Start and End the Day With Art

image courtesy of  GLady via pixabay.com

The cats are very attached to their morning and bedtime rituals, especially the two rescues who had such a tumultuous time before they came to live with us.

I, too, find particular routines helpful to make the transition in and out of my day, and I’ve recently tweaked them, to make them even more useful.

I treated myself to a programmable coffeemaker for Christmas, and it astonishes me that such a small adjustment of setting up the coffee and having it ready when I get up makes such an enormous, positive difference in starting my day.

Morning ritual is feed the cats, grab the coffee, write in my personal journal, and sometimes a few pages on project in longhand. Then yoga, morning meditation, and the day’s tarot card pull. The morning coffee/writing session is usually on the couch in the living room, looking out over the front of the house and over to the mountains. When the weather is warm enough, I’ll sit out on the enclosed front porch and do it there, enjoying the plants. I’ve done that since I moved here, and often started the day with some variation of that on Cape. When the weather was nice enough there, my early morning writing sessions were out on the back deck.

THEN the rest of the day can start, with things like breakfast, checking emails, and doing my first writing session of the work day on the computer.

Thursday mornings have an additional morning meditation session, over Zoom, with the Concord Library and Be Well Be Here.

At night, I do a slightly longer meditation (with singing bowls) directly before bedtime (after the cats get their bedtime snacks). Part of the reason it’s longer is that it takes me longer to settle into the meditation, with my mind still racing through the day.

I started doing something recently that helps with that transition. Before I tidy up the living room (or wherever I’ve been) and give the cats their bedtime snacks. I read a few pages of poetry, or from an artist or writer’s published journal, or look through a book filled with pictures of paintings.

A great deal of my work life has to do with reading: research, background, work by colleagues, script coverage, contest judging, book reviews. I also read several books a week for pleasure. But all of that reading is different from reading poetry or an artist journal or looking at paintings. I often do the poetry/journal/looking at art to warm up to write a creative project, so sometimes I’ll dip into it during the day.

But doing it as part of the evening routine gets me into a calmer, more receptive place, which allows me to settle into the evening meditation faster, and encourages a better quality of sleep.

Starting and ending the day focused on creativity supports the rest of the day’s work, and also eases me into more restful sleep.

What routines and rituals do you use to start and end your day with nourishment?

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