Category: visual thinking

We don’t know what we are messing with

I mentioned yesterday that I led a session on drawing at Northern Voice yesterday. I invited people to be fearless, to draw and to share their drawings. But I forgot how that can trigger deep things in us. My friend Julie Leung pointed me a blog post about an experience of a person in that session, and I am shaken. The blogger has no comments on her blog so I am going to try this. First here’s a link to the post. Read it if you care about people. (and context) NorthernVoice.

Dear Meg

Meg, Meg, Meg

I want to both apologize to you and to thank you. First, apologize because I made light of something important and, as I understand it from your blog post, difficult for you. Second, to thank you for your bravery and what you helped me learn. I feel absolutely torn that we did not get a chance to talk about this and I invite that opportunity if you’d like to.

I learned two very important things as I took my flying leap into this experiment – and one was the reinforcement of the power that drawing can unlock things within us. The second was I need to be more gentle and loving when I offer the invitation to unlock whatever it is we have locked within us.

I feel like I have abused you. I deeply apologize. And I thank you so much for blogging about it and allowing me to learn this.

Nancy

(I found an email and sent the above to Meg)

As I read Meg’s post, I recalled the day I unlocked my inner artist as an adult. I was attending a weekend-long introduction to painting workshop at a local community college. “Beginners welcome.” We explored black and white. We mixed colors from the three primary colors. We painted with blindfolds and, important for me, with our fingers.

There I was in an old shirt, fingers swirling with acrylic paint feeling the roughness of the primed canvas. Our teacher invited us to think about our lives. I can still recall how my arms and fingers started pulling on their own, dipping into more and more red paint. The angry colors flooded the canvas. I did not know how angry I was, how I was holding all that anger inside of me. I was a nice young mom. I had a great job but I was working for a hurt, damaged man who did all he could to hurt and damage us, especially the women who worked for him. I used to come home and in the shower, curse his name. I wrote his name on the bottom of my shoes. And here all this anger and even hate was coming out of my fingers, channeled through the paint.

On Sunday morning, we were invited to show our paintings and, god help me, talk about them. And there I was, like Meg, with my guts on the canvas and having to talk about it in front of all these people. I started crying. And all that anger that I felt, as a “good girl” came flooding out. Like a gashed artery.

All for a bit of paint, or a marker on a paper, and an invitation to express what is truly inside of us. From an ice cream, to our pain.

Meg, again, I both thank you and ask for your forgiveness.

How I slowed down blogging and started drawing on walls

I had a ball leading a session today at Northern Voice. I have lots of pictures, more reflections, etc. But that can wait to later. In the mean time (and in case there is no “later”) here is the link to the wiki page and the slides. northernvoice wiki / How I slowed down blogging and started drawing on walls

Hope Wechkin — integration and the important things that surface.

Alert: Ramble post coming up…
From the Seattle Times
I wake up this morning at 5am, knowing I have to cram two day’s worth of stuff into today. Tomorrow I head up to Northern Voice in Vancouver, B.C. and today I play hooky for 5 hours to to indulge my love of gardens at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. I worked/played late last night to experiment with being an in-world graphic recorder in Second Life, stepping away from the computer only after 9pm and having eaten dinner while at the computer. (I RARELY do that.) Oh, and I stayed up too late last night, hooked in to the movie, Michael Clayton.

So there I am, standing at my tiny kitchen counter waiting for the tea water to boil, realizing I had not even looked at yesterday’s paper. I scan the front page of each section and stop when I see this article: Entertainment | Hope Wechkin — physician, violinist, singer, actor in the Seattle Times. A violin playing soprano, actor, physician and head of a pallative care unit?

Integration.

There is something drawing me these days to people and practices that cross traditional boundaries to help us be in, see and experience our work and our worlds in new light. Thus my recent obsession with visual thinking, and graphic facilitation. Why I am leading a session at Northern Voice on “Why I slowed down blogging and started drawing on walls.” Why I think I write more clearly after I practice yoga. I know that brain research has show how we can access more in our brains by having strong connections between the various parts of our brain. But I’m fascinated by how it feels and operates in daily life. I want to explore the impacts of integrating things into my work with online and F2F groups. I want to know how to do it, how to talk about it – with diverse groups so it has meaning to the agricultural researchers and those worrying about building a more compassionate world.

First, a bit about Hope Wechkin, who, as the paper headline says “physician, violinist, singer, actor – doesn’t approach anything halfheartedly.” Hope (I feel compelled to speak of her intimately, not as Dr. Wechkin, for some reason) is currently performing a self written, one woman show here in Seattle, “Charisma.”

A great believer in the power of music, Wechkin says it can “reach beyond words and beyond medicine.” She sometimes brings her violin into the hospice (Evergreen, in Kirkland, is the only inpatient hospice in the region) and plays for patients, watching the effect of music on the body’s different systems and seeing the pleasure the patients feel in what they hear.

In the piece, Hope plays 12 characters. The set is apparently a hospital bed and the costumes a hospital gown and a different pair of shoes for each character. There is a song for each. The play is about the advice others give to a terminally ill patient. Here is what Hope said in the article.

I want musicians to know about this,” she says. “You can get so battered down by the music profession. But I feel the real work is playing not where it is a competition or a job, but where it is transformative, and you can see how it transforms lives.”

Music transforms lives. We can nurture the different parts of ourselves. A picture paints a thousand words. A poem opens up new worlds. A doctor can bring her art into her profession of tending to the end of people’s lives, a time in medicine where she says “I think I have stumbled on a gem in health care. Then end of life puts everything in focus and the important things rise to the surface.”

In this online world of text, the explosion of video and photography has changed the landscape. But our forms are still fairly segmented, separate. What should we be paying attention to in our diverse practices that brings the parts of the brain together, our intellect and our hearts entwined, drawing upon different modalities?

What sort of integration should we be paying attention to?

Photo is link to the Seattle Times by BETTY UDESEN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
If this is improperly linked, folks at Seattle Times, please, let me know. It was such a great photo I wanted to draw people’s attention to it!

IFVP 2008 Conference Announced

Join us for the 2008 IFVP Conference for graphic recorders, graphic facilitators and other visual practitionersIFVP Conference Logo 2008
I’ve got this one on my 2008 schedule!

This year’s conference will be held August 6-8 at the Summit Executive Centre in Chicago.

The IFVP Board and Conference Team are excited about the changes for this years conference.

Holding the conference earlier will give you a great view of Chicago in the summertime. We also hope that we’re coinciding with the summer slowdown of projects that many of us independent contractors experience.

Our Wednesday through Friday conference dates encourages taking the weekend to explore the Windy City. We’ll update this page with suggestions on how to make the most out of your trip to Chicago.

Also, the Summit Executive Centre couldn’t be better located to enjoy downtown Chicago. Located on Michigan Avenue, it’s on the South end of the “Magnificent Mile.” It is less than two blocks from Millennium Park, the Chicago Cultural Center and six blocks from the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.