There’s a new section on Fridaville called “Creative First Aid.” You’ll find things that inspire me to turn off tv and turn on imagination, to get off my couch and get creative … plus bits and pieces on keeping a journal, the writing craft, collagery, photography and assorted other arty alchemy. Hope you’ll check it out.
In my daughter’s absence, her border collie has transferred his total abject slavering loyalty to me. Not because I give off dog-person vibes, but because I’m The Keeper of the Throw Stick and Ball. I’m a benevolent dictator with one subject. In return for my throwing a ball to him about 655 times a day, he shadows me 24/7. He fetches, barks at strangers and even knows how to open and close doors (handles only, knobs are beyond him). If he had opposable thumbs I think I could teach him how to braid hair and run the vacuum cleaner…as long as a ball toss was the reward. The funny thing is that even though I’m the most distractable and impatient person possible, I find myself calming down as I repeat the throw over and over and over. I envy the single-minded joy that ripples through Scout’s body when he chases the ball as if it were the first time instead of the thousandth. His focus is total, his pursuit passionate, even when the ball gets lost in the underbrush or woods. It’s in his DNA, and he never loses sight of the goal. I want to have the same commitment to my work and pure pleasure in the doing of it instead of dreading it or debating whether it’s worth doing.
Little girls seem to have an insouciant style that comes from deep within some confident, unfettered place in their souls. Glitter shoes with a plaid kilt, rain boots with tutus, princess dresses with cowboy boots. Costumes come as naturally as brilliant wings on butterflies. But then we grow up, and we follow one trend after another, or we give up and try to keep it simple by wearing black every day, or we cover up our unconventional cravings in corporate suits. I’m too old to wear a flower headband, I think, or I want to wear 40s wedges and ankles socks but I’ll look ridiculous or Why can’t I pull off the Audrey Hepburn look? Why can’t I pull off my own look? Why do I shy away from clothes that might draw attention to me? Yeah, sometimes I wish I could throw a burka-equivalent over my pajamas and go to the grocery without giving a damn, but other times, I miss the glittericity.
When I looked at the calendar on my iPhone for the coming week and saw dots on every single date, I felt hopelessly inundated with busyness. Sometimes I dread checking it or getting a reminder to pick up cleaning or an alert that I have an appointment to get my teeth cleaned. I know, of course, that things like doctor visits, workouts, haircuts, new license plates or working on taxes can’t be avoided, but nowhere this month was an hour marked “take a vacation day and sit on the beach,” “work on journal,” or “reread Page After Page,” something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile. And it’s not just this month — my calendar is pretty much like that all the time. Lots of time alloted for dry cleaning and dentists, none for dreaming. That gets crammed into the free time I have after work. Or it doesn’t get done at all, because I say to myself that it’s too late at night to start that project — I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll be creative tomorrow, I’ll sign up for an art class tomorrow, I’ll start an essay tomorrow. I don’t have a solution to this, but it’s been on my mind more and more lately. So today, I’ll do one thing: I’m going to reread all the parts I flagged in Page After Page the first time I read it, and when I’m done, I’ll make an appointment with myself to take a walk tomorrow and schedule it on my iPhone. One little dot to stand for pure pleasure.
The Interrobang is my favorite punctuation mark because it says WTF? and WOW! at the same time. Curiosity and astonishment are qualities I need to cultivate and nurture in order to stay interested in my work. Unfortunately, my old friends apathy and inattention are always lurking and waiting to move in when my guard is down. When that happens, I have to think up ways to get excited about life and art again…and again and again and again. Here are a few of my tricks:
1. Order lots of art supplies I don’t need or know how to use from Dick Blick.
2. Fall in love or lust. Either will do. Unfortunately that’s not as easy to order up as Sakura gel pens.
3. Give or throw away lots of things — it never fails to clear a mental space for me.
4. Work on something difficult for me like Photoshop or French; I can’t obsess about a dry spell when my brain is working like an ox.
5. Magazines — as many as I can buy and lots of different kinds to feed the idea bank, from Psychology Today to Selvedge to Esquire to Elle Decor to Vanity Fair to Fast Company (and I even miss Gourmet even though I’m an indifferent and impatient cook). I never know where I’ll come across an image or a phrase or an article that will set me off on a creative safari (or a creative wild goose chase). If I only read what I’m interested in, I start to repeat myself. It’s part of what Twyla Tharp calls “scratching for ideas.”
6. Reading poetry doesn’t make me feel competitive the way I do when I read prose I wish I’d written; instead, it’s like giving my exhausted inner writer a glass of champagne. Most recent purchase: Flying by Beverly Rollwagen. Most likely to kickstart my writing motor: Jane Kenyon or Mary Oliver.
7. Heart-rate raising, hair-raising aerobic exercise, which I detest in all its forms, always makes me feel shiny and new, like I’ve just been saved at a Holy Ghost Revival. Not exercising feels so good, but I know it works and there’s no way around it.
8. Taking a book to read and a journal to write in to a coffee house in order to be around other people. Their conversation works like white noise for me and helps me get into a zone of concentration that I sometimes can’t manage when I’m home alone with too many distractions.
9. A glass of wine and The New York Times on a late Sunday afternoon, preferably on my porch in summer and on my couch in winter. Opening one of the last real newspapers in the country never fails to give me something to look forward to no matter how dull I’m feeling. It’s rare that I don’t find a piece somewhere in the paper that pulls me under and throws me back to the surface dazed and amazed.
10. A long shower or driving on a road trip. With either one, I go into what I think of as a humming state of mind. I’m cut off from the outside world, away from work or responsibiity, in a duty-free zone. I wish I could simulate those conditions at will.
How do you work the interrobang?
“Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.” William Blake
When I was in the doctor’s waiting room for an hour (yeah, I know they gotta make a buck by overscheduling), I made sure I had something to read to pass the time, and this quote lit up like a neon sign in the beige and taupe surroundings. It gave my spine a tingle. The passage it was quoted in was from a book I’d never heard of called Redefining the Corporate Soul, and the authors write, “Don’t straighten out your curves; they’re what make you stand out from the crowd. Find a way to exploit them, not eliminate them!”. Use what makes you different is one of my rules…live into your quirks and quandaries. For me, that means stop trying to deny my past, but instead, try to use what makes me unique, no matter how unpalatable it might seem at first glance or how embarrassing or how gauche or how white-trashy parts of my background might be. Be me. How easy and simple it sounds, but it’s one of the hardest things I ask myself to do in life.
This is a shot of just a portion of the wall in our art director’s office. It’s almost completely covered with past covers of our magazine, and I realized today when I walked by it how much daily inspiration and beauty it provides. And how lucky I am to work in an environment in which beauty is a requirement. Sometimes I forget how holy it is to be able to follow your calling, to name your passion and claim it. Doing work that uses the best part of you is an act of love — for yourself, your family, your friends, your coworkers — but it’s not always easy to achieve. A wonderful book on this topic is An Artist in the Office (How to Creatively Survive and Thrive Seven Days a Week) by Summer Pierre. You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate her suggestions on how to make office life more creative–it’s helpful for anyone whose day job threatens to throttle their real passion. And in the meantime, devote part of a wall to the beauty you want to bring into your life…and watch it happen.
I read an intriguing post on The Improvised Life blog about taking sabbaticals and what (aside from jobs and money!) keeps us from taking time off to dream and imagine and explore other paths. She posed the question, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Is it doable if we want it enough? I’ve always longed for a sabbatical that someone else paid for, but that has really gotten me no closer to time off, so now I’m thinking about how I can pay for my own sabbatical. A friend of mine suggested that society should start thinking of the first year of retirement as a sabbatical, a deliberate and planned pause instead of a full stop. A pause for renewal before starting the next phase of your intellectual life versus thinking you’re being put out to pasture. But I wish we could all, no matter where we are in life, have periodic sabbaticals that are kairos intervals, in the sense of holy time or a special time of opportunity. Creating an inviolate, sacrosanct time for ourselves in which to reflect, read, walk, write, regenerate is just as important as taking the kids to Disneyworld, heading south for spring break or having a frantic, antic Christmas. Tell me: What would you do if you had a year off, where would you go and what would you do if you weren’t afraid?
1. Cultivate one fresh, green idea. Not just the dull, rusty I’m-in-hibernation green of my frostbitten jasmine vine or the I-might-be-dying green of the bamboo plant I’m nursing on my porch. I want sap-running green, neon green, spring-onion green…tender green shoots promising succulent, tasty projects.
2. Make a map of my day, inspired by Sara Fanelli’s book.
3. Download something inspiring to listen to on the way to work, like this.
4. Make a 7-song playlist for the week. You can sample my choices here.
5. Dress with more creativity instead of resorting to black on black every day.
6. Have a conversation with my conscience and work on one thing that will make me a kinder person.
7. Believe someone is going to rock my world in a good way this year. Please, no rocking my boat, only my world.
8. Love my wrinkles. Or at least be good friends with them. Okay, maybe shake hands with them and have a cup of coffee.
9. Think sexy thoughts. Absolutely necessary for creative mental juiciness.
10. Go fishing for deeper friendships instead of waiting for them to jump in my boat.
There’s so much blah blah blah about how fashion magazines distort a woman’s self image, but I know I’m not going to be able to fit into or afford anything in Vogue. Shelter magazines and design blogs are a different story. I want the lives they suggest are possible to be lived in those gorgeous rooms. I leaf through Elle Decor and think my bedroom would be a haven of peace and serenity if I only moved all the furniture out and painted the floorboards white–you know, Swedish style in South Carolina. And oh yes, I need to distress the white chest sold to me as an antique (also known as junk) whose drawers only open half way. I have to inch my hand in to drag out a pair of tights, but it’s vintage. On less minimalist days, I lean toward Bohemian Hippie Rich on a budget, but if I tried to create a mood wall of photos and art like the one on the magazine page above, it would look like one of those pitiful homes of a hoarder that pop up on the news every now and then. All grimy and random, not artful and studiously casual. And the rosy wall paint that references stuccoed Italian villas out of Enchanted April? It would look like Milk of Magnesia no matter how many times I went to Home Depot to remix it. Today, nothing in my life fits right, nothing is magazine-worthy. Not the living room walls (did I really choose Spearmint?), not the sheepskin rug (it looked so good in the magazine!), not the the wires hanging down from the TV and the multiple hideous cable boxes (I can’t commit to a flat screen wall installation because maybe I’ll give up TV or move it to another room) and especially not the thrift shop bedside table with a blue mirrored top (I’m sorry, but you’re so ugly). A friend of mine says this is a necessary stage you have to go through when you’re trying to change your life or shed your old skin. It’s like being between dress sizes — nothing fits and everything sucks. And all you can see is lack, not how lucky you are to be transforming.
