On, In, and Around Mondays: Fictional Seeing

"I do it on purpose, you know."

That's what I told my friend, when it was observed that I have a Georgia O'Keefe approach to photography.

After I said this, I went back over some of my photos to see if it was true. Do I really do it on purpose? Often, yes. And sometimes it is just that I go through a series of shots, after the fact, until I find the ones that do what I would have done on purpose, had I the mind to do it.

I am reminded, suddenly, of an idea I include in The Novelist, from Mario Vargas Llosa. He said this regarding the construction of fiction, but I think it might apply to all kinds of seeing and composing...

A successful fiction would always contain something inexplicable, something unbound...certain factors [are] crucial to a work—intuition, sensitivity, divination, or the elusive reality of chance. (p.106, The Novelist)

Now it is also true that whether or not I create in a purposeful way, somehow my true self seems to come through not only in the inexplicable and the divination but also in the elusive reality of chance.

Makes me wonder, then. Is Georgia, really, always on my mind?

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)



<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

On, In, and Around Mondays: The Smallest Wild Rose Will Do

I'm mixing it up, since I've already read The Artist's Way, twice. 

I'm reading it a third time now, yes, for the book club, but I also got Cameron's Finding Water from the library. It gets at some of the same material from a different angle, with the coolest little shifts in language. Like this...

"Even the tiniest of Artists Dates will yield results."

I test this language, on a day when I have no date planned. It's just a small diversion, this decision to walk behind the parking lot, on a path that goes nowhere but a woodland loop (so short l I can do it in a few minutes).

Along the path? Wild roses. Diminutive, compared to the fancy roses we can buy and plant in our gardens.

But I spend time with them. Wishing I could catch the way the light is held, as if in a white cup. Holding my breath (why do I hold my breath?) as I lean in to take a shot. And then I run my fingers across the iridescent whiteness, just to take home the scent of roses on my skin. A free perfume. An alteration of my chemistry, if only for today.

Cameron tells me I am wrong about this—the temporary change of chemistry. She says, give it time to sink in, to enter as if into the blood stream, through the skin, through the inhalation of the fragrance. She says it this way...

"Artist Dates fill us with exuberance. We see that we are not caught by the narrow confines of life as we know it."

I am inclined to believe it, after the roses. Even though the path seems, on its surface, the same.

_______

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)



<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

On, In, and Around Mondays: Hug to Creativity

She wanted to go away. Asked me to come and watch her children.

I said yes. I rarely see my nieces and nephews.

It is good that she went away, because that meant I went too— away, to a life so different from mine.

My favorite moments were the ones with the baby. I haven't had babies for a long time. I don't particularly want the work of babies anymore.

But this.

A baby in the lap, blue eyes searching mine. A baby in the lap, playing with my mauve shawl.

"Shawl," I say to her. She pulls it open. Pushes it shut. Manages a sound something close to "sh," but not quite.

I touch her shirt. "Shirt," I say. She touches her shirt. I touch my shirt. "Shirt," I say again. She ventures another "sh."

She lifts her shirt and a white belly sticks out, baby fat. "Belly," I say. She touches her belly, then leans her head against my chest in a sweet baby hug.

We do this again and again. The eyes searching, the shawl opening and closing, the shirts and the belly. The tries at "sh." The hugs.

I kiss her face over and again, and I feel something inside me pulling apart, opening. A creative space. A loving space. Something like a shawl opening and closing around another person. And I feel full. So, so full.

_______

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Do Your Ideas Have Something Missing?

I wanted to try it out. Matthew E. May had claimed that the best ideas have something missing. Of course, making something go missing doesn't assure a good idea. But I wanted to test his theory.

So we played a game.

There were no stated rules, just loosely-related pictures (all with something missing and all from May's book). Beyond some peripheral conversations on Twitter and Facebook, there was no explanation of where it was leading. It was pure experience, more powerful than if I'd said, "Hey, did you know that missing pieces make things more interesting?"

That's what Matthew May believes. As an opening example in the book, he recalls the ending of The Sopranos. "Instead of receiving a concrete answer to the big question [of whether Tony Soprano would get 'whacked'], viewers sat shocked as, during the final seconds of the show, their television screens went black." And that was it. After a few seconds, the credits rolled.

There is more to the story, and you can read it in May's book. But, as he notes, "the point here is that no straightforward conclusion would have engaged viewers with the same intensity and debate."

So, is it worth it to make sure your ideas have something missing? I'll talk about that more in upcoming posts. But for now, I'm going missing until next week. :)

The Glinda Guide to Creativity

Absurdity breeds creativity. At least that's what Psyblog claims.

And I think they might be right.

While many of us wish that life would come with a map, it's the unmapped experiences that often seem to spark the most new thinking. The dynamic? Absurdity is a meaning-threat that causes us to want to... make meaning. This can be good news on the Creativity Front, especially for parents of toddlers and teens, don't you think? :)



This past weekend we went to New York City. It was a whirlwind trip, barely planned.



Teen girls in tow, we mostly let our days unfold. The city is its own brand of absurdity. The show we attended (Wicked) was too. I came home in a kind of bubble, my mind filled with rainbow magical thoughts, my creativity lifted.

Psyblog doesn't follow up with it's assertion about the relationship of Absurdity to Creativity, but I'm guessing it's important to have a rhythm in place. I'm guessing that non-stop absurdity might not be beneficial (and this is why we must put our toddlers and teens to bed at a reasonable hour :). I'm guessing it is also useful to extend our Creative ideas over time, after our absurd experiences.

So here I am, thinking about Glinda again. Three's a charm, so they say.

Ready for an Onion Date

How to stay creative?

There are so many answers.

I like Julia Cameron's idea. The Artist's Date.

Yet my life doesn't easily accommodate such goings-on. I have two girls who I home-educate. I take care of my house (okay, I try :) — mowing, clipping, cleaning. I work as a writer and manager.

When would I possibly plan a date? It's hard.

Thus, my boy-scouts (girl scouts?) approach: always be prepared. There are dates lurking around unexpected corners, if only we are ready for them.

On Saturday, for instance, I ended up needing to take my daughter to a friend's house, far away. Spur-of-the-moment sleepover invitation. I had meant to spend the morning writing, but suddenly...

I saw my chance.

Camera, notebook, Luci Shaw. Into the bag. Water bottle, tissues, and banana muffin (in case I needed a survival kit)— also into the bag. And Lady Gaga, of all people: into the bag. Her music inspires me, despite that her risque lyrics, triangle hair and dresses are... what shall we say... creative.

Gaga in the speakers, the hours before me, I made a date with the day. I stopped on the side of the road to capture a little cottage.



I found a barn full of antiques and... corn, squash, onions, tomatoes.





As part of my survival plan, I stopped at a park that has a bathroom with running water and a brass lock on the door. Along the way to tile floors and paper towels, I found pinecones new-minted, red leaves flaming against blue skies, and bare-faced wildflowers that Lady Gaga could never rival with plastic or pop. On the way home, I did, however, turn up the music and dream.





The creative life doesn't hand itself to us. We hand ourselves to it. One creative date at a time.



Wordle by Sonia. Used with permission.

How to Work Like a Genius

I walked into the dining room and gasped. Oh my, what a two-year-old can do in a brief space of time! While I'd been chopping, frying, and boiling, she'd been stringing, draping, and wrapping. The room looked like some kind of Picasso-bent spider had sneaked in to claim an opportunity at artistic re-engineering.

In the years since that messy dining room day, I've done my share of ill-parenting. But if there's one thing I think I may have gotten right, it's the issue of providing space—both physical and mental, for my daughters to be and do, create and laze, explore and abandon.

Sometimes I've doubted my methods. And as a home educator I've felt particularly pressured at times to prove that I'm not squandering my kids' days... Read the rest over at TheHighCalling.

An Artful Look

My eldest daughter came running into the room, clutching a coil of rope. "Mommy, mommy! Michaela and I can’t agree on what to build. I want to do a suspension bridge. She just wants to make something pretty!"

"Why can’t you do both?" I said. "Useful things can also be artful." She tilted her head, kind of flicked her eyes heavenward and ran out, presumably to present this novel idea.

It is the age-old question of form versus function. Must the two be incompatible? Can we even separate them? Should we?

Betty Spackman, in her book A Profound Weakness, discusses the bias against form and form education (art, if you will). She says…

Today, in North America alone millions of people…are illiterate and depend on the spoken word and on images for communication. The need for pictures to explain text has helped to perpetuate the belief that it is the uneducated, poor and weak…who need images. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why art is still considered an extracurricular activity, rather than as something essential to cognitive development. Images, therefore, belong to children. They are floss; they are fiction. We can get along without art— and if we can do without art we can do without artists. With this attitude… there has been little prospect for the last hundred years of convincing churches and schools (and, in particular, Christian schools) that they should support the arts. p.30

I try to picture a world without God's art. A flower that would be all function, no form. A web that would be all function, no form. A blankness, a sameness. A visual incoherence. And it escapes me.

You could say that God’s art suggests God's existence to me, with the same weight that the intricate form of all things suggests God's existence to me. And if God bothered to paint, to sculpt, to suspend the universe with delicate artistry, then we too might flick our eyes heavenward to consider the incontrovertible place of art…then run out, our shadows unwinding like rope behind us, to tell the world.


Glass Dollhouse Series photo by Gail Nadeau. (Dollhouse and sculpture also by Gail Nadeau.) Used with permission.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

Shaping Our Pain

I remember reading Freud, ages ago. And he seemed to be saying that humans live by the principle of pain avoidance. To some extent, he was right.

Yet it is ultimately unrealistic to live our lives according to this principle. Pain, unavoidable pain, is sometimes our surprising companion. We cannot escape it.

This past week, I began a journey through such inescapable pain. As did so many of my friends, my church community, who knew and loved the dear brother-father-husband-scientist-elder who passed away.

Around the middle of the week, one of these grieving friends shared a song with me. And I had, without knowing it, shared my poem with her. At the end of the week, another friend told me how she had taken the funeral flowers (with the widow's blessing) and saved the ones that were still fresh, to rearrange them in new designs. She wept and wept as she rearranged them. And so her tears and flowers bedecked our refreshment tables on Sunday. Each of us had begun to touch and mold our pain, through our own particular gifts and loves.

In The Burning Word, Judith Kunst notes that the Jews have long relied on words to shape and reshape their pain. Discussing the book of Lamentations she says, "This painful kneading of words and grief binds the poet to his despair, and at the same time it pushes him through it, toward hope..." (p.55)

I realize that I shape and reshape my pain through writing. In this way, I do not avoid my pain but am bound to it while also experiencing a sense of pushing through it. As I told my friend who shared the song, "I write and the mending begins."

(On a totally different note... today marks one year since Seedlings was born.)

Lilies photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

That Creativity Thing

I told Charity that chapter four in The Suburban Christian could supply a month of posts. Which is to say, "Material World: the Challenges of Consumer Culture" gives us a lot to consider.

Hsu asserts, "While the single-family home is symbolic of American individualism and frontier independence, ironically, its very location in an atomized suburban context makes us ever more dependent on commodities and consumption." (p.75)

In other words, suburbanites don't do much for themselves, except slide the credit card.

When this is our approach to life, we are engaged in "financial transactions rather than exchanges of mutual relationships." (p.77) Hsu discusses the consequent adverse effects, including a system which can more easily abuse workers across the globe. But it struck me that we also suffer in this setup.

We suffer a loss of connection, to people and the meaning of work. We suffer with a diminished sense of our own purpose. (Thus being highly attracted to books that offer a purpose-driven life.) We suffer from lack of volition and creativity.

That's why I was especially glad to see that one of Hsu's solutions was a return to creativity— make instead of buy, be relational. I picture this as the difference between going to a movie and making one's own. (I've even provided an example below. This is a "slide show" movie that my kids made to entertain themselves yesterday. I think it beats Barney any day. Of course, I'm biased.)

In the past few years, I've begun to reclaim my creativity in myriad ways. Sure, I don't get as much exercise by sliding my credit card, but that's a challenge I'll accept any day.


THE PLAN, by Sara and Sonia. (I had nothing to do with this.)






















Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.


NEW LINKS TO THIS POST:

Miriam's daughter's Script Submission

Al's Consumer Culture vs. Christian Creativity

Charity's Created to Consume?

Mary's The Post that Stirred Me

Adios, All-You-Can-Eat

In our last discussion, Craver commented that he struggles to spend time with The Few, as opposed to The Many. I observed that this is symptomatic of our "All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet" society.

In other words, we have access to a lot of relationships, experiences, technologies, goods, etc. In such a context, it's hard to focus on our own plate, to savor and appreciate what's there... to willingly choose "smallness of scale," where we can attend to details with creativity and passion.

A few days after our conversation, I opened up Jim Merkel's Radical Simplicity. Merkel is a former arms trader, who now works for peace initiatives. He shares an experience where he watched an indigenous group solve a problem together. It struck him...

"The elegant simplicity of cooperation and hard work was poetry in motion. This is what you do when you don't have a bulldozer, don't have cheap gas, and don't have a permanent war-time economy. These intelligent, creative solutions were outside of my box..." p.32

Sometimes I think we would be happier if we said "adios" to the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet. So many people suffer from a sense of meaninglessness. So many people live in little boxes, that all seem to look the same. We even sell our lives for the privilege, going into mounds of debt; or we work long hours or even two jobs to preserve the box.

Then, in the process, our opportunities for cooperation, intelligence, and creativity fall aside.


If you post something about the All-You-Can-Eat phenomenon, tell me, and I'll link to you. Also, Week Two of the Relationship Exercise is now in the comments of the post "Relational Engagement." Be sure to check out Craver's new comment too... the continuing saga of Mr. & Mrs. Craver!

Sara's Creative Squirrel-Proof Birdfeeder. Photo by L.L. Barkat.

NEW LINKS TO THIS POST:

Pancake Day