Secret #8 of 12: Selecting Empowering Partnerships and Alliances

My digital tweaking of iwadesu's Hear, See, Speak no Evil

Empowering Partners?

I love collaborating with other people like iwadesu. She isn't someone I've met and I've not used any of her photos before (at least I don't think so) but she was kind enough to put this image on flickr with a creative commons license that allows reuse and manipulation which means when I searched for something to show hear no, see no, speak no evil hers was one of the images to come up. This sort of loose association of collaborators is one I really appreciate and one of the reasons why I like flickr so much. Most, though not all, of my flickr images are available for others to play with too and are some of my most popular images.

More formal partnerships?

Well there is my husband - he and I do quite a lot of things together, some of them creative. Right now he is in the process of writing Teasel's dog blog. We planned to do this in "real time" but somehow it didn't happen and he's been busily posting back-dated entries and is currently up to mid-December last year. He keeps a diary and has relied on that. I'd taken lots of photos (and he's taken some too) and many of those are in there.

Today I bumped into an old work colleague... he's someone I enjoyed working with though we didn't do much together. He now has his own business called Business with Heart - what a great name! His presence in my day reminded me that once I used to really enjoy the people aspect of my work life.

However with art work its not been the same. I've attempted twice to share studio space and found both times that it was disastrous for my creative output. This may be something to do with my needing to avoid words too much when I'm in picture space. And the converse that talking shifts me out of picture space...

But I really get a lot out of the way we all spark ideas in each other via our blogs. Yesterday Leah of Creative Every Day mentioned Angel cards - I thought of these, the Angel cards that are available separately but also as part of the Transformation Game. I decided I needed to play it:

Normally one plays it with other people but I've also got the Solo version and I've adapted that to play in other ways too. Yesterday I played it with 2 hands - my conscious self and my dream self. It was amazing - I love the things that come up through playing it though I won't bore you with details!

Last week Kathryn, Collage Diva, called this process of sparking ideas back and forth the Inspiration Spiral. I love that name.