Calon Arang
A sacred Balinese ceremony
What the heck did we just witness??
Madā, the organizer of the Monkey Forest and rice terrace bike tour for Unsettled in Bali, invited anyone from our group who was interested to come to a rare, sacred, 5 hour village ceremony happening from 9pm-2am, called Calon Arang. While there are ceremonies happening just about every single day around Bali, this one is not attended by tourists, or frankly, white people.
Read MoreFluctuating between hyper awareness, tuning into nuance of details that go by unnoticed otherwise; a crimson leaf dancing itself across the street so gracefully and seemingly with purpose. A thumb rotating a ring finger's ring round and round. One sock with the same lime green as the stitching on his backpack.
To blurring vision and opening up the field of view as wide as possible, seeing movements, patterns, and synchronicity emerge.
Tuning the ear into a specific frequency; hearing a woman make kissing noises over a speakerphone to express love, followed by a man's voice, tense and sharp, scolding his lover for not returning his text sooner, rejecting her love. Tuning in sharper, under his divisive words, hearing his own fear and insecurity in that her absence may lead to triggering his pain.
Tuning the ear outward to make all the swirling noise around blend into a white hum of a collective ocean of living.
In this ocean, and of this ocean, feel my self. Living.
I am this ocean. I am the giving and seeking of love. I am the pain and rejection. I am the lime green. I the thumb and the ring. I am the dancing leaf.
In all that I am, I am in repose.
Thank you for reading. :)
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While I don't remember being encouraged to play with my food as a child, I can't remember being told not to. And so I did. I also vividly remember playing with all sorts of inanimate objects, bringing them to life in my mind to create stories and action sequences. It's what kept my attention in school (not on it).
As I started to get into doodling in my late teenage years, and more specifically, intricadoodling, the world around me changed, and the sickness of Pareidolia really started to take hold.
Basically, everywhere I look, I see faces and characters hidden in objects, stains, clouds, light, and the really obscure relationships among objects overlapping. They can haunt me, tease me, keep me from feeling lonely, make me laugh, and make me appreciate the power of perspective.
Here's an example from 2004
Blank canvases still stifle me. I need something to work off of to get the vision flowing, so I usually just squiggle a line across the page and work from there. That then gave birth to a style of doodling I created around 2002, where I draw a shape, create a character. Somewhere next to it create another character. Then the negative space in between it creates the next, then the next, and so forth until there is no negative space left.
What can I say, I like to create positive from the negative! 😜
Here are a couple examples of using 5ft canvases as my doodle pad:
A more refined digital version:
I bring this up because it really amped up seeing faces in everything. The more I do it, the more I see it spill over into the real world.
If I already have it, why a 30 Day Challenge? As I let other priorities of life get in the way, I stopped doodling them and I felt my creativity start to get stiff and stifled. It's the worst feeling as someone who knows how much they thrive when juices are flowing. So I used the 30 days to commit to doing 1 a day.
As I'd walk around during my day, if I saw an interesting shape, I'd just snap a pic on my phone, then sometime later that day, sit down for 10-60 minutes and bring it to life to show how I saw it. It was my daily 👁 Spy.
Here is a gallery of what I saw, and I put them in chronological order, some are quick are rough, others I really fleshed out. When I start to take it too serious, I start to feel like it's a chore and I lose interest. It's a pattern I have.
💡Tip: Click on the first image to bring up the image viewer, use Right Arrow key to see it reveal on top
If you're interested in learning the tools I used and a step-by-step process behind it, let me know and I'll take the time to put that post together.
Also if you see any interesting shapes in your world, take a pic and send it to me. I just may give it a doodle!
Or even better, doodle one yourself and send it to me! I'll share any entries I receive.
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