My Art Journal Papers/Collage

Honoring Our Ancestors: An Art Journaling Journey on All Souls Day

Introduction:

As the leaves fall and the air turns crisp, All Souls Day approaches on November 2, inviting us to remember and honor our ancestors. This year, I've decided to embark on a heartfelt journey of remembrance and connection through the ancient practice of art journaling. In this blog post, I invite you to join me as I explore the profound impact of our ancestors and how art journaling can be a powerful means of preserving their memory.

I. Morning Reflections: Connecting with the Past

Begin the day with a quiet moment of reflection. Take a deep breath and set an intention for your art journaling journey today. Think about the ancestors you wish to honor and the emotions you want to convey through your art.

II. Gathering Supplies: Preparing for the Journey

Before you start your creative process, gather an art journal, paints, markers, colored pencils, brushes, and any other materials you would like to be using. Find a serene and comfortable workspace where you can focus without distractions.

III. The Power of Memories: Remembering Our Ancestors

Choose a page in your art journal that you'd like to dedicate to All Souls Day. This will be your canvas for preserving the memory of your ancestors. Take a moment to reflect on the lives and experiences of those who came before you. Write down memories, thoughts, or messages that you wish to convey to them.

IV. Emotional Expression: Letting Feelings Flow

Start by creating a background for your page using watercolors. Allow the colors to represent the emotions associated with your memories. You might use soothing blues and purples or fiery reds and yellows, depending on the feelings you want to express.

V. Writing to the Departed: A Personal Connection

Write a heartfelt letter or messages to your ancestors. Express your gratitude, love, or any words left unsaid. You can use decorative lettering or calligraphy to add a personal touch to your messages.

VI. Incorporating Mementos: Keeping Their Presence Close

Attach photographs, drawings, or small mementos that represent your ancestors. Create pockets or flaps in your journal to tuck these keepsakes away, using washi tape or adhesive to secure them in place.

VII. Mindful Art Creation: A Journey of Self-Expression

Now, it's time to create your art. Paint or sketch with care and intention. Let your emotions guide your creative process, and don't worry about perfection. Focus on self-expression and the healing power of art.

VIII. Dedicating Your Artwork: A Moment of Gratitude

Sign and date the completed page in your art journal. Write a brief dedication to your ancestors, expressing your gratitude for the creative process and the chance to remember them.

IX. Contemplation and Meditation: Finding Solace in Your Art

Spend a few moments in silence with your completed art. Meditate on the experience and the emotions it has brought forth. Consider how the creative process has provided a healing connection to your ancestors.

X. Sharing and Connecting: Building Bonds with Loved Ones

If you're comfortable, share your art and your experience with family and friends. Discuss your intentions and the significance of your artwork. Encourage others to engage in their own creative All Souls Day reflections.

XI. Closing Ritual: Honoring the Memory

As the day comes to a close, extinguish the candle you lit earlier as a symbol of remembrance. Thank your ancestors for their presence during this creative journey and store your art journal in a safe and cherished place.

XII. Personal Time for Reflection: A Deeper Connection

Take some time to reflect on your All Souls Day art journaling experience. Journal any thoughts or insights that arose during this journey. Consider making this practice an annual tradition, a beautiful way to honor and remember your ancestors.

Conclusion:

Honoring our ancestors on All Souls Day is a deeply meaningful and spiritual practice. Art journaling, with its capacity to channel emotions and memories, provides a unique and healing medium for this commemoration. As we remember and celebrate the lives of those who came before us, we not only connect with our roots but also find solace and healing in the creative process. Join me in commemorating and honoring our ancestors this All Souls Day through the power of art journaling.

journal

“All Souls’ Day
Let’s go our old way
by the stream, and kick the leaves
as we always did, to make
the rhythm of breaking waves.

This day draws no breath –
shows no colour anywhere
except for the leaves - in their death
brilliant as never before.

Yellow of Brimstone Butterfly,
brown of Oak Eggar Moth –
you’d say. And I’d be wondering why
a summer never seems lost

if two have been together
witnessing the variousness of light,
and the same two in lustreless November
enter the year’s night…

The slow-worm stream - how still!
Above that spider’s unguarded door,
look – dull pearls…Time’s full,
brimming, can hold no more.

Next moment (we well know,
my darling, you and I)
what the small day cannot hold
must spill into eternity.

So perhaps we should move cat-soft
meanwhile, and leave everything unsaid,
until no shadow of risk can be left
of disturbing the scatheless dead.

Ah, but you were always leaf-light.
And you so seldom talk
as we go. But there at my side
through the bright leaves you walk.

And yet – touch my hand
that I may be quite without fear,
for it seems as if a mist descends,
and the leaves where you walk do not stir.”

— Frances Bellerby

Bones

Special objects that we bring into our homes imbue the space with what is meaningful to us. Finding something suddenly of interest without knowing why - is part of living a magical life. It may create a feeling or a memory from a time that you are unclear about. What is it that this object brings to me in my living right now? Having a few items is what makes something so special. Filling a space or home with too many things just overwhelms us. The interesting story about our home objects connected to our everyday lives offers us information about the biography we carry.

When we are young we come into our childhood homes and places without having a choice in what that is - in the mundane world. On a different level what lives in the spiritual realm perhaps - the unconscious maybe - there is this idea that we have a connection to how things develop in our biography. Of course belief systems vary in these theories. I do believe that we are connected to a greater life energy - spiritual life energy - that is awash in a plasma that whirls around us in ways that we do not often understand. This feeling is most likely concretized if one has had experiences in life that offer them glimpses into another world. I have had those experiences - so it is perfectly comfortable for me to embrace this ethos in my life. I think that most people have these experiences. It is easy to overlook these moments if our attention is elsewhere. One way I think most people have experienced incredible moments of beauty is - Nature Connection.

With Nature we can feel those powerful feelings of a connection to something much bigger than ourselves. It is undeniable as we stand before a tree, or in our gardens, or seeing the sky above or the rush of a river flowing by us as we stand on the edge. As a world view enlarges it becomes less important to fill our spaces with many items that may in fact diminish a focused energy in our homes and spaces. Imagine if we must choose one or two very important items in our lives and be content with that. This small box of bones is a treasure of meaning and beauty and significance to me. It would be difficult to articulate how one person’s treasure is meaningful to each of us. It is really only something the individual might understand. That is enough for it to be significant. It is this human ability to imbue objects with attachment and meaning that offers us a glimpse into why perhaps we get in over our heads with too much or too many things.

making vessel

One way of finding objects - would be to bring special handmade items into your life and home place. A simple vessel made by a potter can offer so much. It can contain many items over its lifetime. Water that is filling with the sun or moon on a shelf for hours can then bring that energy into your body when you drink it. Flowers that you have gathered on a walk can remind you of your time outdoors. A holder of things. Find what matters to you. Imbue the vessel with who you are and it becomes enlivened with your uniqueness.

A Gathering Basket

A gathering basket will go many places with you. It will go on picnics, haul things around the garden, bring things upstairs with you and carry your items along on a walk. With each carrying time - the basket becomes more important to you - more useful to you. Even more meaningful to you. You may begin to use the basket to create a display when you are not using it as a tool. In this way we find objects that resonate with us in our life. I think a basket is a very useful item to carry in your life. Containers offer use and beauty. Taking care of these objects that live with us will bring to us an art piece to drape our living around.

In our living with objects we find. We find memories that resonate with what that object represents for us. Even if we do not know it consciously. Even when we are drawn in and do not know why. I think that finding enduring beauty can be of use in a world that is over run with too much. Too much of endless meaningless searching. Carefully bring along a few objects of poetry that hold a thread woven across the years. Let the threads sew together that which has carried you along so far. A kind of visual museum of your life - curated in simple and useful or magnificent to only the life ways that you know about. Your own secret magical treasure. Let that meaning find you.

A Writing Exercise: Find an object in your life that holds meaning for you. Write about what you see, feel and understand about this object in your life. What can you discover about yourself that offers you a glimpse into what this holds for you?

Handmade Mug

“Wherever we touch life we form it. It’s an old teaching that man is a microcosm of the universe. If you really feel and internalize that knowledge, it is quite a thing to be a human being, to touch with the hands but also with a thought, a feeling, or a dream.”

— M.C. Richards

Home Diary

Home Diary on a Monday. The beginning of a work week for some people. Others have a life where they are retired, going to school, are unemployed, healthfully challenged, live without a home, or live an unencumbered life for many reasons. So, I think saying it’s the beginning of a work week does not exactly encompass all the peoples. It is difficult to talk about things in a general way for me as nuance exists in the corners. We each carry our life view and over lay it with its own captions onto the wider world culture. All of that being acknowledged - I would like to try talk about Home on Mondays.

“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.”

— Oscar Wilde

Home is a word of comfort to me. I have a moon in Cancer after all. The place of home, family, relationship lives in the fourth house astrologically. It is important to me to make a nourishing nest. Home is wherever we are. We are home with this Land that we are a part of. Land is us. We are of the Land and not standing on the Land. Home is a place that is a deep and integral part of each of us. It is interesting to look at this word - homeland. Really, it is where and who we are. I don’t think it is something that we find.

home shelf

Homemaking - the art of keeping home. Everyone, no matter who they are, lives in a home place. It might not be the ideal home that we wish to have landed in. It is possible to find small and grand ways to make our home space. As I mentioned yesterday - a nature altar offers to us a meaningful and free way to create a special corner to inspire us. An apple sitting on the table is an altar to the Land - each of us. The apple sits there looking lovely as we walk by. Each pass by the apple altar requires of us a simple unconscious shift to take in its beauty. These living neurons awaken in us a creative moment of awareness.

How do we make the space in the places we call home? What is comfortable to us? How are we making home or place toward our own living ideas? Contentment requires a settling - in some ways on this topic. So many images of beautiful homes inspire us or in a moment - disappoints us because we cannot have what the image represents to us. The busy life of pursuit and want and longing - requires us to veer off the path of home keeping. What is here in front of us? How can simplicity bring us beauty and simple comforts? I am not speaking about minimalism and a particular aesthetic. It is the inner compass of what we desire made manifest in the tiny ways we arrange and navigate within our home places. Where is the direction that I want to be living in - imprinting on my home place.

flowers

“Home is the nicest word there is”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

spirit of home

The Spirit of Home oracle card from The Divine Muses Oracle by Maree Bento about home and family life. Your home is a sanctuary from the world where comfort and stability can be found. It’s a joyous and harmonious place to share with family, friends and pets. Where you may celebrate special occasions and give gratitude to your community. The Spirit of Home oracle is a positive card that shows abundance and happiness. Your home is a reflection of who you are. It has consciousness and it breathes because of you.

““I’ve learned that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.” ”

— Cecelia Ahearn

The well known song by Edward Sharp & The Magnetic Zeros - Home is a moving song about Home being Wherever I Am With You. Home is who you are with. Home is a contentment we might feel inside. If we are on the street or in a prison - Home might be the scratched together pieces that are found holding us together. It is good to think about this Land - that is a part of us and we are a part of it. It is a deep process to explore our first home maybe being our own mothers - the good and the bad of it. Explore this with someone that can hold the tender places it might bring up in you.

Home holds over us in the the sky as we live out our lives in places with traces. Remembering the importance in crafting a home place - bringing along our senses and feelings of what the truth of all of it is for ourselves. Home is for all of us. As we walk along the byways in our lives - we are walking with each of us together. It is a community of Home. I breathe in as you breathe out. We are the Land breathing together. As we formation a life of Home - we carry all that we are inside the suitcase of meaning as our individual selves. The sky view might be - what is enough - what is meaningful - what is needed - in making a Home place.

“Sycamore Gap Tree at Hadrian’s Wall”