Notes To Myself, Part II

/ Ally Bean

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I’ve been in a good place lately.

Seeing reality more clearly.  Feeling more deeply.

Understanding and trusting the process.

So it is no surprise that I came upon this poster by Emily P. Freeman.

{“When the student is ready, the teacher will come.”}

It is her how-to guide to making art that matters.  Art with a soul.

I like it as an artist’s manifesto– and as a guide for living an authentic life.

It expresses what I have come to believe.

That mediocrity and love cannot inhabit the same place.

The good place– where everything is just as it should be.

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18 thoughts on “Notes To Myself, Part II”

  1. I particularly like “Try to measure your impact”. Aside from having a healthy regard for the amount of space there is and the number of people sharing it, to spend too much time wondering / worrying about what other people think is so draining and counterproductive. I love these quirky things you come across!

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    • Polly, so true. Fortunately I have learned early on that my impact on anything is never quantifiable. I influence, but never in a way that the numbers people respect. So I’m disinclined to ever focus on that sort of stat.

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  2. I like that. I’ve always considered what I write, I write for me – not to please other people. Not that it’s art, per se, but to be useful and honest I can’t be worrying about what other people think or be afraid to talk about the hard stuff. And lately, that’s what I’ve been doing. I need to get back to being honest and letting go of whether others will like it or me.

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    • Zazzy, I think what you say about writing for yourself is much more difficult to do than we think that it is. I know that once a blog takes on a certain character it is easy to lose readers if you dare to try something different in your writing. And all of us, to some degree, want to be liked by others. So we overthink whether or not to post something more raw and unexpected.

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    • Emily, thanks for stopping by. I really did find this poster to be the summation of what I’ve been mulling over in my mind for the last few months. Just had to share it with everyone who reads my blog.

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    • Margaret, it’s taken me some time to get to this point. That’s why I liked this poster so much. Clear + positive advice about how to do art– or life, if you will.

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  5. Wow, this is an awesome how-to guide. Genius, really! Sadly as I went down the list, I was thinking, “yup, I do that,” “and that,” yikes. Time to print this out, post it on my wall, and follow it already! Thanks for the great post, as always! 🙂

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    • Hi Ally…Hey one more thing. Have you considered changing the plugin you are now using to manage comments? I don’t have a wordpress.com site (I am a self-hosted blog) and when I log in with Twitter, there is no way to “hook” my comments back to my site. Any suggestions? When I just manually enter the information in like before, it takes me to wordpress.com and says I can’t log in (which is true since I’m a .org site). Thanks!

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      • Kristin, glad that you liked this poster. I always need a bit of inspiration each day, so your idea of putting it somewhere to look at daily is a good one. Now, the question is: where shall I put it?

        As for the plugin for comments… I know very little about plugins, so as much as I’d love to say “YES!” I’ll do that, I really don’t even know how to do that! I chose WordPress.com because it is free + all the widget/template stuff is done for me. I’ll look into what you’re talking about, but I think that how the comments work a la WP.com is how the comments work. Good idea, though.

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    • philosopher mouse, it is a good one, isn’t it? And I have to laugh because the color scheme of the poster couldn’t go any better with my template. Tres chic!

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