Seeing music in colour

Chromesthesia

I was reading about a woman recently who sees music in colour.   I've often seen it in patterns, but never in colour.   She said that she chose a piece of music for her mobile phone because the colour of the song would match the colour of her phone.   Isn't that simply magical?

Her name is Melissa McCracken and this is one of her pieces... Such wonderful colour.
You can read more about her here.

The phenomena is called sound-to-colour synaesthesia or chromestesia and apparently quite a lot of people are like that - 1 in 3000 according to this article recently in the Daily Mail.

How about you?  Fancy taking this quiz and seeing how you fare?

Following on from my article about practicing, I'm still finding it a chore to sit down and do any consistent instrument practice - and weeks of a cold and laryngitis haven't helped.   However it feels like loads has been achieved already.   I'm still doing daily journalling ( on target to journal daily for a year) and it's giving me unexpected pleasures and aha moments.   And Colour is one of the most consistent ones that returns day in day out - this happens every time I write consistently.  Last time I did a long bout of morning pages, I painted the entire house bright colours.  I suppose it's natural to want colour during the dull days of Winter when everywhere we look we see blacks and browns and greys (thinking of my clothes' drawers with this!).

For years I've followed artists blogs and drooled at their beautiful work just to get some sunshine coming through my own computer screen.   I've taken a few courses and played with doodling and more recently with the very basics of art journalling - that's really liberating.  I'm not much further along than scraping paint onto a page, but oh what satisfaction it's giving me and everything feels clearer as a result.   For years I've fought this impulse to play with crayons and paints, but in the last few days I've finally decided to stop fighting it and just get on with playing:)
I wonder what the coming weeks of daily writing will bring?

How about you?   Any secret childish pleasures?

Who really likes practising?

... an instrument I mean?

Or should I ask, who really likes the thought of having to sit down to go over the same stuff day in day out!   I for one have always hated it.  Once I'm sitting down, guitar on knee or voice exercises on the stereo then I'm usually ok.   But the way to getting there is dreadful.   It's all worth it in the end but ....

I read lots of blogs about the practice of art, or the practice of daily writing.   And the one practice I can manage, is to do my morning pages most days.   In fact at the moment I'm considering taking up the challenge laid down several years ago by Janice McLeod (she of the wonderful book Paris Letters

which I'm currently devouring) of doing morning pages every day for a year.   When I did them before for an extended period of time, writing songs came very easily to me, as did the basics of settling down to practice, or do publicity or whatever the task at hand was.  I managed to write more or less every day for 10 months and have picked up the practice over and over again in the intervening years.

For those of you who don't know, 'morning pages' is a practice promoted by Julia Cameron in her wonderful book "The Artist's Way".  In it, she suggests that the mainstay of any art, or indeed of a creative life,  is to learn how to bypass the critic.  And her practice of writing 3 pages long-hand every morning is wonderful.  It's cathartic, a great place for moaning, and a great place for working out problems.

Now, many years after first completing The Artist's Way and writing my first morning pages, I don't stick with having to write first thing in the morning.  Writing at any time during the day works for me.   Just showing up at that journal is what's important.   And writing by hand    And while most days I manage the 3 A4 pages, or 6 A5, there are some days when I only have time for one, or for a list or a note.   And that counts too.  It gives me a place to settle in to myself again.

Will it get me to a place where I willingly sit down to practice?   Probably not :)   But it might make something else come around.

Morning pages

I love writing morning pages ...

To sit and let my thoughts work themselves out on the page - sorting the confusion of too many commitments into a manageable mess, like combing out the knots in my hair.

It's hard to get time alone to do this sort of practice when we're away on tour - I pack my journal in the vague hope that if I spot it, the time will magically appear.  But it rarely does.  And I don't seem to need it as much at those times anyway.

But it's like having a massage for my brain, when I get back home, to sit down, and be quiet.

So this afternoon I got an hour writing outside in the garden - the birds are going full throttle - no sore throats or stage fright there .... There's one particularly noisy guy who sounds like he's shouting, ME! ME!  ME! COME ON! COME ON! COME ON!  I'M OVER HERE!  And the rest are just chattering away unperturbed by his warblings.   I wish I could learn to tune out the chatter of other voices quite so easily.

and not forgetting fuchsia, she has to get in for a wee dance.

My sunglasses have some filter in them that highlights the colours - the grass looks greener and the blue bells look bluer against that backdrop.    And the white of the hawthorn, the May bush, sits in contrast to both.   Do you know the saying "Never cast a clout til May is out"?   Well it refers to the hawthorn - the blossom is called the May  - not the month of May.  

This garden gets precious little attention, but it does it's own thing and the reward is to be allowed to sit in it for a quiet hour on a sunny afternoon.  I feel like I'm home now.

How's your week going?  I'll be back tomorrow to get caught up on reading everyone else's blogs and do a bit of commenting.