the artist, or the community. Well, how do we encourage that, instead of simply having our art student copy the teacher's example? I have been watching this interesting documentary available on youtube called Childhood 2.0. It talks about our giant social experiment in screentime and social media. This new screen based world is only growing as we have taken even our traditional education, because of the Corona Virus into the virtual screen world. The findings from this documentary are somewhat disturbing. The increase in teen suicide alone is alarming. There are findings of less empathy, more anxiety, and more depression. Overall we are losing touch with the things that really matter, and losing touch with our selves in the process. Peter Gray has done extensive research on the role of play in the healthy developmental process, particularly in the development of healthy emotional systems in the brain. How do we bring back authentic experiences outside the virtual world? He makes a few suggestions at the end of his amazing Ted talk. He calls on us adults to make possible spaces for children to engage in creative play. This is one of the things I hope the Art Garage provides. But I am not the only one in my community doing good things to get children outside, communicating and away from the screens. The Art Garage is welcoming its community counterpart Kids Awaken into the fold as we work to bring deeper meaning and greater values into the experiences and lives of the kids in our community. Shantel Wells started working with the kids in her neighborhood several years ago when she lived in Florida with her 6 children and noticed that their friends needed mentoring and guidance to understand the world around them. Well, I am so lucky that her kids have also been engaged in the Art Garage and so I have had the chance to connect and get to know these amazing girls. I am so grateful to have met their amazing mother who has also agreed to be a founding board member at the Community House Network! What an amazing neighborhood! There are certain kids I refer to as High Creatives. These children are usually unlikely to succeed in the traditional school system. They may or may not have extremely high IQs as we measure them with traditional IQ tests. Just as an aside, creativity is only correlated with IQ up to 115. Then it quickly stops being related to our traditional measures of intelligence. Also, just as important, empathy and emotional intelligence hardly correlate at all with our standard IQ tests. These truths should not be taken lightly.
What happens to our kiddos who don't "measure-up"? They tend to develop self-limiting beliefs that hold them back from fulfilling their souls desires. More often than not, these children grow up believing they are dumb, and many of them end up believing they are bad. I cannot tell you how many times I have worked with children who believed they were dumb and incompetent because they did not learn in the traditional way. These children often were lost in class, and would find other ways to engage their own creative drives. At time those activities lead to disruption or messy spills or misuse of materials that lead to punishment. Because teachers didn't see these high creatives for the incredible gifts they held, they wound up feeling inferior. What a terrible legacy our public education has left for our highly creative children. It is really happening!
I am feeling the reality of this idea taking form. What an expansive experience. Of course it is still an idea, but the houses make it real. These two beautiful houses, places of so much potential are bringing the intangible realm of idea into physical reality. I am a bit speechless. So many fun and wonderful things are happening. I discovered that the founding members of the Art Garage, my two lively energetic boys and their sister, live right across the street from the new houses. They had moved away, closer to the downtown, and then recently moved back in the area. As they are now getting older, participating in the entrepreneurial side of this project should fit just perfectly with their development. My neighbor across the street works mentoring young boys, and his cousin works to apprentice youth on rehabbing houses in Peoria. My neighbor across the alley works with youth in a program she developed herself. My other neighbor fixes cars, always including his own kids and grandkids, and is eager to make use of the garage to do this work. It is like the perfect storm of willingness. It never ceases to amaze me the way life unfolds. When I let go of fear and trying to control the world, those things that are most needed for what I am meant to do appear just in time. Today I especially feel and see the support all around me. There is so much goodwill for this project. I know I just need to open the doors for those who are here to participate and help to arrive. I often awaken at 3AM with the inexplicable urge to write. I wrote most of my doctoral thesis at these wee hours in the night. Somehow, there is more clarity and a greater ability to listen to that creative inspiration at these hours. Early this morning I had a wonderful inspiration come through. For the past few weeks I have been seeing the apprenticeship aspect of the community houses from a new lens. Shop and car mechanics as one aspect, but also carpentry, and plumbing have been at the top of my list. I have so many ideas on how to incorporate some of these skill sets into fun creative art projects, like constructing PVC sculptures using plumbing tools. Creating fountains and the like. Carpentry skills could come through building boxes, or frames with traditional trim material. The possibilities are endless. The goal of this project has always been to build a healthy community. The way in which I hope to participate in this is through listening to what the neighborhood wants and needs. This neighborhood has gone from being nearly 70-80% owner occupied to probably 30% owner occupied. Furthermore, there are several unoccupied properties which are a haven for crime and abuse. Last summer, I had an interesting conversation with the grandfather of some of the kids. He had a new fence put around the front porch. At that time the Art Garage had been engaged in the Karma Award activities, and so I asked if he would like to have the fence painted. He said he was not the owner of the house, and if it were his place he would have done it already. Another neighbor spoke about not having had the blessing of owning his own place, yet. When I moved in several neighbors expressed so much gratitude that an owner was going to be living on the block. Home ownership is an important key to community. It truly makes a difference, in so many ways. One of the challenges of owning verses renting is paying for repairs. If you do not have the skillset to deal with small carpentry, plumbing or electrical issues, the results can be disasterous. I just had a plumber come to do some very minor repairs and it cost me over $600. In my neighborhood that could be most of your monthly income. But if our community members had enough skills collectively in plumbing, carpentry, electric and the like... What if the Community House Network was not just about entreprenurialism, but also about home ownership? Now that is a powerful idea. I will bring it to the community and get back to you. |
Abigail LarrisonEducator, Scientist and Art Maker. The purpose of all life is to spread joy. What brings more joy than making art? Archives
November 2023
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