What Does It Mean to Inhabit Your Story?

As I said before, I'm working through "Life is a Verb" with a group at Wild Precious Studio. Our first official art project was to create a house and fill it with collage elements representing our stories. Clearly, my brain was refusing to face the real issues.

Once I had the basic house shape down, I thought and thought and thought about what in the house would represent my story. I thought about the various rooms and whatnot. But mostly, I'd covered that in my earlier work and I wasn't in the mood to create a house with those elements and then actually put the answer into words.

Part of the instructions said:
Grab images that call to you without thinking very much about why they are calling to you. Don't plan the final product. Just grab and glue until you have an image that works for you ~ even if this means overlapping images or completely covering some up.

So, I started digging through my collection of collage elements and found a bunch by Tangie Baxter. The collection I'd printed out was mostly fish 'cuz I'm a big fan of the underwater world. Anyway, I turned off my rational brain, started cutting and gluing and playing with crayons and whatnot, and here's what happened.

I finished the right-hand page first and stared at it for a long time. What on earth does That mean? I had thought I was going to do a bunch of journaling on the left-hand page, but once I had made flowers out of paper scraps and added ancient book pages covered with words cut with a Slice, I felt done. Imagine that. An art-journal page with no journaling. LOL!

More on the House Theme

Working further through the "Life is a Verb" with the crew at Wild Precious Studio. The question was about seeing your story as a house and what would it be like to inhabit your story. My brain pretty much locked up at actually answering the question, but came up with a smart-ass reply in the form of this page.

Life is a Verb: Inhabiting Your Story

I'm doing a read through of Life is a Verb with a group on Wild Precious Studio (http://wildprecious-studio.ning.com). We're only in the intro pages now, but Effy posted some interesting questions to think about while reading. This is what came out when I considered, "What does it feel like to inhabit your story?"

Funny. Questions like that normally send me running for a journal to write, but this one came out as a visual.

Cats, Can Openers, and That Unmistakable Sound

Some cats will show up out of nowhere if you hold down the lever of an electric can opener. We used to do that when I was a kid to let Sarah know it was time to come in for the night. No amount of calling or looking did any good at all. The can opener, however? Instant cat. I've even seen it mentioned on lost-cat posters. "Answers to Friskie, Frisket, Frisk, Puddin' Pie, and the sound of an electric can opener."

Well, my cat eats crunchies. No interest whatsoever in soft food. Only crunchies. In fact, since I so rarely open cans, I don't have an electric can opener at all. I do, however, have a surefire trick to find the cat. No matter where she is or what she's doing, she appears every time anyone uses the toilet. My theory is that she's figured out that she has a captive audience with nothing better to do than pet her or run a trickle of water in the sink.

I can just see the poster now. "Answers to Mewon, Mewie, Mew Mew, Mewster, and the sound of  a person peeing."

Please don't let the cat out...