Help Is All Around: 5 Tools to Make Magic In May Routines
"When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around." - Sting
Art I made
Before we've even had a chance to jump in a rain puddle after the storms, April showers have turned to May flowers, and soon, June will bring more open-ended roads to wander and detours to travel.
With our "here and now" broken open, we're required to dig into something within ourselves that perhaps hasn't been born yet.
Now's the time to keep encouraging the growth of that seed within us that is slowly sprouting as the days go forward. We're developing a resilience in us that we can't even anticipate.
It's a beautiful thing to watch something grow.
Graduating, and the next step of our Detours
As a new class of students graduate, I think back on what it was like for me at 18 years old, discharged from the hospital after my coma, waiting for life to start for me while my friends went off to college.
In a sense, we are all students embarking on this new journey, unsure of the road ahead.
So I wanted to share a few articles I eventually wrote on how this "delay" in going to college and living the life I thought I was supposed to live became the greatest gift.
Amy’s High School Detour (American Teen Magazine)
Why Starting College at 25 Was the Best Decision (Miss Mill Mag)
Accepted and Detoured (Huffington Post)
Look for the “flowers” you find on this unique path. The doors you never knew existed…and take pride in the journey you’ve taken so far!
My memoir talks about the surprising guest who showed up at my “highs chool graduation…”
One of the hardest parts of transitioning our “normal lives” to a quarantine routine for me, is the feeling that the days run into each other, now that we can’t break up life, work, and play in different physical spaces. When I couldn’t eat or drink, I needed creative ways to fill my time, as the hours seem to all blend together without meals to break up my day. Here are 5 tools that helped me back then, and surprising fortunately, now!
Create a schedule based on your internal compass.
Rather than just get through the endless hours, waiting for surgical answers for seven years, I wanted to be present and make the moments of my life count. But how could I keep my mind off of hunger 24 hours a day? Without meals, I divided my day with two things: ironically, cooking and painting. I even started a blog and named it after this daily ritual: Allspice & Acrylics. You can check out some archives here.
Thank icky emotions for the flowers they offer you.
Emotions are arrows. They point us where we need to go next. Some emotions don’t feel as good as happiness, excitement, or humor, but following these golden arrows can take us in the most thrilling directions.
This week, write those not-as-fun feelings a thank you note. Where are they pointing you? What clearing are they leading you to on your detour?
Here’s a bit of a poem I wrote to my stress, boredom, and anxiety:
Silence bellows through the halls
Moon is still hung in the sky
Shadows casting on the walls
There’s a dread I can’t deny
Thank you, boredom, for the place
To sit with only and just me
To clear out enough empty space
To search my soul curiously
Thank you, stresses, for presenting
Challenges to overcome
Breathing you out is preventing
Me from freezing, going numb
Thank you, sadness for being
That tender place I’m called to care for
Because of you, I’m finally seeing
How you need me to be there more
Thanks, frustration, for activating
All emotions I don’t mention
As my stress is escalating
You force me to sit with tension
Thank you, anger, for igniting
Me with zeal and vibrant passion
You make life zip forward, lighting
Up a fire in your hot fashion.
I wanted to write this poem in rhythm because it was the best way I could stop “overthinking” these feelings, and let my response come onto the paper like an internal pulse. The rhythm of life is everywhere - and using it can also give us some creative “control!”
3. Embrace empty space. Fireworks can be loud and exciting, but silence is powerful. Those moments may be easy to overlook, but if we listen in on quietness, and stay still enough to hear it, it can whisper the most profound gratitude. This week, leave a pause in your day where you ordinarily may fill it up with noise.
Look at “clutter” as dragons guarding our innermost treasures.
An Empty Gratitude Challenge: Have you heard of a gratitude jar? You write something you're grateful for every day and put it in the jar. But I decided to place my empty “gratitude jar” right in front of my window.
And fill it with nothing.
This way, it's a vessel for the wide-open invitation to breathe and every moment we can breathe in any moment, and breathe out gratitude with whatever that feeling is right now: We are alive.
4. (Creatively) mess with the unknown.
There are a lot of uncertain factors right now. Life is a dance of knowing and not knowing, and to create something we have to step into the unknown.
This week, leap into that uncharted space and look forward to finding your own truth.
How do you embrace the messy space of not knowing?
Art is a great way to start. Especially for people that “don’t” make art. With no training, I paint from the heart. The canvas then becomes an open channel to my soul, so I can really listen to what’s going on inside. Art can be anything - like the chocolate business I created to pass the time because I wanted to play with candy! (That’s what years of stomachless hunger will to do you!)
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” - Carl Sagan
5. Find Freedom within ”limitations.”
My constant source of comfort, gratitude, hope, and inspiration is the outdoors. Sometimes, it's not as easy to get outside when we need that breath of fresh air to refresh, restore and ground us.
Then what do we do?
That was the premise behind my short play, "SunBreaths" which was performed by two wonderful actors in Taphouse Theatre's Shelter in Place Festival. Watch this great group of actors here.
After watching this short play, ask yourself, are you more of a Sam or a Jay right now? How can we use virtual platforms right now to find the discoveries that these two characters searched for in this scene?
Be sure to check out these COVID Face Masks created for sale on my RedBubble page, based on my original paintings. You can buy 4 for $9.99 each. Check them out on Redbubble.
Join me for a virtual book discussion and creative storytelling workshop with my book, My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful: June 17th at 7pm, and you join me virtually with Hamden Library. Register for the zoom discussion here.
This month, I was scheduled to perform my one-woman musical, Gutless & Grateful at the Quinnipiac School of Medicine Conference. That will not be happening this year, but there are still so many ways we can thank all of the healthcare workers, and "Neighborhood Heroes." Check out this wonderful Sesame Street video to share with children about the heroes all around us.
You can also check out Jimmy Fallon and the Roots remixing Safety Dance with first responders!
Other videos I’ve enjoyed this week?
Why 4am is such a deliciously mysterious hour, and all about the calm of collage.
Art and Books Update! I’ve had plenty of time to finish up edits on a book of some of my newest art, starting from its very beginnings back in Yale Hospital, and it’s exciting watching this slowly coming together! Here’s a sample page from the manuscript.
ART BOOK GIVEAWAY… As you see from the “Lorem Ipsums,” I have yet to title these two paintings. Send me your title ideas, and if I use them, you’ll be receiving an exclusive signed copy!
Be sure to e-mail me at lovemydetour@gmail.com, or tag me on instagram @amyoes70 with #LoveMyDetour.
What would you title these two paintings? Write me back and win a free copy!
Also…stay tuned for updated on my Creativity & Gratitude Workbook being released this November!
Safe travels, Detourists. Hope to see you June 17th on Zoom to discuss all of your beautiful detours!
"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." -William Arthur Ward
“I know this candle’s bound to burn. And I will have my time to sing, I will, even if it’s anything…” - Lost in the Corner, 2012