fbpx
Category

creativity

creativity introversion

Gems #18 Creating sacred space

October 9, 2012

Living and working away from home for a while recently has made me reflect on space, the space I inhabit, the space I share, the nexus between partnership and independence, and between time together and time alone.

As an introvert, who is in a highly interactive, people focused leadership role, I need time alone to re-energise, ground myself and get in touch with my creative side. This time enables me also to feed my creativity with valued reading of books, blogs and other sources to shape my own developing thoughts and ideas. Or to interact with creative others through social media and blogs to also link and inspire.

It all comes back to making sacred space. Here are some gems on creating sacred space:

Defining your sacred space

Todd Henry, author of ‘Accidental Genius’ makes the case for having a sacred space and encourages us to find our ‘bliss station’ or:

a physical place where your only job is to pursue the things that ensure your sense of wonder and prod you towards the unexplored.

Quoting Joseph Campbell from interviews collected in ‘The Power of Myth‘, Henry celebrates the power of this type of sacred space in ‘creative incubation’:

[A sacred place] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

Love that place and that thought, and holding onto it. Read Todd’s great article for more thoughts on sacred space and its value.

‘A Room of One’s Own’ – Virginia Woolf

One of my favourite books that sits on my rolltop desk always, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ makes a clear case for both physical and intellectual space to write especially for women. Walking us through the history of women and those who have paved the way in making space for creativity, Virginia Woolf’s classic book is full of gems that remind us of the value of space to be able to create and express one’s unique vision and work:

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me – and there are thousands like me – you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy.

More quotes from Goodreads here from ‘A Room of One’s Own’, or dive back into this wonderful essay and read it in all its sinuous and intelligent entirety.

And finally, my own poem celebrating sacred space:

Poem without silence

I want to write a poem
without the word silence.
The allure of its sleek long vowel
fights to identify this
late night sensation,
wise without sound.

After the traffic
punctuating rain,
the music I become,
beyond the reach of reading
all that marches past my eyes,
the exterior collapses
to a page to hold
the chatter
I confine.

And there though this loophole
of assonance or in its role
defining that breathless space,
the secret finds its way,
this pleasure I make.

2 Comments
creativity

On Creativity

August 23, 2012

Some gems about gathering creative ideas and being productive:

In ‘Capturing Your Creative Ideas‘, Victoria Smith outlines a range of strategies, both digital and non-digital, for capturing and organising creative ideas. As ‘ideas and creative inspirations are our currency’, Victoria provides many practical suggestions for how to collect and curate our inputs and thoughts so we are ready to move when the opportunity arises.

In ‘Writers, Inspiration and the Ideas we Collect‘, Benison O’Reilly writes about my favourite bird, the satin bowerbird, and the male bowerbird’s penchant for gathering blue objects into his bower to attract his female mate. Benison captures how, like the bowerbird, writers gather what attracts them and the ideas that come together. As Benison says, ‘All writers need to be bowerbirds’, open, alert, looking for what connects us and making the links.

In ‘Creating Perfect Solitude for Creative Focus‘, Leo Babauta provides suggestions for how to find the right time to create, how to schedule it, clear the desk, disconnect and generally keep the creative environment simple and productive.

What gems do you have on creativity?

4 Comments
creativity introversion writing

Making space to speak

July 29, 2012

The balance between partnerships and creativity, between being together and being alone, between doing/being and reflecting on the doing and being, is often a fine line. Like many people, I have sought to manage and maintain the balance. It is often easier to create when you have space and solitude; but relationships, family, work and friends are all so important.

Tillie Olsen’s, ‘Silences‘ published in 1978, is about the conditions for creating art, and the circumstances that inhibit and foster the development of writing and other art forms. She examines what works for creativity; the circumstances that she analyses include gender, race and economic situation. A product of its time, ‘Silences’ identifies the high number of women, for example, who have not married or had children and created works of art. Certainly the personal and social situations we create, choose and find ourselves in are an influence in what we create and the conditions in which it is created.

I wrote about this some time ago in a poem that still holds true for me about the balance between relationships and creativity:

Half a Man

If I had even half a man now
could I write the night,
out into its waiting wings
to penetrate delight.

If I had a part of one
who tried to gather all,
I’d run because his promise
is not wiser than the call.

If I had a whole man
who could teach me to receive,
I’d write between the space he gave
and love with sudden ease.

Sometimes , the space itself, when we do find it, can be almost too much, overwhelming in its vacancy to fill. The feeling of all that open space in which to create, once we have organised it or when it is just there due to circumstance, can in itself be intimidating as May Sarton writes in ‘Journal of a Solitude‘:

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it? (p12)

I love the approach of Australian writer, Kate Grenville, to capturing every inspiration and opportunity to create. As she documents in ‘Searching for the Secret River‘, Kate uses a series of mantras to keep herself writing: ‘never have a blank page,’ ‘don’t wait for the mood’, ‘fix it up later’ and ‘don’t wait for time to write’. She further writes:

I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me – one of my favourite scenes in ‘Joan Makes History‘ was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add to something. (p145)

So it seems there is no perfect formula for making space to speak. Whilst some conditions might make writing and other creativity more likely, if we are serious about it, we need to write and create in whatever situation we find ourselves. It’s possibly also that waiting for the perfect conditions is just another form of resistance to getting down to work.

That’s why this blog is so important to me; it’s a stay against silence, a way of creating space to speak, a way of practising making space, so that my writing here now (nearly) each week is an achievement, a making of space in an otherwise very busy life.

So with all this in mind, what habitat suits you to create? What conditions help you write or create art? What have you learnt from your experiences in creativity over time ?

5 Comments
blogging creativity introversion

Collecting ourselves

July 22, 2012

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

‘Song of Myself’ – Walt Whitman

We collect many things: shells, stamps, books, art…you name it, someone is collecting it. The urge to collect, to gather possessions and things we love is an extension of ourselves. You wonder what attracts us to collect or gather just those specific items.

A collection seen in a museum or gallery is meant to represent an entire people, but our personal collections show who we are as individuals. Walking into someone else’s room is like walking into a small museum where a person’s identity is preserved in its original context.

Comment, blog post: Response to James Clifford’s, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’

When we think about the definition of ‘collect’, it’s really about ‘gathering together’ and we can bring together two key definitions or senses of the word:

To bring together in a group or mass; gather.

To accumulate as a hobby or for study.

with…

To recover control of: collect one’s emotions.

Definitions from ‘The Free Dictionary’

In collecting what we love around us, we are in a sense gathering ourselves, bringing the different pieces of the multitudes of what we are and what we love together to reflect the whole and make sense of it.

This can be physical or virtual. A blog is really an online gathering of ourselves, a collection of ourselves we present to the world, with all our loves: books, photos, words, thoughts, family, passions. Like journal writing, but more edited and audience focused, blogging is about reflecting, collecting and building for the next phase of our creative endeavours.

Likewise, Pinterest is a perfect example of how like bowerbirds, we scan for images that reflect who we are to display in an online gallery of ourselves portrayed through our interests and style preferences.

My ‘Blogging from the Heart’ friends also wrote about this theme at the same time as we learnt and connected together. We reflected in various forms about how we collect ourselves: gathering, noticing, stopping, recollecting, appreciating the present moment and preparing for moving onto the next phase.

In ‘Summer of Me – Moodling‘, Jessica Brogan writes about the value of doing nothing and being idle as a way of incubating for the next phase of creativity.

I wrote in the same week about unplugging and rebooting and how an enforced break from technology through circumstance brought home the message about needing to stop to reconnect the pieces.

Many posts connected at the same time via our ‘Blogging from the Heart‘ e-course and seemed to have some link with stopping to gather in some way, like a collective exhale.

So, just like we collect, physically and virtually, as an expression of ourselves, sometimes we need to gather ourselves, to recollect, as preparation for moving on, settling our identity and what defines us before we move on.

Here are some ways I have found to be of value in collecting myself:
  • Writing poetry, journal writing and other personal narrative writing has been of great value in re-grouping. These activities are all about collecting ourselves, taking stock, maybe a catharsis, in a way that summarises the experience in language that captures it and then holds it, enabling us to reflect and move on, whether public or not.
  • Writing my blog, an example of personal narrative writing and expression – and just take a minute to listen to what Seth Godin and Tom Peters have to say about the power of this act!
  • Reading and working through ‘Style Statement: Live by your own design‘ by Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte has been a wonderful way to work through what’s important and to create a personal style statement to define your authentic self. I have found my two word style statement, Sacred Creative, something I return to again and again.
  • Linking what I’m learning in the work sphere with what I am learning in other creative aspects of my life and vice versa: blogging, reading, photography, twitter, online reading, strategy, productivity and change.
  • Taking photographs, collecting and connecting them including on flickr, instagram, facebook and the blog. The value of this was learnt through the Unravelling e-course with Susannah Conway; it is such an accessible way of recording, sharing, tracking and celebrating.
  • Walking, especially on the beach; my poem, ‘Narrative‘ was very much about the theme of collecting yourself through a walk on the beach. It’s amazing how during a walk, ideas often connect and come together, seemingly resolving themselves.
So what have you found to be of value in collecting yourself and regathering for the next phase?

8 Comments
creativity love, loss & longing transcending

Rebooting

July 16, 2012

Restart and reboot yourself

You’re free to go…

Shout for joy if you get the chance

Password, you, enter here, right now’

  from ‘Unknown Caller’, U2

It was a small, old, blue, beach cottage, up the coast, hidden in trees, shells everywhere suggesting a time to be spent collecting yourself. The cottage even had a name, ‘Chill-out’, written in shells and hanging on the lounge room wall.

There were magazines, books, TV, DVDs, day beds. There was no network connection, no phone line, no internet. You could hear the roar of the sea’s thunder from the back room open out onto the air.

It was also across the road from where my parents used to live for some 15 years, before they moved back to the city about eight years ago. Since then, my brother and father have died, and I was bringing my mother back to where she lived before all this, back to happy places and old friends. My aunty also was with us; she lost her husband six weeks before my dad died. We had all come to visit and stay in this little town for most of our lives. And so we returned, and lots of thoughts came along with us, of people we loved who had also loved this place and who came here to recharge and unwind.

Having no internet was challenging. Life is all so very connected and I realised this past week how dependent on technology I am. Apart from the obvious work reliance on email, I have a strong need for personal connectedness it seems. I read the papers on the net; do sudoku and crosswords; connect with family, colleagues, friends and fellow bloggers and online friends who value creativity, reading and writing as much as I. I read a book and find out more about it online; I connect through Goodreads and find out more about the author. I find out what’s happening in the world through the news in my twitter feed. I research online content to inform my writing and read a huge range of blogs through feedly.

I write a blog, I create content, choosing as my focus ‘Transcending’ and dealing with love, loss and longing, strengthening yourself through reading, music, writing, strategy and productivity, whatever it is that gets you through, takes you up and onwards. I connect with other creative people through this and am keen to progress my blog writing during the week away. I find that without the internet, I can’t connect the parts, do the research, create the images, and even instagram fails to work.

So I take photos on my iphone. I enjoy the company of my family; we eat, we drink, we relax, we walk through a canopy of trees on a boardwalk beside the beach, we read, do sudoku, play scrabble, catch up with our old neighbour, now a sparkling blue-eyed 86 years young. We reminisce, we talk about those not with us any more as the place brings them back into our conversation and our lives.

I take two books to read that week that both turn out to be about the presence of those not there any more in the physical sense. ‘Poet’s Cottage’, by Josephine Pennicott, set in Tasmania, is all about family, ghosts, old houses and their history and the interplay between them. As reviewer, Elizabeth Storrs, comments, ‘If you ever have doubts as to whether ghosts exist, then you should visit Tasmania.’ This is true – I’ve felt this when travelling there, in old houses where you can feel a strong presence of others no longer there. ‘Poet’s Cottage’ was an atmospheric read about the past and its influence on the present.

Then I read Anne Tyler’s ‘The Beginner’s Good-bye‘ in which the main character, Aaron, loses his wife when she is struck down by a tree. He starts to see her again and have conversations with her, never sure if they are real or not. Through this, he begins to re-establish a new and different life.

It was only last night, coming home and reflecting on the week, that I realised my head was fully engaged in reading about the presence of those not there any more, of reflecting and moving on.

When we got home last night, our ipads were not connecting to the wi-fi. To get mine to work, I turned off and rebooted, suggesting to my partner, “Sometimes you just need to restart to make all the connections again.” Even when the words come out of my own mouth, I don’t get it straight away. The universe must think me so slow.

So today with time to reflect on a deeper level and stumbling across the words above from U2’s ‘Unknown Caller’ in one of my notebooks, I finally gather together what the week was about: the opportunity to turn off some of the input, unscramble the data, to recalibrate and reboot, knowing I have the password and the resources to shift up and on to what matters, with the love of those who have left us, still ringing in our memories, somehow cheering us on.

<div

Full review of ‘Poet’s Cottage’ coming soon as part of the Australian Women Writer’s 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge.

6 Comments

PRIVACY POLICY

Privacy Policy

COOKIE POLICY

Cookie Policy