Have you fed your Wayward Artist today?

Like many artists, waywards make do on very little. They sometimes mistake their marginal nature for not deserving very much.  They sometimes forget that they are really researching the frontiers of consciousness. Well, there are four areas or Needs that seem to really nourish us:

The Four Needs:    WONDER, STORIES, KRAFTING, THE CARNAL

1. The Need for Wonder, Play, Surrealism.  Wonder is most simply the opportunity to admire the world for its vitality, complexity and relentlessness.  It’s the chance to feel WOW! for no one reason. It’s also called numina. -that momentary-( could we hardly stand much more?)-amazement  at being here. Working consciously with natural materials stimulates and addresses this.

This cluster includes many other terms implying the need for contact with other realities.  The graphic “magic realism” of central and South American literature and films are good examples.   We seem to delight in, revel in seeing one world shift into another.  Sometimes it’s as simple as momentarily forgetting the tasks and agendas of the day as we are presented with the sunshine, the air, the budding trees. There is a sudden simplifying.  Just the air feels good, the sun warm, the rain moist.  This capacity for wonder or appreciation is at the core of creativity, of making. Because event he most crafted or “made” items have to work fundamentally on the capacity to bring wonder to another. Wonder seems to involve ambiguity.   See terms:  Oh, it’s this… and that…. And THAT!” :

“Oh, I’m on my way to work and have to do this and that, but, ah, what smells in the air! .... and how warm the sun feels! and why is that cat looking at me?”  Now start the Car!  It’s the capacity to flip, flicker between parts of realities.  Life Drifts.

Practicing Wonder?  As soon as possible, just pick up three things you see on the ground. And just hold them or place them together.  Do this again tomorrow.  Play is related to wonder.  Real play is related to wonder.  Much play is only really just entertainment or recreation… broad, but shallow ways of spending time. They chase away the importance of play, or “infinite play” as Gordon calls it.

2. The Need for Stories: We are always in stories, figuring out the story lines.  Kurt Vonnegut describes the proto story as “man in hole; man gets out of hole”.  All daily lives are greater and lesser stories, (often being told as they happen on the cell phone)  Stories, even mundane ones, are all threads in the vital myth-making needed to live.  But it is especially the Deep Stories we are searching for.  By choice or not, we all  hunt the daimon, that other self, the true self eclipsed during the first part of life as the bright sun of socialization and expectations cooked us.  The daimon waits, along with many other lesser “s’elves” for the cue to step back on our stage.  Joseph Campbell is so clear on this.  We must have the stories to know who we are and who we can become. Finally, we must have stories to stay in touch with the mystical around us. Objects and object-making are vital ways of keeping the Stories going.  Things help. They help with the necessary task of revisiting, revising and repairing  updating and expanding our stories.  The Basic Story is always still there, but it can always, always grow more.  Like Coral.

3. The Need for Krafting:  (German for strength)  is just the innate thirst to learn to do something more, new and different.  It is about curiosity, skills and developing competence.  More importantly, it is our way of affirming the need and our capacity for Transformation. We make to remind ourselves that we change. Differentiate between alternative approaches to making: the bricoleur and the craftsman. Mastery is overrated

4. The Need for the Carnal: Whatever else we are, we are animals. Contact with the earth, air, water, fire, light and dark, cold and heat is urgent.  We need reminders of sensuality, awakened and emphasized sense experiences. (Richard Louv “nature deficit disorder.”)  Carl Jung referred to the “Bush Soul” This need also includes encounters with Natural Time.  Unlike technological time, in organic time, things are not always available when you want them.  There are seasons.  There is waiting and planning.  There is accommodation to using what is available here and now.  Humans are hard-wired with the organic and experience distress in the relentless presence of the technological.  Making with natural materials explores expresses and feeds this need.