The Discomfort Zone

I started a Creative Journaling workshop at BookWorks a couple of weeks ago. A primary objective of the class is to keep information that you collect easily accessible. That means dedicating specific journals to specific subjects. For example, our instructor (a textile artist with a penchant for organizing her thoughts and images on paper), maintains, among other journals, one for images that inspire her, as a resource for her work, and one on kelp (why kelp, I wonder?). A left-brainer in recovery, welcoming order for as long as I can remember (control issues, no doubt), I’ve taken to the class like a pig to mud.

Last week, we listed (aah, the joy of lists!) the types of journals that we saw in our future. I came up with a dozen (we are not surprised). Our homework over the next two weeks is to think through what they should look like and find sources for them. The journal should both match the purpose — its content — and also “feel right.” “Don’t force it,” says Heather, our teacher. This will be the easy part. As an inveterate collector of notebooks/journals/datebooks, which feeds into my lust for paper and books of any kind, and my partiality to systems, I have quite a selection of potential journals of all shapes, sizes and bindings. Some I’ll make myself, of course.

The more difficult part — and a big motivator for taking the class — will be to help me move away from the word and toward the image. My journals (or “diaries,” as we used to call them before “journaling” became trendy) until now have held only words. As with much of what I’m up to this year, I’m hoping to inch closer to my “discomfort zone:” the visual, the intuitive, the instinctive and the spontaneous (by the way, did Jonathan Franzen make up the term “discomfort zone,” or did he appropriate it from someone else? It doesn’t sound original.). Paradoxically, I guess this means that the more uncomfortable I feel, the closer I’ll be to succeeding. And since that sentence itself makes me uncomfortable, I guess I’m off to a good start.

Left-Brainers and Art

This morning a new friend and I were talking about our belief that engaging in art is important and necessary for personal development. This led us to the art forms that we initially chose to start us on this road. For her, it’s calligraphy; for me, book arts. Each of us admitted that much of our lives have been governed by left-brain activity. I wondered whether that wasn’t what first drew me to bookmaking. The craft of making books was, in fact, what attracted me first: My interest in artists’ books — my knowledge of artists’ books, frankly) — and in creating content, came later. Making forms is, in effect, a left-brain activity. It has specific rules — and at least until you start creating forms that ARE content in themselves — fairly standardized approaches. It’s as you move from creating a standard structure to making artistic decisions, starting simply with choosing papers for blank books, then moving to content as a starting place and then weaving together content and form, that the right brain kicks into gear. So it seems I took my artistic plunge in a relative safe pond.

Which is not to say that I didn’t fall passionately in love with book arts; just that, as my new friend said, interests tend to pick us, not us them. And if starting “safely” helps us transition to the less “safe” (the more right-brained), all the better.

I realize, I told her, that my way of “doing art” in the past has consisted of reading all I could about it, then doing nothing. So very very left-brain, no? She responded by telling me about Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, who says –and I’m paraphrasing wildly– that we should use the time spent reading about meditation, meditating instead. Sound advice.