Marney's Musings:
Gratitude in New Places and Spaces
Artellagram 11-9-13




In the U.S., November is the month we think about gratitude, because of the Thanksgiving holiday. While it's wonderful to have a holiday to celebrate giving thanks, gratitude is a daily practice that changes lives. Gratitude is the foundation of full, voluminous living, which represents the extent to which we are fully embodying appreciation. It gives us an infallible direct indication of how fully we are living our lives.

While clocks give us a measurement of vertical time, gratitude gives us a measurement of horizontal time, or fullness of life. When we are on the go throughout the day, setting very high daily production expectations for ourselves, we can easily get caught up in the affairs of the day and lose sight of the things that truly matter. When we evaluate our days by gratitude, we detach from traditional measurements such as how hard we've worked, or how much we have gotten done, or even how much we have served the rest of the world around us. In the end, it all comes down to love, and whether we are expressing it for a person, a favorite pen, or a delicious cup of tea, Gratitude is the ultimate shortcut to love.

When we are experiencing challenging times, it often doesn't work to look to our normal, default blessings for comfort. If we are in pain, it's challenging to be grateful for our health. If we are going through relationship difficulties, it can be challenging to be grateful for our connections with others. If we have survived serious trauma, it can be difficult to be grateful for a benevolent life force that provides us with comfort and hope.

When our natural channels for gratitude are blocked, creativity can help us find gratitude in new places and spaces…access points that we didn't even know existed.


I will always remember a gratitude awakening I experienced through art that changed the course of my life forever. It began when I was first introduced to mixed media assemblage in 2001. I attended an art conference and had a wonderful time making an over-the-top, more-is-definitely-more assemblage of a plump woman. Back in my hotel room when I looked at the fruits of my day-long workshop's labor, I was startled to see how ugly this piece was. I looked at it with a harsh, critical eye, finding all the things wrong with it: her figure was way too angular, like a toddler had cut out her shapes; she had way too many found objects incorporated; the pigment powders didn't even match and just looked cheap. The negativity went on and on, and got even worse over time. This response surprised me. Though very new at creating this kind of artwork, I generally tended to be rather self-forgiving and usually was happy to just have fun without a lot of emphasis on results. Yet here, I found myself playing over the day in my mind, thinking of what I wish I would have done differently. It was a sad way to end a creative weekend.

Back at home, I took out this piece of geometric junk and placed it on the shelf in my studio. There she stayed, haunting me. What was she? A ghost? A bag lady? A demon? I finally decided I needed to figure out why I was being so negatively triggered by this piece of art. Was it really just my inner critic running amok, or was something else going on?

What happened next changed everything. I wrote a free-form poem, using my very favorite technique for accessing intuitive writing, which is to type with my eyes closed, which literally prohibits editing. Her story was written through me quickly, without thinking, and I was surprised to find out that she was me, and all the "stuff" on her represented the collection of tangled, wiry, precious things I had picked out and carried for my journey in life. In this new perspective, suddenly she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The individual pieces of junk on her body became blessings, each symbolizing experiences from my life.

A portal for a different kind of appreciation opened in me that day, and I'm convinced it happened because of the blend of words and art, waltzing together to show me the dance of gratitude. This powerful experience led me to a new hobby -- Artella -- which celebrates its 11th birthday this month! I could never have imagined that looking somewhere unexpected -- in this case, an ugly piece of art and a story that came from deep within -- could have led me to deep gratitude and brought me along a new path. I feel immensely grateful for the joy in my life that came when "Artemis, Hunter for Joy" revealed herself to me and told me I could find gratitude in new places and spaces.

If you want to experience in new ways the transformational power of gratitude, take a look at the ARTpreciation Bonus Bundle to help you rediscover gratitude in new places and spaces!
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