When at first you don’t succeed:  those of you who got “At the Speed of Life” may have noticed the formatting was a bit off.  Seems WordPress doesn’t like my adding random pictures anymore.  I thought I caught it before it went out, but see some folks actually read it.  An adventure reading that squinced up format!  So in the meantime, Daughter has turned me on to some HTML how-to which I will later try, but for now I will stick with what is working, which is “gallery” photo format.

These are pictures from artgalpals loading in to our show, merge/emerge which opens this week.  It is a very small room at a North Beach Gallery, and there are 7 of us showing (and an 8th who made the lettering for us even though she isn’t around to show).  We had the dimensions on paper and everyone brought what they wanted to show and up it went in about 4 hours.  It was an exercise in 7 women artists sharing comaraderie, intentional community and co-creation.  Which is the point of the show:  that we have created, gone looking at art and generally shared our lives over the past year and something bigger than us individually has emerged from this merging of breath and spirit – community.  You cannot create in close quarters over a long period of time without inspiring each other.  And that inspiration ripples out everywhere in your life, so it is important that this is an intentional community – one we have put together by choice.

It began almost 3 years back when I was looking for community that I hadn’t yet found.   I decided to facilitate a master mind group and see what came of it.  I only used my own maililng list/Facebook/blog so I was drawing from people with whom I at least peripherally interacted on a regular basis.  It wasn’t a really big surprise that of the 5 people that stayed in the group (out of an original 6), 4 of those were connected in some ways to art. 

We wer talking the other night as we interviewed for the local weekend section of the newspaper, and none of us could remember exactly how long it lasted.  I think around 5 sessions.  The first session was to commit and go forward as a group that held a safe space for each person to explore some life aspect they wanted to address.  I was there to hold the space, keep notes, ask reflecting questions and hold a space for accountability.  There is something about meeting regularly with the same group that encourages one to do the things that keep moving down the list because of – well, you fill in the blank.  I’m sure you have some of those things yourself!

At the end of the Master Mind which had a set number of sessions from the beginning, several of the women wanted to keep going somehow, so those of us interested in continuing (I was moving out of facilitator mode and into member of the unstructured, unlead group mode) made arrangements to meet and spend some time chatting.  I think we did this about 3 times, enlarging the group with other women who we felt shared the energy.  Then it moved into hands-on art creating/learning just because of the energy of the women we had in the group.  These were sharing of ideas and how-tos, which started blending our skills.  The group has sculptors (clay which is additive, and rock/wood which is subtractive), jewelry artists, metal workers, graphic artists, painters, pyrographers, paper makers….well, as it turns out there isn’t much in the way of creative work that some member of the group hasn’t at least tried. 

Our stated intent was a place to share and play together in a generous and non-competitive atmosphere – it had to be non-competitive because we were sharing techniques that were replicable, especially after we taught everyone else how.  We figured (and it has worked out this way) that other people using our knowledge would expand our own ways of seeing our work and make a space for us to move in directions we might never have otherwise.

What I want to share, really, is that intentional communities can be co-created by just focusing on comraderie and shared visions.  I think the world needs more of this.  My own world has greatly expanded from the one little idea I had 3 years ago – gone in marvelous directions I never forsaw and thought I could only dream of!

merge/emerge is:  Rose Beitzel, Joan Humphreys, Conni Leigh James, Deb McClure, Mary Ida Rolape, Linda Rosenthal (whom I credit with pulling together that first chat group after the Master Mind and making a space for all this!),  and me, Tammy Vitale.  Dhyana MacKenzie is our lettering guru who made our wall sign.

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

So much of what we buy and do is booby prizes because we’re not living lives we want, we even forget how lively life can be so we’ve got to keep getting more stuff to fill the unfillable hole.  A service we can do for each other is to watch for signs of life and say, “You look like you love doing that.  Maybe you should do it some more.  Maybe I can help you.”  Ann Herbert