Category Archives for Gratitude & Creativity

Gratitude and Creativity: Unsteady Vertigo Lines

So many things in my life have changed in recent years with the arrival of my pain. One of the big things is my limited transportation options. I don’t drive or travel by public transportation anywhere anymore. I don’t drive because I’m not comfortable gauging how foggy my pain medications will make my mind or how much they dull my reflexes and the time it takes to respond to sudden, unpredictable movements. I don’t take buses or the subway mainly because I have a tough time climbing stairs and I can’t stand for very long before my pain increases. Not to mention the painful, unexplained reaction my body has to what I assume are the vibrations from any vehicle I travel in for longer than ten minutes. I also have frequent bouts of lightheadedness, dizziness, and nausea, which does not bode well for traveling alone or operating a two-ton vehicle.

Sometimes my dizziness becomes full-blown vertigo, which is “the sudden sensation that you’re spinning or that the inside of your head is spinning.” It comes with no warnings. The best method of coping with it is sitting down, or lying down when just sitting upright makes everything spin. I had one episode that stretched over an entire week. It was impossible for me to do much beyond lying on my couch or sleeping. The constant feeling of the room spinning around nauseated me. At one point, I sat on my bathroom floor next to the toilet bowl for about an hour, so I could avoid falling over if the need to vomit did arise. Luckily, I haven’t had an episode as severe as that in the last couple of months.

Although there is no cure for vertigo, there are treatments to manage it. If it doesn’t go away on its own or if the frequency of the episodes increases, I may have to undergo a procedure called canalith repositioning, which involves “several simple and slow maneuvers for positioning your head” to move particles from your inner ear to another area where they are more easily absorbed. This procedure is taught by a doctor, audiologist, or physical therapist and “is usually effective after one or two treatments.” However, if canalith repositioning doesn’t work there is a surgical option that boasts a 90% success rate. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that things don’t get any worse and that the worst part of my vertigo remains the need to hug my toilet bowl periodically.

Even with this periodic dizziness, I’m still trying to focus on creativity. I think my body’s unsteadiness has given rise to my current obsession with patterns with curled and circular lines. I’ve given a lot of attention to a tangle pattern called ‘sand swirl’. I noticed while drawing it how my lines wobble, giving each swirl a shaky, non-uniform appearance when I want smooth, curved lines. I’ve drawn it repeatedly, by itself and with other patterns, even in coloured ink, trying to practice the wobbles out of it. But alas, no matter how deeply I concentrate, the wobbles aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they show up in other patterns I draw that have curled, circular or swirled lines. I can’t seem to will my hand to hold my pen to create the steady, smooth curves I want to draw.

Surprisingly, while trying to eliminate the unsteady, wobbly lines, I created some things I really enjoy looking at. I’m starting to think these unsteady, wobbly lines may be part of my artistic signature. Instead of trying to eliminate them, I’ll just embrace them and let my shaky hands lead me to create more swirling line art to become lost within.

 

Tiffany Lovering Tangle Tutorial – Sand Swirl

 

Gratitude and Creativity: Calligraphy Is Cool… Now

I might have stated once or twice before in my writing that I was a bit of a nerd when I was growing up. I was definitely not a “cool” teenager – nor am I a cool adult. If the category existed, someone might have labeled me a “nerdy-jock” because I was athletic but also focused on academic achievement. A lot of reading and studying balanced the sports I played, and practiced for hours, and I participated in other extra-curricular activities that “cool kids” would never join like band, public speaking, debating, and creative writing. In some of the spare time I had, I explored other solitary creative pursuits like writing poetry, drawing, and calligraphy.

I’m not sure what sparked my interest in calligraphy, but I do remember buying my first kit that had a pen with varying nib sizes and dark blue ink cartridges. I used to sit in my room practicing how to write with that pen for hours on end. I sometimes wrote my poetry with it to give it a unique and slightly aged look. I gave copies of my poems, written on coloured paper in calligraphy, to my friends and family as gifts. Sometimes my family would ask me to use my “fancy writing” to write up tags on presents or cards. Unfortunately, like so many of the creative things I did when I was younger, calligraphy fell off the list of things I enjoyed doing.

Lately, as I’ve been reconnecting with my creative self, my interest in typography – the design of lettering and typeface, which for me includes calligraphy, has resurfaced. Countless tutorials are available online that teach the basics of lettering from drawing simple lines and shapes to ornate Gothic fonts. It’s wonderful to see the broad range of resources available to anyone interested in typography as a hobby or on a professional level. It’s even more wonderful to know that something I might have been laughed at for having an interest in as a teenager now has a cool factor.

One of the people making calligraphy cool is Seb Lester. He is an English artist, type designer, and calligrapher. Videos of his work have gone viral. A few nights ago, while I was unable to sleep – again, I stumbled upon one of those videos that I had seen before but never paid attention to who the artist was or the significance of how he is exposing droves of people all over the world to an old art form in such an interesting way. The fascinating thing about his work is that he is able to create beautiful works with incredible precision without any specialized tools. He relies on the steadiness of his hands and his pens. The video below is a quick look at his talent for reproducing some of the most recognizable logos in the world.

Seb Lester – Hand Drawn Logos

 

Seb Lester has more than one million fans across social media. I’m one of them now. In a few weeks, I’ll also be the proud owner of one of his stunning prints, titled ‘First Time Ever’; and I’ll never think of my love for calligraphy as uncool ever again.

 

Echosmith – Cool Kids

 

Gratitude and Creativity: Low Emotional Valley

I’m just realizing that I spent the better part of the past month in a low emotional valley. The failure of my acupuncture treatment hit me hard. I know this because of the smatterings of energy I managed to invest in anything that resembled something creative, including how little I wrote. The recovery from the pain flare up caused by the acupuncture has been slow – I haven’t been able to reduce the doses of my pain medications. The frustration and disappointment of another treatment that doesn’t work for me is becoming hard to bear. As much as I try being positive, the melancholy found its way in and decided to hang around as I drank copious amounts of tea and binge watched TV while sleep eluded me most nights.

My uninvited guest sapped me of so much energy that I became too tired to sleep. Too tired to feed myself properly, and barely able to meet the few commitments I made to family and friends. The strange thing is while this was happening I didn’t recognize it because I was still moving, still breathing, and still feeling pain. I’m not numb, but I was enveloped by whatever the opposite of being mindful and aware of oneself might be. Then, this morning, as I turned the corner on another sleep-deprived night I flipped through a few pages of my art/gratitude journal and saw how little my brain and hands have produced because of my low energy and sinking emotions.

What was I trying to find in the pages of a sketchbook at 6:45 on a Saturday morning? I was looking for a blank space to teach myself how to draw a new, to me, Zentangle pattern. The space was easy to find because, as I said, I haven’t done a lot of creating lately. I keep saying that I’m teaching myself how to draw. However, at the rate I’m going I may not reach that goal. I have the books and the art supplies I need, but without motivation and a positive mood, that amounts to a lot of blank paper and unused pens, pencils and paint.

I noticed that the time I spend in these emotional valleys seems to be getting longer each time and my awareness of that space is losing its sharpness. This morning, wanting to draw a new combination of lines alerted me to the presence of the current valley. I wanted to connect with one of the things that help to stop me from falling down the steep slopes and that desire, that smallest of desires, pulled me upward.

Last night, while sleep stayed far away from me, I spent time on Adele Bruno’s website Tickled to Tangle. She’s a Certified Zentangle Teacher (CZT) from whose posts I’m learning a lot. She writes a series called “Tips for Tangling” where she shares great step-by-step information about how to draw Zentangle patterns that makes drawing them a lot easier. Because of her posts, I’m becoming more comfortable and confident about drawing in ink and not worrying about making mistakes. After all, in Zentangle there are no mistakes. It was one of her posts that made me reach for my sketchbook: Tangling Radiant Sooflowers. I wanted to try creating my own radiant drawing but I first needed to learn the tangle pattern, Sooflowers created by Livia Chua, which luckily wasn’t at all difficult. After a quick practice, I worked on my tile and made one change to customize it. Instead of stippling the white spaces with dots, I filled them with small Tipple circles.

Sooflowers – Livia Chua
Radiant Sooflowers – Inspired by Adele Bruno (CZT)

My tired eyes and shaky hands aside, I’m happy with the result. I’m also happy that although I didn’t sleep at all last night, Adele Bruno’s creativity alerted my awareness to my low emotional valley and inspired me to start climbing out.

 

Ed Sheeran – I See Fire