Seeding Our Imagination

  

SEED PODS LiDoña Wagner 2022

Terry Bergdall

Three songs on my playlist are about being awake on life's journey and taking an affirmative relationship to the realities one encounters. 

 

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

Kurt Elling

Album: The Questions

 

In the final verse, after describing many troubling encounters, his crucial point is to notice and pay self-conscious attention to it all:  "I'll know my song well before I start singin'."

 

I Can See Clearly Now

Holly Cole

Album: Don't Smoke in Bed

 

It is as if she's proclaiming, "this is precisely where I should be, and I am extremely grateful for it." It strikes me as courageous. I find her delivery of this song to be profoundly inspirational.

 

Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen

Album: Live in London

 

There are no rose-colored glasses in this song. "Our love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken 'Hallelujah'." But "hallelujah" none-the-less and all the more powerful because of its clear lucidity with wide open eyes. 

Reawakening the Muse Within

TIFFANY SHLAIN is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, animation, video, and performance. Her advice for those looking to make a career in the arts is relevant for all of us.

 

Shlain’s feminist history tree ring, Dendrofemonology
is at the center of her new solo exhibition, 
Human Nature, at SHACK15 in San Francisco. 

See as much as you can. You are a sponge to absorb every idea and thought you can then build on and reference as you create something that only you can bring to life. And like anything, you must focus and home in on your craft. I believe everyone is creative and just needs an environment to foster that creativity and focus. So see and create as much as you can!

 

And one other key piece of advice that I think is the special sauce to all of this: One day a week, turn off your phone and all your screens and look instead to what is around and inside you. I have been doing this practice for 13 years, and my day without screens is literally the day all the best creative ideas come to me.

 

 

From Winter 2022 volume of CLIO
The Magazine of the National Women’s History Museum
with photos courtesy Tiffany Shlain. Tiffanyshlain.com/art

 

 

 

 SEASON OF REST & RENEWAL

December 21, 2022 – February 5, 2023

  

 

Spirit Hears Women Singing to Pine Trees

 LiDoña Wagner 2022

 

From the Winter Solstice 

marking the incremental return of the light

to the conclusion of the Lantern Festival 

celebrating the Lunar New Year,

I declare as my personal season of rest and renewal.

 A time of appreciating the darkness 

while Simultaneously 

welcoming the lengthening of daylight hours

 

Patiently awaiting 

new potentials now hidden from view

Trusting resurrection 

from old, outdated patterns and beliefs

 

I am Nature 

And Nature is Me

 

PEACE and JOY TO YOU!

 

 

READ IT!

SOLITO A Memoir by Javier Zamora touched me as no other book has since THE TRANSLATOR by Daoud Hari. 

 

From El Salvador to Guatemala to Mexico
 to the Sonoran Desert to La USA.

Zamora’s retelling of his unimaginably horrific migration journey to the United States as a nine-year-old exposes heroes and villains. I include myself as a villain - an unaware and self-absorbed bystander. 

Read it to relive your own sources of despair and courage. 

His writing brought to the surface a painful experience of being bullied and uprooted at the age of 8. It opened my wound from a devastating encounter with US Customs at an airport in Hawaii. Still, my frightening experiences while traveling alone in India and Italy were trivial beside Javier's life-threatening dangers. 

Read it to expand your compassion for coyotes, all immigrants, and Dreamers. 

Read it!

 

 

PLAY SPACE

Where is your imaginative play space? 

We all like and need to play. A runner or hiker puts on shoes or boots and makes a bee line for the door. Rock climbers gather their gear and head for the mountains. Bikers jump on a bike and ride. Ballerinas grab a duffle bag of leotards and slippers and dance their way to a studio. A chef gathers up veggies and herbs in a well-equipped kitchen. An artist keeps colors and marking tools close at hand.

My play space requires surfaces at differing heights to allow 
for various forms of play and for having fun with others. 

All around lighting and comprehensive space utilization
enhance my play time. 

Playing requires equipment and designated spaces. A musician without an instrument feels bereft of a beloved companion. Play connects us to our body and its senses of hearing, sight, sensation, smelling, taste, and hearing. More importantly, play opens us up to that which is beyond our current experience and expertise. 

 

Cutting boards on top of a paper storage unit allow collage
 opportunities at the same time as being involved in a writing project.

Are you stretching your imagination muscles? 

Imaginative play is about pure potential. Do you have a space for daydreaming, journaling and making personal notes? Or for recording your dreams and inquiring about their messages? Do you doodle as you think about possible ventures or while talking on the phone? Do you keep your doodles and expand on them? Are markers, pens, pencils, and paper ready at hand when an idea floats at the edge of awareness? 

Keeping track of files and having a closet filled with
multiple project options makes me happy. 
 

As an experimental artist,
I require a variety of materials.

When I decided to record my experiences in oppressed communities around the world, I got a laptop computer and claimed an unoccupied room on the top floor of the former nunnery where I was living. Later I moved to an island that unleashed my visual imagination, so I began taking art classes. Soon my apartment kitchen had two folding shelves to hold my materials. Returning to the mainland, I graduated to a table and cabinet in the one-bedroom place I rented. Only when I bought my little townhouse was there a room that could become a full-on art studio. 

My original bedroom cabinet stores paints, pens,
 crayons, markers and all sorts of gluing and sealing materials

Because nature sparks my imagination, my creative 
play spaces must have windows.

If you don’t have a designated imaginative play space, where could you make one? In the closet under the stairs? By removing an irrelevant piece of furniture?

Autumn leaves keep me grounded despite the mess my studio becomes 
when I'm in the middle of a project, or two or even three.

Are you ready for some imaginative play?

REINVENT YOURSELF 

with Dreaming & Artful Play

 A Workbook

Available at the sale price of $39.95 

from October 23 through December 2022 

 

Layout by Katherine Getta of Gettadesign

Send an email to lidonaw@gmail.com to order your downloadable pdf.

REINVENT YOURSELF

LIDOÑA WAGNER 

 announces the upcoming release of

REINVENT YOURSELF 

with Dreaming & Artful Play

 A Workbook

Available at the sale price of $39.95 

from October 23 through December 2022 

 

Layout by Katherine Getta of Gettadesign

Learn to Become … 

A storyteller of hope and positive change 

with the tool of discovery writing.

Gray Lady Nancy Golden 2022

The architect of a meaningful and fulfilling life

through the process of dream inquiry.

Life Keys Barbara Lang 2022

An expressive creator of human joy and delight 

with exercises that release your uniquely personal imagination.

Dancing Caterpillar Judy Newman 2022

An embodiment of trusting and responsive community

by sharing these methods with others.

Burst of Joy LiDoña Wagner 2022

 

 Send an email to

lidonaw@gmail.com

to preorder a downloadable pdf 

of this life-changing workbook designed 

for use by an individual or in a group

at the bargain price of $39.95.

     

LIDOÑA WAGNER has taught dreamwork, artful play and discovery writing for over twenty-five years – methods that guided her through leaving a difficult marriage, exiting stifling work situations, and reinventing her life after cancer and the death of her only child. Trained as a teacher and writer, she became a consultant in Dr. Ira Progoff’s Intensive Journal Process, learned dream inquiry with Jungian analyst Milene Baron in Brussels, Belgium, and developed artful play with master artists in Victoria, BC. 

Tree Nursery Update

GARDENS ARE ALWAYS CHANGING 

Baby trees I showed you months ago were moved to pots with room to grow, becoming beautiful assets to my front entry. 

Seeing the struggling Maidenhead fern in front,
 I decided to give it one more chance by planting it
in the ground in my back yard. 

REPOTTING DAY

As a container gardener, I have to be on the lookout for plants becoming root-bound and beginning to die. Repotting days require forethought. An inventory of my plants tells me which are ready to die, need a bigger pot, or need different sunlight. Rather than run out and buy new pots, I strategize. If I let go of the yellowing spiky plant, that black ceramic pot will be perfect for the three-year old Japanese Maple whose pot would be perfect for the one-year old Japanese Maple, whose pot could be home for one of the thriving Oak seedlings, etc. 

 

I replaced the Maidenhead fern with a chrysanthemum for fall.
The Japanese Maples are harder to see, but each received
a pot double the size of its previous home. 

The carpark hosts six pots with three or more baby trees in each. 

PROPAGATING BELOVED PLANTS 

Perennial Hydrangias are close to my heart and easy to propagate. Just stick a healthy stalk in the dirt and give it lots of water.

The leafing stem in front is a start from a Hydrangia.
Behind it is an Oak seedling; can you see its curly stem near the dirt? 
Maybe it's a result of my moving it from pot to pot as it grew.

 

I put two more Hydrangia starts (left side) in another pot with Maple seedlings.

On the other side of the carpark is one big pot with several 
seedlings. This Hydrangia start and Maple seedling are flourishing.

I'm not sure if my Pine seedlings will make it. 
The largest one may, but the two little ones in front
are struggling. Three other babies turned brown.

ENJOYING THE VIEW

Plants mature and flower at different times, focusing our eyes first in one area and then in another. This repotting day provided me with more stunning views of my Japanese Maples, volunteers from a friend's garden. I'm in love with the enhanced view that repotting and moving them around provides.

Looking at the tree nursery from my front door,
notice a lovely branch of the three-year old Japanese Maple.
You can barely see the one-year old Japanese Maple two pots down.

Viewing the Japanese Maples from the second floor is pure delight.
Their delicate leaves blend together into a lovely pattern.

Plants mature and flower at different times, focusing our eyes first in one area and then in another. This winter it will be my Citrus Pine and shade loving plants that will come out to delight my senses.