This week, I’ve been working on the October issue of Skirt!, and since the theme is Smile, I’ve been writing about playfulness. In the process, I’ve realized how little I play, what a drudge I’ve become! That’s why I’m really enjoying Free Play, which is all about the creative process and its relationship to improvisation. Not a new book, but new to me and coming into my life at just the right time. I’ve purchased several copies for friends who are starting new projects, because I think it will give them courage to go forth. And don’t we all need that?

]]> http://fridaville.com/learning-to-play/feed/ 0 http://fridaville.com/putting-myself-on-pause/ http://fridaville.com/putting-myself-on-pause/#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:20:04 +0000 nikki http://fridaville.com/?p=645

At the bottom of a long, hot arduous trail in Yosemite this summer, we ended up at a spectacular river that was crystal clear and icy cold from snow melt in the high country. Peeling off shoes and socks and plunging in to cool off was a revitalizing pause between hiking down and the long haul back up in unaccustomed high altitude. Sometimes we need a pause between stages of life, I think, but it’s a luxury not many of us have. After all, we have to keep going to work even when we don’t feel we’re doing a great job. We have to take care of the kids, even when we forget why we wanted to be parents. We have to sleep in the same bed, even when we wonder why we married the person we’re sharing it with. And life just keeps sweeping us along in its current, so how do we find a way to sit on the bank, cool off and gather energy to continue on?  I particularly need to press Pause right now in order to give my brain a break from pawing over stale, overworked ideas. I’m going to start by doing something totally different and unconnected with my job — a weekend of watercolors instead of words. I’ll keep my hands busy so my mind can relax and spin some new stories in the background without being hitched up to plow the same field day after day. The brain craves novelty and fresh experiences and play, and I’ve been treating mine like a work horse. Time to giddy-up and take it for a joy ride.

]]> http://fridaville.com/putting-myself-on-pause/feed/ 4 http://fridaville.com/begin-with-red/ http://fridaville.com/begin-with-red/#comments Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:54:09 +0000 nikki http://fridaville.com/?p=643

The cushy lining of the uterus. The angry cry at being pulled loose. My favorite story of Little Red Riding Hood and the shivery feeling I get when the wolf steps into her path. Hell fire where I will probably end up unless I’m saved, which I am a dozen times at the altar of my youth by a trumpet-playing preacher. Twelve  years old and yearning to be swept off my feet by Jesus. Until I meet David when I’m 13 and wearing a red dress and red shoes the first day of high school and he is leaning, lanky and broad-shouldered,  against the wall checking out the new girls in the freshman class. “Hi, Red,” he says. And that’s how it begins.

Are you thrilled that we’re at Friday? Not only Friday but a 3-day weekend? I’m sure that if I were on a perpetual 3-day weekend I would get bored (really?) and have to come up with a project to break the lovely leisure, but right now I am so excited to have a stack of books, a Tempurpedic mattress and plenty of Prosecco. I will take a walk on the beach and love every sandy moment. I’ll give my hair a deep moisturizing treatment and shave my legs. Ideally, there would be a thunderstorm, but if we don’t get one, I’ll turn on the White Noise app on my iPhone and pretend it’s raining outside while I’m reading inside.  I’ll make up another bag of clothes I don’t wear but am saving for when I’m a bag lady during the 2nd Great Depression and give them away. Goodbye, cheesy black lace Libertine skirt I bought at Target! What was I thinking? Next weekend I’m traveling to take this workshop and will need to pack my extrovert side, so this weekend is all for being a happy hermit. After years of wishing I could be more like my high-alert friends, I’ve finally learned that I need to balance being around people and trying new experiences with periods of being quiet and alone and recharging what has been depleted.

Screening is too easy, and I don’t mean just screening calls. It’s screening the unspoken messages that you aren’t good enough or cool enough or just enough. My doctor, who I love and who is so incredibly human and humane and innovative, always asks me if I’m seeing “someone.” I’m glad he does, because he’s just keeping tabs on my social life to make sure that I  have one, that I’m not isolated or hermiting. How many docs bother? But when other people ask me that and the answer is “no,” I always feel somehow that it’s my fault. Why don’t I meet any men, why aren’t I on match.com, what’s wrong with me?  So I’m trying to look at it from a different point of view: How great it is that my friends and acquaintances believe I’m capable of attracting a “someone.” So many things in life benefit from standing on the other side of the window and looking outside in, instead of always from the inside out.

I’ve been thinking really hard lately about greening, about trying to resensitize myself to the world around me, to somehow get back to a five-year-old’s matter-of-fact oneness with it. Of course, I can’t ignore the layers of experience that have built up around my soul since I was five, that have muffled the message of the beautiful old world, but there are certain objects, colors, sounds, words that call them up still. The green leaves of the basil plant on my porch remind me of the big, velvety green leaves of the tobacco plants that hung from the rafters of my grandfather’s barn. A poem like The Healing Time by Pesha Gertler that breaks through the carapace formed by being one of the living wounded (aren’t we all?!) to make me cry. Coming across a paper garland on Etsy made out of pages of a book I first read in front of the fireplace in my grandmother’s bedroom, which also functioned as living/sitting/center of the world room in her house. Remembering that aside from stabbing my playmate in the scalp with a No. 2 pencil I was a dreamy, quiet kid who had a rockin’ interior life and vivid imagination. That I loved cutting and pasting more than anything, and whenever I can do it now, I regain fragments of that state of mind. Scissors, please.

Do you want to lower your heart rate, decrease your blood pressure and increase your learning ability and productivity? No, it’s not a new wonder drug, but some studies suggest that listening to Baroque music with its 60-beats-per-minute pattern may do just that. So next time you’re working on a poem or a Powerpoint presentation, turn on some Bach, Handel or Vivaldi. This Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is one of my very favorites.

Lots of good points in this…find the background on the post/manifesto on this blog.

I don’t know if this message was a response to a boarded up store in the neighborhood where I work or just a cry from the heart.  If the latter, I get it. There are so many things I’d like to undo:

I wish I’d been a better daughter.

I shouldn’t have thrown that Irish coffee at an old boyfriend in the middle of the street one night.

Being self-conscious instead of self-confident.

Saying yes when my brain shouted no — only about a million times.

What’s his name — wow, undo it.

Sitting on my bum so many years instead of exercising.

Withholding love, trust, a simple hug in order to maintain a resentment or a wall.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have to fall down and get dirty and get up and do something different they’d want to undo later. Over and over. And when you start undoing, where does it end? So many good things connected to so many regrettable things — if you start to unravel one, the others come loose, too.  So no undoing, but maybe just understanding.

]]> http://fridaville.com/do-over/feed/ 1 http://fridaville.com/making-your-target/ http://fridaville.com/making-your-target/#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:56:23 +0000 nikki http://fridaville.com/?p=622

Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bullseye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre. Brian Eno

I love this quote that I found on a creativity blog, and it’s so important for me to remember…get inspired by what other people are doing, but not distracted by it or worried by it or inhibited by it.