This year has been really new for me. I have stretched myself by engaging in a number of new activities that by definition will change me. If you don't do new stuff you will not become new. To do what you did yesterday is to live a life on repeat. When you intentionally make your routine one of change, innovation and recreation you will be recreated into being the creative design the creator had in mind when you were created in the divine womb of your mother.
Starting a Masters in Fine Arts in photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), attending the Society for Photographic Educators, presenting at and attending SXSW. these have been all new to me and touched me in different ways. The key to all of them is that they helped me see myself, the world and my work in the world differently. To use a photographic metaphor, these experiences have helped me reframe what I see God doing in the world in a liberative way and to hear God calling me to engage in this liberative work in new and exciting ways.
This has also been a time of anxiety. To put myself in these situations where I don't know what to expect and how to engage was scary. The most trying of these was to go back to school. To enter SCAD at the tender age fo 51, having completed my PhD in 1997 was the biggest stretch. A new way of learning and being assessed was a trip. I am used to reading and writing and then turing my paper into the professor and getting my grade. Not at SCAD! It is go and do your work, put your prints up on the wall and have your colleagues and professor begin the process of a public critique!! What was this? I was so intimidated but I persisted. The key for me was to allow the process to do it's work.
Now to SXSW..this place is like no other gathering I have ever attended. I am used to academic conferences where things are very linear. Sessions are easy to find. The map is easy to follow and the papers are presented in sessions. There is little time for questions, you proceed to the next room, sit and listen and then move on. This is not the case at SXSW. This is truly an interactive conference that is a true live event. All kinds of stuff is happening simultaneously. You move from the interactive, to the film, to the music, literally to the street. It goes from early in the morning to late at night. Twitter is the best way to keep up with what is going on and what is hot. Things are buzzing and moving around you all the time. Every sense in your body is being touched as you engage in conversations and connections that are life changing.
SXSW has the energy of real-time, it is planned but not staged. I walked around in awe of all that was coming at me. The conversations, the panels, the speakers, the trade-show, the films, filmmakers, artists and overall creative spirit that fed the atmosphere. I have been effected and affected in ways I am sure I can't quite make sense of right now. I am different because I have invited different and new into my life. What are you inviting in your life to make you new? What new things are you doing on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis that has the power to transform you into what the Creator had in mind when the Creator created you?
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