Piece a Day Projects
A wonderful frame for cultivating flow through process play is the Piece a Day project.
My invitation for you, if you haven't done this before, is to choose a medium that is compelling to you at this time and agree to play in that channel every day for a certain period of time.
This can be anything at all: 1 collage a day for 1 month, 10 minutes of singing a day for 10 days, 20 photos a day for 1 year, a macaroni necklace a day for 2 weeks - it really, honestly doesn't matter what it is.
The point of Piece a Day is that when you commit to any medium for a sustained period of time, sooner or later you will experience flow in that channel. And flow in one channel will help flow appear in the other channels too. If you're a writer and you're stuck, for example, you can do 1 hula dance a day for 2 months and that will help unwind your writing too.
When I do this project, I make an agreement with myself that I am committing only to quantity, not quality - it's not one "good" piece per day, it's just a piece.
The purpose is process play, not art, so the "piece" part of it is really just a way of making a container. It is perfectly ok for that piece to be incoherent, short, unedited or in some other way "not real art". I also make the commitments very small - 1 minute-long sound pieces, 10 minutes of movement, 1 poem, where a 1-line poem counts, and try to make them as pleasurable as possible.
I did a song/sound piece a day project for one year, giving me 365 of these types of things:
You can see how loose the frame is - just a 1-minute long something in the sound channel, every day for a year.
I also did a poem-a-day project for a year. A sample from that project:
My love, eat things that come from the sea.
Kelp, mollusks, salt from the wave-ground stones.
Eat fish that shine. Eat the wood from lost boats.
Eat the thumb-prickers, creatures from the wilderness
of water. Eat sand, shells, dogfish, and pearls.
Eat the mother of pearls,
the ear of abalone bone. Eat nets. Eat deep.
Coast, wave with bracken and heather. Slim ribbon of green.
Wide band of gray.
Gorse, be heavy with blooming. Be loud with bees. Be purple.
Be the bed of high-flown song. Be blown with salt. Be honey.
I also did 1 dance a day for a year. If you want to see an example of this, you can get a glimpse here. (The password is LionSong.)
The benefits of Piece a Day commitments as I experience them are:
a) strengthening the habit of just showing up, no matter what
b) learning to be less precious about the process and losing the fear of doing something wrong, because there's always tomorrow
c) exploring forbidden aesthetic terrain, like ugly or experimental expressions, which is super juicy and draws on the power of that which has been banished and excluded by ego
d) experiencing that when, through sheer repetition, I get past my most rehearsed, predictable ego-bound material, there's a stream of fresher material that wants to be expressed in form, that will flow in whatever channel I use, provided I show up
e) sometimes, as a side effect, getting process records, or even something that looks like an art piece, out of it that I actually rather cherish
A caveat: I don't recommend doing this out of some kind of guilt or idea that you have to kick your own butt into gear. I know that works for some people, but personally my inner child, keeper of my creativity, absolutely hates how that feels and that's a surefire way to make it egoic rather than unconditional and genuine. For me Piece A Day commitments really only work if I set the frame in a way where it's all play and no "work". The true work, if there is any in this, is in shrewdly setting a frame that manages to keep ego out of it for the most part.
Have fun:)
Thumbnail image reverently appropriated from Ruth Heller's The Reason for a Flower.