Daily Divinatory Drawings – Matching Intention With Practice
Once again I am back to this blog after a long absence, ready at last to start posting my “daily” divinatory drawings. I finally got my new scanner a few weeks back (after the first one got lost in the shipping black hole of New Jersey and I had to have a new one sent out), but I have found that the process of both cultivating the daily drawing habit and getting new drawings posted has been more daunting than I originally anticipated.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out to be less difficult than I expected to churn out drawings inspired by each day’s astrological aspects on a daily basis. The results thus far have been a strange exploration into my own symbolic world. Sometimes there’s a direct correlation between the aspects of the day and the images I draw. And sometimes the aspects are merely a springboard into some wild symbolist-surrealist flight of fancy that bewilders even me. Regardless, apparently I have far more creative material lurking around in my brain than I had previously given myself credit for (in spite of the daily flood of random ideas that I’ve chronicled for years in journals, notebooks, notepad files, cloud documents, and the occasional restaurant napkin…). It turns out that the hard part is getting them posted.
The finishing process of any project has always proved daunting to me, not because I don’t enjoy that work, but because I enjoy it too much, have too much of a sense of perfectionism, and can too easily lose myself in all of the little details and refinements when really I should just get the darn thing out there. 😉
With the cultivation of this daily drawing practice, that stumbling point became all-encompassing. I can sketch and at least partly ink a drawing on most days, and do so fairly consistently. But thus far, to do so every day has been an elusive goal, and getting them scanned and posted within that same day? Not a chance, unless I start the process in the wee hours before going to bed (when I do my best work) and then finish it when I wake up again, before I head out to tackle the rest of the day. On top of that frustration is the realization that adding colour to these is unlikely to ever happen for the majority of them, despite the fact that I almost always envision them in colour. Keeping in mind that most habits take at least a month of solid practice to take hold, I have expected some stumbling blocks in the cultivation of this habit, but quite frankly didn’t realize how ambitious it was for me to both keep to this goal and work it into my bizarre weekly schedule, where no two days have the same configuration, and certain days simply will not allow for the time and space to focus on drawing (no matter how much I tell myself “make the time!”). And the deep disappointment resulting from my practice not living up to the original parameters of my intention actually became the biggest barrier of all. Until now.
For whatever reason, I’ve looked at all of those drawings that I’ve produced in the past few months, and finally have seen not a failure to complete them all to my satisfaction but rather a process of growing into a lifestyle more in alignment with my gifts, a process of living daily with both art and astrology as a spiritual practice, not an end goal but an ongoing journey, filled with far more enjoyment overall than frustration. Seeing that has made it easier to drop my attachment to having the practice perfected before posting these images.
So, here is the first of these drawings that I will share with you, based on today’s major alignments in the Eastern Standard Time Zone.
At this time, I can’t promise that I will be posting these drawings daily, or even at regular intervals, though I certainly hope to do so at some point. But this practice has taken hold as a part of my life that I finally feel like I can share with others, and I am very interested to hear your reactions to these drawings as they are posted. Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments, and thank you for joining me in this journey.