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Posts tagged ‘Halloween’

Oct 27

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Your Creative Intentions: The Monday Post ~ October 27, 2014

Erica Jong

Halloween comes to the Monday Post….boo!

A regular creative practice — a daily practice, if possible — is key to staying in touch with how you make meaning. Key to living, not postponing. (Let’s all agree to give up on “someday.”)

What are your plans for creative practice this week? Given the specifics of your schedule, decide on a realistic intention or practice plan — and ink that time in your calendar. The scheduling part is important, because as you know, if you try to “fit it in” around the edges, it generally won’t happen. An intention as simple as “I will write for 20 minutes every morning after breakfast” or “I will sketch a new still life on Wednesday evening” is what it’s all about. If appropriate, use time estimates to containerize your task, which can make a daunting project feel more accessible.

Share your intentions or goals as a comment to this post, and let us know how things went with your creative plans for last week, if you posted to last week’s Monday Post. We use a broad brush in defining creativity, so don’t be shy. We also often include well-being practices that support creativity, such as exercise and journaling.

Putting your intentions on “paper” helps you get clear on what you want to do — and sharing those intentions with this community leverages the motivation of an accountability group. Join us!

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If you’re an artist or writer with little ones, The Creative Mother’s Guide: Six Creative Practices for the Early Years is the essential survival guide written just for you. Concrete strategies for becoming more creative without adding stress and guilt. Filled with the wisdom of 13 insightful creative mothers; written by a certified creativity coach and mother of five. “Highly recommended.” ~Eric Maisel. 35 pages/$11.98. Available for download here.

Oct 29

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Brittany: Fall in New York

This is my favorite time of year. I love it when the leaves change color and the opressive heat (and sun) of the summer gives way to cooler temperatures. I feel energized in the cool (but not cold) weather, and my writing output attests to the fact that I am a seasonal writer — doing my best writing in the fall.

Fall is also a great time to be a mom, since I’m finding so many fun things to do with the boys right now. We’ve done the apple orchards and pumpkin patches — with the farm rides and corn mazes, fresh apple cider, and apple cider doughnuts. And this past week, Kira and I got pumpkins and had the boys paint them.

 

 

You can see one of the painted pumpkins beside John’s foot in this picture. The boys had a lot of fun with it, but honestly, so did I. I love that the boys are finally both old enough to do all of the activities I dreamed of doing before I became a mom. Easter egg hunts, painting/carving pumpkins at Halloween, making gingerbread men at Christmas, all of it is finally possible, for the most part.

I say for the most part because of the mixed success we had with another Halloween project I cooked up. I had some tomato stakes that were just lying around, and it occurred to me that they were the shape of ghosts. A (very ill-defined) plan for making some ghosts with the boys started forming in my head. I was going to buy some cotton or cheesecloth at the craft store, but then I found a huge roll of polyester quilt batting that I wasn’t likely to ever use in the basement, and grabbed the boys, their non-toxic washable paints, went outside, and tried to wing it.

That’s never a good idea with two boys, by the way…

So we went outside, wrapped the batting around the stakes, and I drew a rough outline of a mouth and eyes on each ghost so that Sam could paint the face. Except Sam thought the ghosts should have noses. And John, who didn’t understand the spirit of the project, thought the ghosts needed some random paint dabs everywhere.

This ghost turned out fairly well in spite of everything.

The ghost on the left… well, it looks like it had a bad run in with a Dematerializer. LOL

 

But the boys had fun with it, they expressed themselves (Lefty The Ghost has three noses and two circular arms on his head), the boys feel a sense of accomplishment about the experience, and really, that’s all that matters, right?

In the future, I might try to make different tomato stake ghosts like the ones described here. But that’ll have to wait until the fun of painting crazy ghosts wears off. And who knows? With our twisted sense of humor around here — the Halloween Paint-Your-Own-Crazy-Ghost thing could become an annual tradition.

[Cross-posted from Re-Writing Motherhood]

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