The Creative Journal

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

When Rita told us we would be doing 'creative journaling' on Saturday, I envisioned some exercises in writing in the journal that I brought with me.  But I was mistaken.  We were making a creative journal.

This is an exercise that we have done at various girl's events at church...shoot, we did this for the project for the 'Holy Spirit' unit in Friends Club...take an ordinary composition book, cut photos/words/etc from magazines and such, and make a collage to cover the front and back of the composition book to make a unique custom journal.   When we've done it at church, we covered the collage w/clear contact paper; Rita had Modge Podge to use to seal it (confession:  my experience w/ Modge Podge has been that it's ALWAYS sticky, so I carefully packed my journal up and brought it home and covered it w/ clear contact paper).

This is a common first day exercise at the Dive school, to get the creative process cranking. Rita had TONS of magazines, as well as some old Bibles and dictionaries, rubber stamps and ink, stickers, bits of interesting fabric, silk flowers, craft jewels...all KINDS of stuff. It was interesting to see those who made true works of art, with sparklies and stickers and flowers, those who just put things on they liked and then found what they had done revealed something in them they had not paid attention to before they saw it on their journals.

Now,  as I said, I've done this a couple of times before and normally I've been late to the party, looking for significant things in magazines that have already been culled once or twice.

But Saturday, I got a brand spanking new 'In Style' magazine.  I laughed, wondering what of spiritual significance I could find in a fashion magazine.

Y'know, if you pull stuff in a fashion mag out of that context...it can be...well, interesting.  I just started at the front and pulled out anything that caught my eye.  This is something that needs to be done from the gut...not over thought (overthinking was a common snare throughout the whole week for many of us...it's hard to just let go and trust that God will use the creative process).

I ended up with a lot of pictures of gems and jewelry...and words that went with them, so I decided to put them on the front cover.  Then I found that no one had yet cut out the definitions of 'jewel' and 'gem' from the dictionary, so I helped myself to those and added those...and the definition of 'gem' included something prized for its beauty or worth, while the definition of 'jewel' included a thing or person of great worth or excellence. 

I'm not sure just exactly how I chose the things that went on the back, other than they were the things that seemed most significant of the rest of my 'cut outs'.  I put the cat on just for fun, 'cause you know I love me some kitties, but after it was all finished I found that the cat really did have something to say to me.

One of the things I wanted to work through at Dive was my tendency to worry over much (overthink?) how what I said and did would appear to other folks.  What would they think?  How would that affect their opinion of me?

Cats don't care about that.

I also thought it was interesting that the words on the front were almost totally adjectives, while the words on the back were, by and large, instructions. 

'BE' then 'DO'...in that order.


And I did not set out to instruct myself....but I got instructed just the same.