Like many of you, I have always cherished photos. That rush of excitement to see how the camera captured a moment in time, and that sense of gratefulness for the ability to remember not just that moment, but also that particular time in your life. My 1960s and 1970s photos especially have me peering behind the picture’s subjects to the background objects that also got captured. “I remember riding in the back of that brown station wagon!” “Oh, how I loved that round lamp table with the beautiful, wavy lampshade.”
I happily jumped on the scrapbooking craze. From 1996-2006, I spent countless hours creating photo scrapbooks for our family. Then life became crazier, more digital, and the flow of that hobby was harder to maintain. Ah, but what a fun ride that was.
Images can capture other things as well ~ our moods, our dreams, our longings, our inner voices. They can spark emotions, and we may not even know why. Likely we haven’t even paused to wonder why an image evoked an inner response. Have you ever flipped through a magazine and stopped to soak in a certain picture for a few seconds? Or have been moved by a painting, an album cover, or a particular expression of a perfect stranger’s photo?
There is a reason these different “sparks within” happen. We connect with images because they mean something to the many parts of our unique selves that are important ~ those influential voices in our heads, the soft murmurings of our hearts, the parts we celebrate, or hide. Those parts cause us to think, feel, behave and respond in different ways. They are present within because we have experienced life. They are all to be respected.
The practice of SoulCollage© teaches us how to collect images that give us any emotion. Then, through a very simple, cut and paste process, we make cards from these images that allow us to greet the different parts of us in a gentle, gracious way, and to learn about ourselves in the process. It’s satisfying. It’s fascinating. It’s meditative. It’s revelatory. It’s fun.
My website page for SoulCollage© will tell you even more, as well as the next time I will teach a 3-hour beginner’s class on Zoom. Whether you end up making a few cards or many over time, you’ll find that every single one will be very special to you. Because they will illuminate the multi-layered wonder that you are.
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