Tag: creativity

I’ve Been Outed

My deepest, darkest shortcomings have been outed yet again by someone sharper and more insightful than me.

To be fair, I did submit one short story to a competition in the past year.

It did bupkis in the contest but the editor/readers did say good things about my submission. It did encourage me to submit to other contests.

That’s something, I guess.

“I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work.

According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything.

He doesn’t want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn’t want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection.

He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it.

In another five or ten years, he will probably start using another excuse like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.”

He should just enter his writing for an award, and if he gets rejected, so be it.

If he did, he might grow, or discover that he should pursue something different.

Either way, he would be able to move on.

That is what changing your current lifestyle is about.

He won’t get anywhere by not submitting anything.”

Ichiro Kishimi

(Book: The Courage to Be Disliked [ad] https://amzn.to/4aAyXmO)

Blinders Off

Stock taking begins.

I am not the great writer I hoped, and secretly believed, that I am.

It turns out that years of personal upheaval, creative subterfuge, dismissal and avoidance did take their toll.

I had plenty of “deep thoughts” about a lot of things to share when I was young. The childish arrogance is sweet, but laughable. But it came to a point I didn’t dare express them anyway.

I didn’t have the tools or necessary distance to start dissecting and unpacking the multi and various lapses of my childhood until I was well into adulthood.

I think a great writer – and I’m thinking of the great novelists here – can invite and bring you into their world. Any world they devise. Seemingly effortlessly. You are led around by the author as a steady companion might be.

They tell you their stories which tells you something about who they are. You overhear something from one particular conversation that stays with you. You meet people. And people got stories.

When I think of the great protagonists in novels I’ve enjoyed, I liked that the author helped me get to know their character’s character. Warts and all. Right off the bat.

There is something particularly compelling about a character being vulnerable that can advance a story dramatically.

The 24/7 superhero character can become an uninteresting drag. So even the best of them usually have some trauma or tragedy that has shaped their path and who they are.

For a time, I entertained the delusional notion that I might present myself to the world as that broken but not beaten female superhero. The one who could help others make sense out of an unstable and abusive childhood. I would show them how they could do it.

I can be downright amusing. I have carried this conceit of my writing prowess for years to offset the real life gravity that pulled my biggest desires and goals wildly off course. There was always going to be a “some day.” Until one day, there isn’t.

I am going to work on acceptance of my own limitations and the inevitable deflation of ego that propelled this little adventure over the past year. I do dearly wish that the place of peace and healthy self-confidence I have now, I would have had when I needed them most.

But I read few stories that read that way or actually go that way. Challenge and growth seem to be the mandatory edicts laid down for human beings in order to move forward in life.

Will a book suddenly come rushing out of me one day with all the words and stories I have been holding back for decades? I’m doubtful. Over thirty years, I’ve actively pursued therapy to talk out my issues and by writing endless journals to explore every aspect and screwup of my life. To date.

The same urgency is no longer there. Words padded and protected me most when I needed them to. They have been my tools, my playmates, my confidantes, and my critics for as long as I can remember.

Maybe one day I’ll get honest enough to throw off my tidy 3 minute writing restriction (a broadcasting hangover). Or shuck the internalized discipline of a professional writing career and tell you unedited what I really think and feel. But I actually do that already. But there’s always more.

Like how much I have come to resent my dead mother and her chronic overwhelm. How sorry and sad I feel for our fractured and flailing family. How much rage I carry over the “preventable tragedies” I watched unfold around me. And within my own life.

So that’s where I am at for now. I had no intention when I started out to monetize this blog. Still don’t. I could try some of the WordPress “marketing” tricks to reach a wider audience. In truth, I don’t know how many of you found me in the first place. Tags, maybe?

At the moment I am treading water. I’m trying to decide whether to swim out to deeper waters in the hope of finding a luxurious desert island to hang out on. Or whether I will be heading dutifully – and sensibly – back to shore.

Guess we’ll see.

Truth and Beauty

Art history students no doubt pursue the path they do so they can live and work among beautiful works of art. And also because they can consort intellectually with the artists in different historical eras and their discipline altering visions and techniques.

It can also be safely assumed that chefs love and respect food and no doubt love eating it, too. But I imagine they are discerning as their skill intensifies. They learn to prefer eating well-prepared good food over junk.

And there is an alarmingly high quantity of junk food available out there. A lot of junk generally.

There is a Biblical verse that says that we must learn to separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives. I think that is just an old-fashioned way of prioritizing and setting goals. Pursuing quality and goals that will lead you to a satisfying place instead of a spiritually barren and empty field.

“He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never-ending fire.”

Matthew 3:12

And even as you deliberately set out on this path, it can take awhile to get there. Distractions abound.

I have been wondering lately what emphatically drew me to books and the words they are made of so early and passionately in my young life.

A love of books was shaped to a degree by my mother. Books were her other obsession along with prescription pills. But I caught the reading bug and have never recovered. Mom says I was an accomplished reader by the time I started Grade One.

Love of, and a requirement, to use and develop my imagination were part of that pull. By seeing authors use words to devise and describe scenarios, it seems like a superpower to me. Authors allowed us to visit worlds, and meet people I would never likely meet in everyday life.

Not anywhere near as many, at any rate. And never in much depth. Facts in scholarly books help us understand things. And a skilled and gifted novelist can articulate aspects of life and living that are not always quantifiable. Like love and truth and beauty.

Those magical moments in life are often fleeting and ephemeral. The dew that collects on a sunflower overnight won’t last long. A white beach brightly illuminated by the moon and stars will simply be another tourist trap come morning. The emotions that stir in your belly while looking at a beautifully executed painting or even a photograph pass by when you move along

It is the pull toward seeking and the seeing that sets the artist apart. They can often show us another way to look at things, think about things, and express things. With their works, they can elevate or move us into a deeper understanding of something on a personal level.

People in everyday life rarely let their guard down and reveal their weakness and deficiencies as tidily as an author can. In the beleaguered hero, we find an underdog to champion. In the vile and conniving character, we can pray either for his salvation or demise. In the vulnerable child left to her own devices, we pray for her survival and succor.

It can take an alarmingly long time to discover our fellows substantial liabilities in real life. It can take an even longer time to discover and deal with our own weaknesses and deficiencies. Working to tame and overcome them is an ongoing work in progress.

As I busy myself these days creating a home environment I deem beautiful and elegant and workable, I am dabbling in artistic choice-making.

Because as Matthew said in The Bible, it is the choices we make between the wheat and the chaff that inform our living environment and shape our character. By doing this consistently, we eventually see the results manifest in our every day lives.

So I set my sights anew on bringing truth and beauty into my life every day. It is a practice of ongoing renewal and commitment. I well know when I’m failing or falling short of these ideals. I also see when I succeed and I have learned to appreciate those moments, too.

I have discovered it is important to me as a daily mantra to keep striving toward my dreams and ideals. That vision is what guides and greases the trajectory of the journey. By my age, most of my peers and I have learned and accept our limitations.

We have, or should have, a clear understanding of what we can practically do and cannot do. We have tossed our big and unwieldy and unrealistic dreams for smaller, satisfying, manageable ones.

This is not the same as giving up. It is growing up. Seeking truth and beauty are my goals. I am fully cognizant that the little choices I make every day are one day woven into a much more complex and tightly woven tapestry that is my life.

Avoid the acrylic and opt for the real sheepswool yarn, say I.

I fully believe it will pay off eventually.

Lying Fallow

Here’s a post I wish I had written. It is about the importance – in fact, the necessity bytime – of doing nothing. It is a familiar concept in an agricultural context to let a field lie fallow.

That is, leaving something alone to rest for a period of time to let it replenish itself and regenerate. In the words that used to be popular in social parlance a few years back, making time to “sharpen the saw.”

Many people work themselves to the edge of, or even into actual, burnout. Many don’t feel they have any other choice. Single parents come to mind. And young men in a hurry.

But overworking can be a trap. I have learned that my effectiveness diminishes the more spent I become. I end up going through the motions but without much output or productivity to show for it. I am effectively treading water and sometimes, hardly even that.

Many people work consistently and doggedly toward an ephemeral or ideal goal when they don’t have to. A relentless and unbroken cycle of nonstop work can set us up for devastating downturns or even long-term failure.

The cycle is usually easy to identify. We work like crazy for months, even years, until something in us or around us breaks down or stops working. Our health. A marriage. Kids. Without taking deliberate “fallow time” to regroup and replenish ourselves, this dysfunctional outcome is pretty predictable.

So I seized on this essay by Julie Peters when I found it about the value of doing nothing. I was compelled to share it. I am sharing it because I needed to hear it. Maybe you do, too?

“I’ve been spending a lot of my evenings lately sitting at home watching Netflix.

Not very romantic, I know. On these evenings, after long days of meetings, teaching, yoga, meditation, writing and all the rest of it, I think, shouldn’t I be doing something more productive with my life—or at least more interesting?

We live in a world that privileges work, productivity, and speed, so when I take the time to do nothing in particular, I feel guilty. I am not carpe-ing any diems here. So why do I feel such a strong need to sit on my couch and watch TV shows from the early nineties?

I think it’s for the same reason growing fields need to sometimes lie fallow. Farmers will occasionally plough a field that normally grows a crop like corn or wheat, and simply not seed it for that growing season. The blank, unseeded space is a “fallow field.”

During this time of apparently nothing, the soil is regenerating, and restoring its fertility so that by next season it will be ready to grow. The farmers don’t treat the soil, inject it with fertilizers, plant better seeds, or poke at it with a magic wand. They just get out of the way. 

We want so much to have control over our lives, our health, and our happiness. In the yoga and wellness communities, we have lots of extra tools that we can’t find in conventional medicine. So what do we do? We constantly mess around with our physical issues and mental health—at the expense of the simple, humbling medicine of just getting out of the way.

A yoga teacher friend of mine had a pain in her shoulder, and she had learned all these fabulous techniques to help to release it. She was stretching it, strengthening it, rolling on it with a dowel, lying on golf balls, anything she could think of. After months of incessant pain, she finally went to see her doctor about it who asked, “Have you let it rest?”

We are a culture of human doings, not human beings. We are not in the habit of taking time off to let the body and mind do their mysterious internal work. Have you ever tried going to a coffee shop alone and drinking the coffee—maybe just looking out the window? You feel like a whack-a-mole lifting your head in that sea of noses buried in smartphones, newspapers, and laptops.

It’s hard to trust that just because you can’t see growth or change doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. My writing, for example, benefits greatly when I leave it for a few hours to think about other things.

Ideas come to me while I’m walking the dog or taking a dance class. Giving my instincts a chance to talk to me passively can be helpful. Sometimes it’s also a little scary: if I give myself the space to think and feel properly, I might discover that I need to change something.

So sleep late, watch a dumb movie, stare out the window, or go for a walk. Taking the time to lie fallow, whether it’s a few minutes at the end of the day, or months of quiet after a stressful or traumatic event, can regenerate your creativity, energy, and whatever else you may not even know that you need. Trust your fallow field, and it will be ready when the growing season comes.

Julie Peters

Child’s Play

Are there still parents out there focussed on firing up the imaginations of and nurturing their children’s artistic inclinations?

Does the school system still make room for developing the intuitive left brains of young people?

I am out of touch with how well children today are being set up for their lifelong search for actualization. But I do know funding for arts education has always been in peril.

North Americans seem to recognize the value of arts education, but obtaining consistent funding can be a different matter.

During my children’s years at high school, I lobbied to keep the arts coordinator on staff. Any arts educator fears budget cuts: dispensable, you know. Some people believe art is a frivolous pursuit and doesn’t prepare kids for the “real world.”

I oppose the assertion that arts are an education “add-on.” I believe talent and creativity need to be nurtured and developed.

While 88% of Americans agree that arts education is an essential component of a well-rounded education, there has been a persistent decline in support for arts education, particularly in communities that cannot finance it on their own.

In 2018, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences convened a Commission on the Arts…. The resulting report, Art for Life’s Sake: The Case for Arts Education, finds ample evidence for the attributes, values, and skills that come from arts education, including social and emotional development, improvements in school engagement, as well as more vital civic and social engagement. 

https://www.amacad.org/news/arts-education-report

Today’s political, social and economic reality often defies logic and sanity. There are a lot of days lately when the old adage has never been more apt: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Even more apt: “No one can make this s— up.”

What an arts education teaches is discernment and analysis. Different ways of looking at a problem pr project. Today’s kids are going to need those skills when they grow up. When this generation takes over the world twenty years from now, let’s hope they have learned more complex skills than how to set up apps on their smartphones or record TikTok videos.

The artistic path has always been 10% inspiration and 90% inspiration. But let’s face it. Someone who has your back can grease the skids. A cheerleader who promotes and supports your creative ambitions (think arts patrons of old) is going to make your artistic path considerably easier. Perhaps even more meaningful and desirable.

We all need fellow travelers to validate and mirror us on our journey. That checks out whether you are an artist or not…. and we are all artists to varying degrees. We all long for and seek outlets for creative expression.

Would that every aspiring artist could be born into an arts-friendly environment like Marlon Brando. Would that every child with artistic ambition have similar luck on the home front.

Given how Brando turned out artistically, it’s hard to argue with the methods.

Alternatively pray the powers-that-be minding the arts purse see the wisdom of continued support for arts education as a line item. Not simply an afterthought.

“My mother’s name will only appear in texts or in conversations because she was my mother–the mother of a man who inexplicably became famous.

I want you to know, however, that my mother was a great artist, a powerful artist who poured creativity and ingenuity and brilliance into raising her children, infusing us all with imagination and the ability–with no paranormal influences–to remove ourselves, to lift our bodies and our minds, from locations and situations that were brutal.

That is art, and if we studied people like my mother, there would be shelves of books on her work with her children, her friends, her small circle of enchanted friends. Tennessee’s mother was like this. I bet yours is too.

“The artistic suicide is not only the drug-addicted actor; the alcoholic singer; the writer who makes bad choice after bad choice. Artistic suicide, like charity, begins at home. We kill the artists within ourselves in the quest to get by, to walk within the lines, to mind our manners.

“Write about that.”

–Marlon Brando/Interview with James Grissom

Quick Fix, Not

Here is a basic dichotomy these days.

We are inventing fools. Interpret that however you like.

Forget the industrial revolution and the upheaval it brought.

The technological revolution is on a whole other level.

There are so many new and improved appliances, processes, gadgets, vehicles out there for us. They are supposed to make our lives “easier.” And “better.” And “happier.” And more “personally satisfied.”

You feeling all that, yet? I know I’m not.

I laugh now at the early promises of “new technology.” We were all sold on how these new abilities were going to make our lives easier. The four-day work week. Paperless offices. More time for “leisure” and “creativity.” I snort in my coffee.

That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

So here we are awash in the daily frustrations and idiocy as a product of countless “technological solutions.” I’ve talked about this before.

What I’m experiencing later in life is the huge social deficit caused by diminishing face-to-face interactions. Like connection. Like getting to know each other. Like shared experience. Isn’t that quaint?

It has left us vulnerable to all manner of snake-oil salesmen. Because if we don’t know anyone well, and don’t have access to information about their track record and have never met their parents or siblings, anyone will do in a pinch. Right? We need to believe.

Ideas about belonging to a community of like-minded individuals who know and support each other seem quaint and pedantic now. We imagine, crave and seek out a community of similar seekers who might be out there for us to connect with. At this particular time, it is harder to do than it was in the past.

So what do we do instead? We join online groups. We have countless ZOOM calls. We sign up for Facebook groups with people who have causes or interests that we also believe in or care about. We “lol” and “ffs” and “FOMO” ourselves into low-grade stupefication.

No wonder FOMO is so prevalent. People are so disconnected from the ebb and flow of life and each other that the manic chase to “keep up” is reaching epidemic proportions. Young people no longer have a shared social history that taught them how to be part of a group or community.

I believe many believe the internet is the way, the truth and the life. What will happen to them if it ever fails them?

The anonymity of the internet nourishes all kinds of negatives: bullying, sexting, false information, false scenarios and facts. Oops sorry. I didn’t mean to post that. Oops sorry. I have no way to retrieve that post and obliterate it from the internet.

No problem. Instead of overcoming their shame or finding ways to deal with their pain, young people injure or kill themselves. Is that surprising?

What stupefies me is the tolerance we all exhibit in light of widespread social and psychological deterioration. Rigid, conservative, prejudicial attitudes and actions have always been with us. That needed shaking up. But the parameters of human civility and interaction were tighter then.

People once seemed to understand that humans had a limit to their capacity for enduring pain. They had enough sense of belonging that they understood their actions were a vital part of the collective whole.

How does that tee up with how you are experiencing life these days? Safe and happy with a community of people you know you can count on and who know you and support you and love you anyway? No wonder the internet and Facebook and who knows what else are awash in corrective “positive affirmations” and meaty memes that promise to guide us to the “meaning of life.”

Our heads are in such a constant twist scrambling after the next “big thing” in guidance and insight, we have collective whiplash.

My heart aches for young people today. Young people desperate for individuality and attention and belonging dye their hair fuschia, wear three inch fingernails and one inch eyelashes. They tattoo meaningful Chinese characters on their arsm.

For those for whom this is not enough, they simply pick up an AK-47 with their allowance money at the shop around the corner and go out and murder a bunch of people. That we have collectively managed to breed such troubled, alienated souls reflects our failure to inculcate the fundamental “rules” of becoming a human being in our children: with all the warts those rules contained.

I believe a majority are scrambling to make sense of life today and need to understand where we fit in it. I watch my adult children struggling to internalize the reality of out of control housing prices. Once a surefire road to financial security, more and more that is reserved for fewer and fewer. It has affected their future and family planning and stability.

Who wants to start a revolution?