Author: Scraping Raisins

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Keep Showing Up {guest post}

By Marvia Davidson | Instagram

You will find by doing. Doing brings revelation and clarity. In the discovery of gifts, I have found it to be challenging to own the place of my full purpose as a creative spirit. You see, I don’t simply do one thing in my creative practices. I engage in many creative things, but I’ve learned to give myself grace to play, grow, and discover what art forms I enjoy.

When I think of the discovery of gifts, I think of exploration and permission.

Maybe these aren’t always easy for us to give ourselves, but they are a much needed part of the process of finding our creative voice, and it enhances the gifts we bring. Sometimes those insights lead to deeper revelation of who we are and what we’re here for, and they can be surprising too.

I find more of my creative voice by showing up and doing the work of discovery – the practice of trying out ideas and techniques. I do this most frequently in writing because I’ve enjoyed writing and sharing ideas for many years.

When it came to any kind of art, I didn’t think I could do it. It looked hard, tedious, and nearly impossible. I doubted I would be able to draw, to create, or paint. I’ll tell you a secret to overcoming my self doubt, and it may sound odd, but social media has been an underestimated source of creative, guiding inspiration for me. I don’t mean to sound woo.

I mean that an app like Instagram has become a mini art school for me, a way to see how art is expressed in myriad forms. It has become an abundant place to learn, search, explore, and share my art, Yes! I said my art because I now call myself and artist. It is art I did not know I could do, but finding other creatives on Instagram has been encouraging for me. I have witnessed people growing in their process, and the more they share the more I find possibility beating in my own heart.

I enjoy making mixed media art and hand lettering, specifically brush lettering. These two art forms were daunting to me because I would peruse specialized magazines, books, or websites of perfectly styled and photographed pieces, but Instagram is full of people who share their behind the scenes process and how they do what they do despite their imperfections.

All of a sudden, I wasn’t afraid to experiment with these new gifts. Along the way, I realized these two art forms could serve as a way for me to express my purpose, values, and desire to see people encouraged through the tough circumstances of life. I also learned to accept I am an artist in my own unique way, and it is okay for me to walk out what it means to be one.

Because my art practices require time and patience, they have been a wonderful way for me to fight back against imposter syndrome and self doubt.

The discovery of color, painting, and pens gliding across blank paper encouraged me to develop my skills, and I’ve been having fun ever since. I wanted sustainable practices which could also serve as a soul care practice, and they are. Like quilting, I find the process of painting and hand lettering to be therapeutic and meditative. In a way, they allow me to infuse my work with focused attention to the message I want to convey.

I believe when we accept the nuances of who we truly are, we become more ourselves and we learn to live abundantly. We learn to give ourselves and one another room to be. We find there is room for us at the table, and the only thing that might be holding us back is our own limiting belief.

Engaging fellow artisans reminds me how much community can matter when we’re trying something new. Sharing our struggles, mistakes, and failures gives us room to refine our creative voices and the processes we use. When I see another artist sharing this way, it empowers me to take more bold steps in my own art because I know that discovery comes through the process of doing.

The more I do the artsy things, the more I am settled in who I am and the creative expression of the Divine in me. The challenge no longer keeps me from growing. I choose to show up. Every time I do, I let loose and play, allowing my heart, mind, and body to express with colors and words on canvas or page.

I choose to invest in myself and the materials I need to express my creative soul. This is an act of self love. To give one’s self grace to discover one’s gifts, is to love one’s self well, and I believe this opens a door for us to learn to love others well too.

To give one’s self grace to discover one’s gifts, is to love one’s self well, and I believe this opens a door for us to learn to love others well too. @MarviaDavidson

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I encourage you to pause and reflect on those creative inklings tumbling around your heart, and follow the curiosity of their unfolding beauty.

About Marvia:

Marvia is a Texas writer/creative soul who enjoys writing, making art, laughing loudly, baking, dancing ridiculously because it’s fun, and smashing lies that keep people from living whole. Join her at marviadavidson.com. You can also follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MarviaDavidson and on Facebook at facebook.com/marviawrites.

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Our theme this month is “Create.” If you are a maker, artist, or creator and you would like to guest post, I still have a few spots left! Otherwise, check out the themes for the coming months here. The theme for July is “Hospitality Around the World.” And if you’re not interested in guest posting, follow me on social media (buttons on the top right) to be sure you don’t miss a post this month!

Sign up for the (occasional) Mid-month Digest and the (loosely) “end of the month” Secret Newsletter Here:

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Why I Paint African Faces {guest post}

By Beth Watkins | Twitter: @iambethwatkins

I’ve always been a maker. I can’t help myself. I’m an extremely tactile person. I love doing things with my hands and if I see something I think I could make myself, I absolutely want to teach myself how to do it.

I sold homemade jewelry on the playground in 4th grade, and again in high school. I carried around no less than 4 notebooks and 50 pens from the 5th to the 10th grade – always on the ready to doodle, draw, and write about my feelings in full color. I got my first set of real paints when I was 11, set up my studio in the basement, and read books about impressionism before bed. I won my first award for a painting when I was 12 and sold my first acrylic painting when I was 16. I was always collecting supplies, making things out of what I could find, and went through a really intense phase of dyeing, appliqueing, and painting on my clothes.

I thought I would apply to art school, but then decided God wanted me in Africa instead. I took my acrylic paints with me but turns out when you live in a desert the paint dries a lot faster and I couldn’t work with it the same way. So I made jewelry with beads and electric wire. I took bottle caps and wire and sat with street boys and we made cars, snakes, and rickshaw sculptures. When I went home I’d draw pictures of these boys, of my desert home, crosshatching their faces, the mosques, the ladies in their colorful tobes.

A few years later I sat with former street girls at a center in South Sudan and we made bead looms out of cardboard and they learned to weave necklaces and bracelets, attaching them to closures made from inner tube. They loved it.

We’d sit for hours and hours, wondering where the time went – marveling at how quiet the center was now that hands were occupied and fights broke out less. The older girls would teach the younger ones, and we sold their wares. By doing so the girls stopped selling their bodies. They made their own intricate designs, invented their own techniques, and went from students to teachers.

Again, in the evenings, I’d sketch their faces as I wrote their stories in my journal, not sure how so much beauty and so much pain could coincide together.

I’m back in the US now – taking my making with me. I’ve learned to make shoes, how to can tomatoes and pickles (the composing of a delicious meal being as much creation as a painting – just one that nourishes us in different ways) and make standing planters and raised garden beds out of burlap sacks, scrap bricks, and anything else I can find.

I’m still painting portraits – our house is filled with colorful paintings of African faces. Faces of people I’ve known, loved, and had to leave. As I paint them I remember, I pray. They are tributes in a way. Marks of seasons now over. They fade into the background now, more or less, but sometimes I stop and I remember. Faces of people I love, marking dreams lost, grief, the changing of things with time.

My husband and I were apart the last three months of our engagement. He was still in South Sudan and I was in the US getting counseling and planning our wedding. I painted a 3’x3’ portrait of our faces from a picture taken the night we got engaged. I was worried for him, still in a tumultuous place, a country at war. I couldn’t hug him, touch him, see in his eyes if he was ok or not, so I painted him. I got to scrutinize each hair, each freckle, the curve of his smile and render it with my own hand. It was deeply meaningful to paint, forming his face on a canvas when he was so far away.

I make out of practicality sometimes, but mostly joy. And I think it is in this joy we ourselves have been made.

I always did and I still do get a little flutter when I finish a picture or project. Whether it’s shoes for a friend, an ambitious baking project, an illustration for a freelance project, or another portrait on our ever-crowded walls, I get the flutter because while I’m in the process I’m never always sure that finishing will come.

Most of what I make isn’t for day-to-day use. Much of it sits tucked away. It’s the making that fills my soul. An idea that is seen through until the end. Getting surprised again and again that some of the things I make turn out nicely. All the better if it is something that sparks joy for someone I love.

Maybe that’s what the Creator feels about us too. I don’t think God gets surprised about what those Almighty hands are capable of, but God must experience something like pure joy in creation. Joy that begets joy. God creates us and not only do we find great joy in what else and who else has been created alongside, we take what we have and what we can find and we make art, gardens, jewelry and clothing, homes and poems, stews and cakes and we make and we make and we multiply joy as we create as God taught us how.

We are makers of beauty because we’ve been beautifully crafted.

We are makers of beauty because we’ve been beautifully crafted. @iambethwatkins

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 We are unique and flawed, becoming masters in our crafts while others master theirs. We make mistakes and we learn and we make as we have been made. We create as we have been created. In love, in pained labor, and the world is better because we keep making, because we’ve been made in the image, and part of that image is that of maker.

(all images by Beth Watkins)

About Beth:

Beth Watkins spent the last 6 years working in North and Sub-Saharan Africa with vulnerable populations. She is currently settling back in the US with her immigrant husband and writes about flailing awkwardly into neighbor-love at http://www.iambethwatkins.com and on Twitter: @iambethwatkins.

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Our theme this month is “Create.” If you are a maker, artist, or creator and you would like to guest post, I still have a few spots left! Otherwise, check out the themes for the coming months here. The theme for July is “Hospitality Around the World.” And if you’re not interested in guest posting, follow me on social media (buttons on the top right) to be sure you don’t miss a post this month!

Sign up for the (occasional) Mid-month Digest and the (loosely) “end of the month” Secret Newsletter Here:

Why I Paint African Faces, by Beth Watkins. (blog post) #art #artists #create #creativity #makers #createdtocreate #painters #inspirationforartists

 

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My Take on Race: From a White Girl in a Multicolored Family {Guest Post}

By Jodie Pine | blog

I was blessed to grow up in a multi-colored family. My “twin” is my biracial brother, younger than me by two months. I have another brother, adopted from Brazil, who is a month older than my biological sister. And she is just 1 ½ years younger than me. My parents had their hands full.

Living in Arkansas in the 1970’s, our unique family experienced misunderstandings and discrimination. Because we were not all welcome at the city park designated for whites, we frequented the “black park.” The local Boy Scouts chapter refused to let my brother join. And I can still remember the fear I felt as we witnessed a KKK cross burning in a friend’s yard. What’s the big deal about skin color, I wondered? Why do some people think whites are superior?

I can recall how proud my sister and I were in the blazing hot summer of 1979. All four of us kids were on an outdoor swim team and, to our great delight, our skin turned the same beautiful shade as our brothers. No longer that sickly pale color. We could actually be called brown. And brown was good in our eyes. We wanted to be like our brothers, not different from them.

Then we moved from Arkansas to a North Carolina mountain town, which was predominately white. It didn’t affect my sister and me much, because we looked just like everyone else, but I’m sure–looking back now–that my brothers were constantly aware of being the minority.

During my freshman year of college at UNC-Chapel Hill, I lived in a randomly assigned suite with eight girls. Seven were black and then there was me. I learned so much during that transformative year from my roommate Sheletha. And even though it was uncomfortable at times to be the only white girl, I’m so thankful God gave me an opportunity that many white people are not privileged to get: to experience being the minority.

After college, God gave me another opportunity to be a white minority by living in the beautiful homogenous land of China. Involved in education, my husband and I raised our three biological children there, who can identify with the image of an egg: white on the outside and yellow on the inside. We adopted our two Chinese boys in 2013 and moved back to the US after 20 years in East Asia.

Last year a Chinese American friend asked me how our boys were doing in American public school, dealing with race issues. I responded that I didn’t think it was a big deal for them and we hadn’t really talked about it much. My flippant comment later made me realize how much I still live in my white privileged world. Another Asian friend at that time encouraged me to join a transracial adoption group to learn more about how race issues affect my children every day.

She wrote, “Society will tell them they’re not white. Society will treat them differently. Don’t be afraid to talk about race and racism. It will benefit them more than you know it. And it will let them know you are not there for the whole ‘I don’t see color’ ideology, because that just means you don’t value where they come from and who they are.”

Growing up as a white girl with brothers of color, and now mothering two sons of color, I am saddened to realize that I still can be sheltered under my white privilege umbrella. I’m therefore incredibly thankful for friends who have challenged me, with their probing questions, to step out from under this umbrella into the world that people of color live in. I have come to see that attempting to better understand the effects of racism on my family and friends will be a lifelong choice.

When we step into someone else’s shoes we gain a different perspective. A better understanding. While will never be able to fully enter into another’s life experience, we can move a step closer.

And we can grow deeper in our conviction that all people are wonderfully and fearfully made, handcrafted by God. Intentionally passing that belief on to the next generation, we never lose hope that–united across the racial divide–we can make a difference in this world.

Martin Luther King Jr. beautifully expressed this view:

“The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the ‘image of God,’ is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man. That is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.”

The reality is that people born into a life of white privilege will never experience the kind of fear and anger and discrimination directed toward those born with black, brown, or yellow skin. And even though it would be easy to do, I strongly believe that privileged white people cannot shut the door, turn the other way, and ignore what is happening right now all around us. We must join together to fight against injustice. Fight for those who face mistreatment every single day of their lives. Mistreatment simply because of the color of their skin.

Even if it’s not our personal battle, it must become our battle. The people suffering from injustice are our brothers and sisters. Our sons and daughters.

Surrounded by different skin colors…

So much beauty in the color. If we choose to see.

So much racism. If we choose to label.

Injustice seems to be growing in our world today.

How do we fight it?

How can we celebrate the diversity of colors and see past the skin to what is in the heart?

So that we can discover the unity in our humanity.

And realize that we are all people wonderfully and fearfully made,

handcrafted by God.

So much alike underneath our different colored skin.

With human hurts and human dreams.

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About Jodie:

As a mom, I juggle two different kinds of parenting — long-distance to our 3 adult kids (who are white on the outside but very Chinese on the inside) and our two adopted Chinese boys at home who have special needs. Since being back in the US, my husband has taken up cooking Chinese food, with a specialty of Lanzhou beef noodles (where we used to live and where our boys are from), giving us a taste of “home.” You can follow our story on my blog. I am also on Instagram and Facebook.

Sign up for my newsletter by February 28th and be entered to win a copy of Beyond Colorblind! (U.S. residents only)

Sign up for my Mid-month Digest and Secret Newsletter Here:

How is God calling you to enter the race conversation? 

This month we’ll be discussing racism, privilege and bridge building. If you’d like to guest post on this topic, please email me at scrapingraisins(dot)gmail(dot)com. Yes, this is awkward and fraught with the potential for missteps, blunders and embarrassing moments, but it’s necessary. Join me?

I’ll go first.

(Consider joining the Facebook group Be the Bridge to Racial Unity to learn more about how God is moving in this sphere.)

If you are a writer, consider using the hashtag #WOCwithpens to showcase the writing of our black and brown sisters of faith every Wednesday specifically, but anytime as well! You can find the explanation for the hashtag here.

If you’re a white person who’s new to all of this, I compiled some resources to start you on your journey (because I’m not much farther ahead):

70+ Race Resources for White People

80+ MORE Race Resources for White people

**Contains Amazon affiliate links

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