Harvesting Our Dreams at the Autumn Equinox

I'm excited to be offering a workshop on SoulCollage® and Dreams this Sunday, honoring the Autumn Equinox!

The Equinox is a time a balance, a moment when day and night are of equal length.  These moments of of cosmic shift are beneficial times to explore what our dreams are telling us about our lives and our world, as we look ahead to a new season.

SoulCollage® is a very natural way to explore dreams and their meanings.  Both use the non-linear non-verbal language of image, and both bring messages from our deepest unconscious depths. We'll be tapping into the crisp energy in the air and letting our dreams be part of the harvest that we reap!

I'm looking forward to taking this journey together with others!

To find out more:
http://www.soulcollage.com
http://www.soulcollage.com/susan-richards-lcsw

SoulCollage® and Dreamwork: The Mystery of Dream Cards

"Dreams are unopened letters from God, and who wouldn't want to open their mail?"  I vividly remember hearing these words in a talk by Kilton Stewart's widow many years ago.  In the mid 20th century, the Stewarts publicized the central role of dreams among the Senoi people of Malaysia, a culture that taught the value of dreams to its children by parents asking them about their dreams over breakfast, and taking the time to listen to and discuss them.

SoulCollage® is a very natural way to explore dreams and their meanings for we 21st century Westerners.  Both use the non-linear non-verbal language of image, and both bring messages from our deepest unconscious depths.  

My Turtle SoulCollage® Card, above, is from a fragment of a specific dream.  On awakening I only remembered seeing a turtle crossing a road and a sense of the turtle being blessed, (even though I knew it had been a much longer dream.)  Other than the turtle itself, none of the rest of this card exactly matches the dream images, but the images I chose do convey the feeling tone of the dream. 

This is one way to make a SoulCollage® Dream Card.  Other Dream Cards in my SoulCollage® deck have come to me like waking dreams.  As with cards in the four Suits, as described by Seena Frost in her book SoulCollage® Evolving, the images are put together intuitively.  We often have no idea why certain images seem to want to 'go together.'  Only after a card was made did it let me know that it was a Dream Card that captured the essence of many repetitive dreams I have had over the years. Again, the images of the card may not be specific to the dream(s), but capture the feeling tone. Following are two examples of this kind of Dream Card:

The following card is still another way that Dream Cards can both be made and can function. It is a card I made in response to a nightmare in which I felt trapped in a narrow place and threatened.  Again, there was no available imagery that was exactly like the dream, but I was able to find imagery that metaphorically conveyed the feeling of it.  As in techniques like re-dreaming a more positive end to a nightmare, or even writing down a different ending and imagining it, the solution was given to me by an image that wanted to be incorporated into the card. The resolution to feeling trapped in a narrow place and threatened was found by incorporating the animal moving forward strongly and firmly.  The animal was not in the dream itself, but wanted to be in my Dream Card!  That only occurred in the course of making the card...  a waking form of re-dreaming a positive ending!   It was a freeing experience to make the card and shifted the energy of the dream for me.

As a SoulCollage® Facilitator, I am very excited to be offering workshops on SoulCollage® and Dreamwork near the Equinoxes and the Solstices, starting with the Autumn Equinox.  I look forward to exploring this amazingly fertile ground together with others!

Chanticleer: A Pleasure Garden!

It's been called a gardener's garden.  I can see why.  It's designed for joy, for pleasure, for replenishing the soul.  It's not an arboretum - there are no labels to make it into a classroom;  no barriers to immediate experience.  It was a hot day today, but there were so many shady groves.  Our grandsons could run all over the meadows, and get soaked in the sprinklers.  An intimate jewel, it is a work of art, that changes from season to season. 

I'm grateful it is nearby.  This was the first time we made it there since moving to the Philly area.  I'll go back alone, with my sketchbook and watercolor pencils!

Honored and Happy

A little boy dressed in his cowboy outfit was a  dramatic foil to the President of the Board of Da Vinci Art Alliance, as she gave the  curatorial talk at last Sunday's reception for  Da Vinci's Annual Members Exhibition.  He strutted, hammed it up, and stole the show, enjoying every minute.

I found out later he was Pat Burns' grandson, there with his father, Pat's son.  I was touched and surprised when my mixed-media piece (above) was awarded the first annual Pat Burns Memorial Prize, (a cash prize).  Pat Burns, who passed away last year, was an extraordinary painter and apparently an equally extraordinary person.

I met a long-time friend of hers at the reception, who by chance happens to live two blocks away from me. The synchronicity of meeting someone who was a close friend of Pat's for forty years and then finding out we are neighbors, felt like something that is meant to be.   I look forward to getting  together with my new friend and neighbor and learning about the the very special person whose legacy I am now connected to and honored by, including viewing a CD of all of Pat's art  that she photographed. 

How could I not feel connected to Pat after being congratulated several times by Pat's son,  and seen her grandson collapsed on his father's shoulder, a worn out little cowboy?

Happy 4th of July!

A family with kids in their pajamas eating Chinese food directly out of the carton were next to us on the bluffs overlooking the Del Mar California Fair when I took these fireworks shots. Below us was the  Ferris wheel outlined in lights and headlights of traffic on the Coast Highway running next to the ocean.   Fireworks together with the smell of Chinese food ....  yuuuum.

The Traveler's Eye

The Traveler's Eye is definitely sharpened, so it seemed the right title for my mixed-media piece above.  The transparent image transfers in The Traveler's Eye are from photographs of street grates in Cordoba, Spain, including my own shadow clicking away.  I strive to see my everyday ordinary world with the same wonder and awareness of detail that I notice when in a new place.

I just delivered The Traveler's Eye to The Da Vinci Art Alliance for its Annual Members Exhibition, titled Summer in the City.  The Opening Awards Reception is next Sunday, July 8, 1-4 p.m and should be a lot of fun.  Da Vinci is a venerable non-profit artists' organization that has been around since 1931.  Its South Philly location is definitely funkier than the trendy and posh Old City galleries.  I like the funk.

Just for fun, here are some photos from my Spanish Street Grate series.  Beautiful, no?

 

"It's a meditative trance, scraping the top of your subconscious with a knife.  The shavings may be a song.. "  That's  Bruce Springsteen, describing his songwriting creative process.  We were at the National Constitution Center today on Independence Mall, the same Mall that houses the Liberty Bell, to see The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen, an exhibit organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

In the 80's when Springsteen hit it big I was too stuck in classical music to listen to Rock and Roll.  Now in retrospect I appreciate what I was missing!  More touching to me than seeing his guitars or his motorcycle, the photographs or the posters,  were the dozens of lined spiral notebooks with handwritten songs.  They speak to a creative genius whose poetry couldn't stop pouring out.  Sometimes there were crossings out. More often, the pages were uncorrected.

Listening with headphones to an old radio interview, I was awed to hear him describe his creative process.  After the meditative trance phase, came the craft - the refining again and again, with discipline and persistence.  He said 95% of it didn't come to fruition, but when the 5% is something like Born in the U.S.A., the 95% percent fades away and all the work doesn't matter.

I am struck by the similarity of the creative process, across genres, across mediums, across time.  I am grateful to the friends who wanted to see this exhibit with us.  Otherwise we wouldn't have gone and I would have missed out. Now I await the CD compilation of his work they are sending us!