Here’s a beautiful and revelatory story from a member of our markmaking class:
Marcia, the class participant, has a manual therapy/craniosacral healing practice. She has many years’ experience, and works both from her considerable medical knowledge and her intuitive sense about what her patients need. Over the years, she developed the practice of taking long walks, during which “ideas” about what to do with her patients would arise; these provided guidance as she worked. However, Marcia recently hurt her back and can’t walk! What was she to do?
One afternoon, after our class series had ended, Marcia turned toward her stack of markmaking papers that she had created in our classes. She kind of drifted through them, turning them this way and that. Suddenly, she says, “What I saw on that page HIT me”—and somehow provided her with an image that spoke directly to concerns she’d had about a patient’s progress. She was stunned that images made weeks prior could carry such directly useful information for her.
Stunned, and thrilled. In recounting this story to me, Marcia shared that she now has added markmaking to her meditation time in the morning. She sits quietly for a period, then turns to paper and materials and makes some marks. She tells me that this process builds, and also draws upon, that deep inner connection which supplies her with inspiration in her life and work.
Marcia’s story beautifully exemplifies the lived relationship with the Imagination that has both called forth these markmaking classes, and that is fed by them too.