Creative to-do lists

A short note on my week since the election…

Wowza I picked a weird time to come back to this blog. Or maybe not. I’ve felt in turns this week: lost, angry, defiant, sad, and grief stricken, just to name a few. I feel like I have cycled through the entirety of the grief process at least four times now. Maybe you feel that way too.

I’ve been trying the practice of Buddhist non attachment this week. Letting thoughts and information from the world pass through me like light through a window pane. When I start to get balled up, I remind myself to release it through the window. I’ve also mostly stayed off of social media, which helps too. I don’t know if I’ll stay with this practice but dang, it’s been worth it this week.

My other practice involves some words of wisdom from a dear friend. She said instead of focusing on the “what ifs” which are as plentiful as grains of rice, focus on the “what is” of this present moment. And I call myself back from the darkness with a list of “what is” right now around me and the beauty of the things I can see and touch and hear and see.

I hope these techniques help you as they’ve helped me. Now on to something slightly more lighthearted but nevertheless still somehow forms the backbone of my creative life.

I heart lists

I wanna talk about creative to-do lists this week. If yours is anything like mine, it’s long and stretches back literal years. You all have been here long enough to know I love my lists. Any time I have an idea for an art or crochet project or a blog post, I have lists for those things so I can jot down the idea and revisit it later. And then when I’m looking for something to do, I have ideas at hand! So I can always go to work fast! And be excited!

These lists have served me well.

My blog post list especially has allowed me to go weeks at a time with plenty to say. When someone says something they’d like for me to write about, it goes on the list. If I see something or read something that I want to explore in an essay, it goes on the list. Even as I write this, the blog list has nine items other items on it. One I’ve been pondering for so long and I still don’t know exactly what to say about it. It’ll tumble out eventually here on the blog though because it’s something near and dear to my heart.

I visit, use, and revise my crochet project list as I am feeling it. This is the only list that isn’t on paper. I keep this one in Ravelry. (If you are on there, friend me so I can see your projects too!) I keep this digitally since I have my yarn stash cataloged in the database there. It makes it easier to find patterns and reference what I have against what the pattern calls for. I enjoy building this list up when I’m kicking ideas around for new crochet projects and then tearing it down when I get tired of how full it is.

My art ideas list is sorta on paper and sorta in my head. Sometimes these things are hard to articulate with words and so to keep them from losing energy I keep a little mental list. And shrug emoji, if I forget an item then it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve got one idea I’ve been kicking around now for almost a year. I need to attempt it small scale and see if I like it so I have a prototype for something larger. But then again, maybe the idea is just keeping me warm at night so I can come up with other ideas and work on them first.

Working lists

And as you can tell by my descriptions of my lists I treat them with a good bit of flexibility and yet still I sometimes feel some guilt over not getting to things and crossing them off. I have to remind myself that they are MY lists, here to serve me and my creativity. They are not MUST dos but a series of options. Sometimes the singular act of writing it on one of my lists is all the creative energy an idea has. But at the same time, there are items on these lists that have to hang around and marinate, get fat and juicy before I can food metaphor them into something good. So I continue to transfer my lists from notebook to notebook so I can keep remembering them. It’s a kind of creative security blanket.

I’ve been on a watercolor kick recently. I’m doing a lot of practice since I haven’t watercolored much over the past few years. It is both the trickiest and easiest of painting practices. Somewhere in the process there’s always too much water. Maybe it’s just the way I do things, maybe I’m the mess. My lists are like that. Pull all the thoughts out of my head and get them captured then figure out later how to make something out of them. I guess what I’m saying is, trust the process.

Learning to let go

And as usual, something that I thought would be lighthearted and breezy is actually a source of chagrin at how timely it turns out to be. Another way of looking at life through the lens of art practice. Trusting the practice and learning when is the right time to move or to let go.

What do your lists look like? Catch up with me on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post to be immortalized for all of time.

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