Activating my imaginative life by looking inside...

"Art Garden" Art Journal Pages

Tim Holtz "Tattered Florals" die, newspaper, rusty washers,
scrapbook paper, markers, ink, Inktense watercolor pencils

I've been feeling so weird lately.  Inspired by a million images and ideas on facebook, YouTube and other blogs.  Think I need to shift from gathering to planting, tending, harvesting.  I saw this great quote from Joseph Campbell and I think it cuts to the core:

"We're living in a period that I regard as a kind of period of the terminal moraine of mythology. It's as though a lot of mythological rubbish is all around. Mythologies that built civilizations and are no longer working in that way are just in rubble all around us.

"So an individual who puts himself to the task of activating his imaginative life - the life that springs up from inside, not in res...ponse to outside information and commands - that person can find stimulation in this wonderful literature that is pouring into the libraries. Now the world is full of these wonderful things again.

"So there is no rule. An individual has to find what electrifies and enlivens his own heart, and wakes him."

Joseph Campbell, "The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work," p. 133

The wonderful images I have been awed by are not "rubbish" they are pure gold, but they are not the gold I must seek inside of me.  I need to focus on activating my imaginative life through my own art process, then I will feel more whole and grounded, I think.  I need to focus on "the life that springs up from inside, not in response to outside information and commands".