In January, I attended workshops at our church on various spiritual practices: meditation, the Zen of drawing, and also one based on the book SOULCOLLAGE by Seena Frost. According to the SoulCollage® website, it is a process for “accessing your intuition and creating an incredible deck of cards with deep personal meaning that will help you with life’s questions and transitions.” I am a control freak but I managed to let go and enjoy this process. I hope to find time to make more cards like this, maybe at a retreat sometime.
And this week, I made my first story collage. I first read about this process in an RWR article by Jennifer Crusie, “Picture This: Collage as Prewriting and Inspiration” also available here. I was curious about the process, knowing that it worked for authors I admire including Crusie, Jo Beverley and others. Although it is designed for prewriting, I thought it might help me to reconnect with my balloonist story, which has been sitting half-finished for over two years now.
It was fun. I used all the images I’d already been collecting to inspire the characters and the setting. Browsing through craft stores, I came up with some cool finds: the perfect brilliant blue silk, cloud patterned paper. As I was cutting the black fabric for the lower part, my scissors snagged and created a jagged pattern, like clouds of smoke, and I decided to keep it that way.
While I didn’t get any new ideas, making the collage reminded me that I do have a real story to tell. I will definitely try this again the next time I start a new story.
Have any of you tried collage as a creative and/or spiritual process? Did it work for you? Are there other processes you use to tap into your intuition?
Elena