The heart we share with ourselves

“A woman has three hearts… one that she shares with the world, one that she shares with her family, and one that she shares only with herself.”  It’s an old Chinese proverb.  I’m taking Christy Tomlinson‘s She Had Three Hearts workshop, which is about sharing those hearts differently with different people.  Sometimes we hold them in and not share them.  Each of the three weeks of the workshop covers one part of the proverb through art journaling.  (Read my post about the heart I share with the world and this one about the heart I share with my family.)

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Christy has really gotten my creative juices flowing in this class.  I love that I have recognized the ways I share different parts of myself with certain people.  This week was a very personal week about the heart we share ONLY with ourselves.

The heart we share with ourselves is sometimes the hardest to talk about.  It’s the one we are either afraid to share or feel it’s too sacred to share.   Sometimes we are scared that others won’t understand or appreciate what we have to share.

So I’ll share some of my dreams: I used to dream of being an editor in NYC, living in a loft and having lots of friends in the literature, music, and art communities.  I also hoped to go to a writing in residency program someday… the kind where you live in a cabin for 6 weeks and write all day and collaborate with others.  I hoped to be a teacher of literature at a small liberal arts college.  Maybe some of these dreams will still materialize.  I don’t feel at all like my choices are over.  At almost 38, I feel I’m just beginning.

I would like to be more transparent in general.  I would like to be more comfortable sharing my imperfections here on the blog and being REAL.  I’d like to feel more OK in my own skin, like it’s perfectly ok to simply be me – the me that sometimes gets caught in a spiral of sadness, sometimes gets wound up in an organizing frenzy, who is addicted to craft supplies and who appreciates my own creative imagination.

Like Christy mentions in one of her class videos, I have a strong belief in God and believe God is with me in everything, so I don’t think this heart is only for myself.  There is always God there to understand me and be with me.

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OK so on to the art! I took myself on an artist date last week, the first in a long while.  Nothing fancy either… I went to the Salvation Army and then to Goodwill.  I was on the hunt for surfaces on which I could paint and doodle.  I was really just looking for something different from a canvas.  I struck gold, peeps.  I’ll share all of my finds in another post in case you’re worried.  🙂

For this week’s “heart I share with myself” project, I used one of my finds.  Here’s the before and after:

I quite like it much more! The little board was $1.99.  How could I not buy it?

I began by covering it with gesso.

 I don’t know if you can tell by the picture, but the original image still showed through.  So I painted it again with black gesso and then chose a page of poetry from another Salvation Army find, a book of literature from the Romantics for $3.

The rest is pretty much layering scrapbook and tissue papers and adding various transparent paints.

I’m 95% happy with how it turned out.  It was very fun to play around with stamps, bubble wrap, markers, washi tape, and to draw the birdie.

What do you think? Share in the comments if you like about YOUR heart and who you share it with.  I’d love to hear!

You can see more “Behind the Art” posts here.