Smashing into intuition

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars …
— Lawrence M. Krauss from A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

Nuclear furnaces of stars, smashing, colliding elements. When I #FollowIntuition, it often feels just like that, a smashing and colliding of elements into something great and wonderful. It reminds me of what a friend shared with me while in grad school that she called her gut test. When she was making a decision she tried to anticipate how her gut would feel the next day, would it be filled with regret or joy. She applied this to attending parties as well as choosing a job. We all have variations of it. Ways of testing our intuition.

Following that intuition can be like fulfilling a craving for butternut squash ravioli panfried with mushrooms, olive oil and sage. But it can also be puzzle like, layered and filled with many micro decisions that lead up to the where intuition leads. The two things that stall me from following my intuition are fear and getting started. They feed each other, the fear making the getting started bigger and bigger and bigger. When I ignore that, and just get started, the fear disappears.

As I look ahead, to the light returning, to the reminder of the gift of love that fills so many hearts this holiday season, a new semester, a new year, I work to carve out that time to listen to where my intuition is calling me. It calls me to make: to get work to get out of my own way and start the more complicated projects that keep whispering to me “realize this, weave this into your life, find a way.” Some of what I want to make requires hope and extensive planning, mini-deadlines, small steps, holding myself accountable because I must make the external deadline. It requires me to say hello that fear of getting started as just part of who I am, to ignore it, and just begin.

A big shout out to JESS LIVELY and Quest 2017 for the prompt#FollowIntuition, which inspired today’s writing.

Today’s Assignment:

This collage came into being thanks to some studio organizing. I need to find a home for some lettering equipment so I emptied a drawer filled with very old paste paper scraps. I loved the long green ones and decided they needed to find away into today’s work.

1. Take a patterned paper and cut it in half. Glue to the sides of your collage matrix.
2. With contrasting papers, reconnect the split half somehow.
3. Add some kind of focal point.