Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Storyteller




What a treasure this day was!  Here are a few glimpses of the day that Laura spent learning to, in the words of the teacher,  "capture the beautiful details of our life and become the curator of our own story."
The studio brims with creativity and I have to resist the urge to snap photos of everything that surrounds me!  I nestle into the corner of a long u-shaped art table wrapped with five, fresh-as-the-morning-faced-young women...and sink into the creativity that surrounds me.
We'll be creating ten pages that will become the canvases to capture the beauty, the art, of our lives.
 The journey unfolds, not at the beginning of the first blank-stare-you-in-the-face-white page of each journal, but in the safe, comfortable middle.  Oh, I'm going to like this approach...

Phrases worth framing pour out of the teacher the moment she begins to speak.  We're encouraged to "sink into our own story" and "engage with the pages"
and there seems to be a soft exhale when she says ...
"pages slow you down to the speed of listening".

We learn to "wrap language around our pages"
create envelopes to collect things and shelter things
and play with background pages on which we'll curate sprinklings of our story
We are challenged to ask ourselves a question in our journals
And then we answer it...right on the same page.


We pause for a lovely lunch, gather around a rustic, elegant table, flanked with an antique church pew, easy conversation and beautiful box lunches from 3 Blind Mice. Yum! http://www.tbmrestaurant.com

After lunch, we paint backgrounds, landing places, spilling spots in our journals for thoughts, dreams, lists, calendars, emotions and heart whispers.  You can almost hear the sounds of life stories being nurtured, tended to, noticed..."curated".
Our teacher unwraps a treasured photo and with grace-filled transparency shares the significance of this blue, venetian-blind filled photo from her grandparents home. It holds the sweet memories of summer, a screen door she can still hear snapping shut in the background and a favorite pecan tree, now gone, but living forever in her heart and on this little slip of paper.
Her transparency in sharing this story compels us all to think of creative ways to capture our own stories.
Real storytellers do that ... they inspire others.
 Betsy CaƱas Garmon,  our teacher, in center, with two of the fresh faced young women who participated. @ http://www.wildthymecreative.com

I end the day thinking that these journal pages we've created are like rooms filled with rare and precious treasures. The lives they represent are like houses. And the passage from Proverbs 24:3 rises up from my heart.

"By wisdom a house (a life?) is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms (its "pages"?) are filled with rare and beautiful treasures."

Grateful for a day to fill my rooms, my pages, with treasures,
A Velvet Lime Girl  
Classes and workshops are ongoing for those of you who are interested @ http://www.wildthymecreative.com