prescribing some hammock time for my left brain...

For the past few decades, the growing awareness of my inability to view something with the right side of my brain without my left side sidelining it has both surprised and troubled me. Surprised, because I am an iNFp (Myers-Briggs) musician who values creativity and beauty more than anything. Troubled, because I simply can't shut off the analytical tape that's playing.

So, for example, when I look at a magnificent live oak tree with magical moss dripping from every limb, I can't seem to lose myself in the wordless wonder of it all. My left brain's tour guide analysis insists on bestowing meaning from its standpoint. That's OK...but it won't shut up.

When I was young and started studying piano, the perfectionist in me figured out every note on the page, painstakingly carefully. Once. It would be instantly translated to the 'ballet on the keys' where my eyes would find patterns and meaning that melded with the sound - and the result was almost instant memorization in the right side of the brain. Later, I grew more balanced. By young adulthood, I became an analytical, killer sight reader, by necessity. And, gradually, memorizing dropped to second place.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches a fascinating method for activating the most core creative process in the brain. Imagine taping a piece of blank paper to a table...setting a pencil point in the center...and then looking away at your subject - perhaps a carrot or your hand - and never looking away from it, while on paper your pencil traces what you actually see in your subject. If your end-result drawing looks remotely like the shape of a carrot or a hand, then you cheated. The goal of the technique is not to draw what we think we should, but what we actually see with our ('mind's) right eye'.

An accurate drawing of a drawing of a hand

Drawings of the real thing.
Note the complexities denoted by the hand positions.
Such is of great interest to the right brain.

Even now, though I place my body in a hammock...and begin to enjoy the intricate weavings of threads and colors, I will find myself wanting to describe the patterns, rather than wrapping my brain in their beauty. I'm committed to letting go or that. I know I'll get sidetracked by the left brain's geometric discourses. Or maybe even some worthy speculatings about our children being set up for weary, demented, aged brains because reading and math are emphasized so strongly over art and music in our schools... musing about whether their gray matter is being pushed into a painful pencil sharpener - rather than enjoying the inhalation of invigorating oxygen into their right brains. All of which is what took me out of the hammock after a few minutes in it this morning in order to blog about it.

But, that's for another day or time when I've earned some analytical time.