Treasure Chest
and Runes
These last two rituals shook me up.
But it’s too late for me to explain now, because hey…
it’s New Year’s Eve!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
Let’s make it the greatest year ever.
Deal?
I LOVE YOU
Here’s the blogborygmus I doodled, last night.
It represents the ultimate goal I’ll be focusing on throughout 2009.
A goal I’m determined to reach before August 16, 2010, as I am anxious to reap the abundance that will follow — a very “Law of Attraction” reaction.
In case the above drawing/message is too confusing or comes off as being too hippy-dippy-weird, here’s a more precise and detailed version of my ultimate goal:
I want to make money…
I want to…
I want to…
Will be visualizing my road trip scenario over and over till I can actually taste the smell of gasoline; till I feel my butt getting numb from driving around for too long and I suddenly catch myself looking for a cool place to park and to take a walk.
Must think “nomad,” “gypsy,” “traveling road show.”
Must visualize with all my senses.
Must be grateful and keep saying “Thank you.”
Must make believe I already have it all.
Gracias, Universe!
Countdown to 2009
**The Year of The Oza**
Still more to come…
About Santa Claus
He didn’t bring me what I asked for. Far from it.
Instead of a MacBook Pro and a ZOOM H4, I got a boil.
And the boil isn’t in any ol’ place either: it’s on my face, in the middle of my right cheek, right under my big brown beauty mark.
Arrrgh!
While I’m typing this blog post, my festive furuncle sleeps soundly under a heavy coat of aloe gel. Good boil. As the pus-filled lump sleeps, a thought gives me the creeps: if I don’t kick myself in the butt and move on with my life, I will continue to ROT.
Which brings us to my next topic…
This website turned one year old on December 18
I went back and read my my very first blog post. I remember how completely drained I was that day. Drained by the months of patience and hard work it had taken for the site to go up. I can’t begin to count the hours spent on Skype with Tina Stephen, my tech guru, probing and testing, day and night, to finally figure things out and make my dream come true.
So there I was, inaugurating my custom-designed site, at the start of what I believed would be a rockin’ road trip through the past.
When I clicked to publish that first post, I was excited — oh yes, very much so. But at the same time, I realized what HIGH expectations I held for this site and that I would have to work very hard in order to keep the dream alive. (DOUBLY hard since I had had the brilliant idea of managing a French version of this blog thus doubling the work… doubling the stress.)
Yes, I was stressed. The stress kept getting heavier and heavier, and things started to become more and more boring as the weeks and months went by. Where had all the excitement and adventure and music and laughter gone? Why was my magical van so slow? Why did I always end up spoiling my fun?
Many times, I wanted to quit and shut down the site. Other times, I wanted to at least drop one of the blogs. Of course, the French blog would have been the one to go because it has the least traffic. The thought of this made me feel bad: How could I abandon my heritage, my culture?
Damn guilt.
All this to say that I’m glad I pushed ahead and pulled through — in both English and French.
I’m now ready to raise the bar and make this place a reflection of who I truly am and of who I want to become. I’m already focusing on getting rid of the perfectionist devil, and I’ll be starting a creativity class soon, but that’s a topic for another post.
I hope you all have some kind of end-of-year ritual. Personally, I find it important to look at where I have come from; to make sure I know where I want to go; and to pack my mind, heart and soul with whatever I’ll need for the journey ahead.
More to come as I count down the hours
that will lead us to 2009…
**The Year of The Oza**
Everybody conga!
Mobile post sent by OzaMeilleur using Utterli. Replies. mp3
I invented the word “blogborygmus”
in order to combat perfectionism.
Inspired by the real word “borborygmus” — rumbling of the stomach –, a blogborygmus is a mix of doodles and words that I most often scribble before falling asleep at night, the result of which usually goes straight to the garbage the next morning.
But having recently become a born-again-bum, I’ve decided to let go of my Inner Critic and post my late night rumblings of the mind — my brain gas — on my blogs, both English and French, for all to see.
Thus, I created the new blog post category: blogborygmi (plural of blogborygmus). The first brain gas to have honoured this category was oh what a beautiful day!
The above blogborygmus oozed out of me last Friday.
I call it the ladder.
Duh.
Cerebration is the enemy of
originality in art.
Martin Ritt
In her book The Artist’s Way — A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self — this is what Julia Cameron has to say about perfectionism:
Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.
Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”
The perfectionist fixes one line of a poem over and over — until no lines are right. The perfectionist redraws the chin line on a portrait until the paper tears. The perfectionist writes so many versions of scene one that she never gets to the rest of the play. The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.
The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain. The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued with a white-glove approach: “Mmm. What about this comma? Is this how you spell…?”
For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone.
Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outiline it, see where it’s going.
And where is it going?
Nowhere, very fast.The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, “This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep going.”
To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.
Perfectionism is not a quest of the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again.
No. We should not.
“A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places,” said Paul Gardner. A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity — letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.
Now, this doesn’t mean I’ll strive for the lowest trash. No. But posting my blogborygmi will help me let go of “trying” and get me used to just “doing.” And who knows… I may even discover subconscious messages in my brain gas emissions.
How about you?
Are you possessed by
the perfectionist devil?
My first meme…
Yippee!
I was tagged by the very charming Rob Lee who was himself tagged by the also very charming Bob Goyetche — two guys I had the great pleasure of meeting at PodCamp Montréal back in September.
Here are the rules for this particular meme:
Well, if you go to my Flickr, you’ll see that I only have one page*. So I decided to pick photo number twelve, which is two times six (deep… very deep):
It’s my darling Daisy — I wrote about her in a blog post, Daisy Decides To Die – Act 1.
Which reminds me I never posted Act 2, so here it is in a nutshell: the next day, I took my Daisy Mae to the vet where she was put to sleep. Yes, Daisy died in my arms. And yes, I still miss her a lot. But I know she’s having a ball playing in “The Other Dimension” with the rest of our dearly departed little friends.
Now comes the time to tag six blogger friends (seven — added an extra one for luck) who, I hope, will remain my friends even though I tagged them (Goyetche writes that Internet memes have “kinda become the chain letters of the modern age” — eek!).
They are, in alphabetical order:
David Kemper (The DIGITAL Archive)
Jean-Philippe Murray (Lapin Blanc)
Ange Recchia (Buzzing With Ange)
Marilyn Robertson (From The Water’s Edge)
Kcrystina Stephen (Freshly Handmade Jewelry & Accessories)
Renée Wathelet (En direct des iles)
I’m inviting you to visit their blogs and leave a comment — tell ‘em I sent ya
* Note to people in the Future: My Flickr probably has more pages now, so try to imagine only one page.
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