A little while back, I began creating what I came to call my Book of Allies, a ritual magicked into existence to sustain me through a difficult time.
The practice works like this: each morning when I wake up, I hop skip my way around the usual temptations that call out from the confines of my phone. Instead, I take out my sketchbook with the soft blue cover, my favourite black ink pen and start to draw. I would draw whatever or whomever comes to mind, intuitively, instinctively.
At first, I was worried that no-one or nothing would arrive, that I would sit blank paged and equally blank of mind– but they always did. And always the birds.
Pen in hand, I watched my allies find me, arriving in fine lines of changing grip and pressure, amidst a myriad of tensions and uncertainties, each stroke alerting me to an undercurrent of mood or feeling that would have otherwise passed me by. As I grew their images on the page, the anxious parts of me became diminished.
My Book of Allies could equally be called my Book of A Thousand Tiny Exhalations.
Truth be known, I’m obsessed with drawing birds. I can give you a million explanations and no explanation at all as to why that is the case. But what I can tell you is that choosing to focus my attention on beauty, on my birds, pulled me out of my anxious brain and grew the part of me where new ideas were free to find me.
A place that would have remained hidden had I kept trying to find solutions in the same part of my brain that was creating the problems.
When I feel that anxious part of me rise up, I know that I will always feel better by turning to my sketchbook. It untangles the knots in my brain that pull my insides into tightness and at the end of my drawing, I am different.
I think this is where the gold is. Not in the good or bad, right or wrong, but in the fact that as part of any creative process, you come out changed.
xx Jane
In just over a week, Winging It is opening. I’ll share my love of drawing and illustrating birds, but perhaps more importantly, offer a start point to a creative practice that I have found to be life changing. I’d love for you to be a part of it! You can learn all about it here: www.janepike.com/winging-it
