Off the Ledge

You would think that when the house is quiet in the middle of the afternoon I would get a lot done. But when the house is quiet all I want is to sit and enjoy the solitude. It's not that our house is particularly noisy, but it's a very small house and we're all on top of each other all the time. When it's quiet, the quiet is good.

This week I took an important step in my creative life: I entered a photography contest. But I almost didn't. I almost convinced myself it didn't matter and that I'd never win, mostly because I don't have fancy equipment or stellar Photoshop skills. I talked myself up onto the ledge, where I believed that my work isn't enough like everyone else's work to compete, and then talked myself down. Isn't part of being creative to be an individual? Why should I worry about being like everyone else? Reading this helped.

I struggle with this in my writing, too. I'll write something I'm proud of and immediately try to convince myself that it is awful and it won't resonate with anyone and no one will care. That has never been the case. Why worry about this?

I entered this photo. It will be on display at the mall for a week, along with the other entries. I don't expect to win, though I'd love to, of course. I'd love to do a lot of things. And this is a small, though important, step in the right direction.

We Should Play

In light of my Curator article from Friday, my friend Allison emailed me this post about the importance of play. In terms of the interior life, play and imagination seem to be as critical as any other creative act. We are all creative and being an adult with adult responsibilities doesn't make that less true. Why else would we watch TV and films, or read novels?

I suspect we could all work harder to engage in play. Those of us with kiddos might have it a bit easier since, for children, life is nothing but play. For those of us who are artists, great play yields great art. I'd argue, though, that great play would yield a greater, fuller life.

Interior Life

If you've read my blog for any length of time or had a conversation with me in the last year, you know that being creative and living a creative life is what I strive for every day. In the last few weeks I've been working through my own struggles -- talking, writing, working it out. All of it.

When I sat down to write my essay for the Curator, all I could find to write was the same stuff I grapple with every day. What does it mean to be healed? What does the creative life look like? Why do I feel such a strong need to write and make and find beauty?

This is what came out.

And, no, I don't have a motorcycle.

Acts of Creation

Read recently on a bottle cap: Find Salvation Through Acts of Creation

The past few days have been a bit rough (all baby walking, aside). I've been reading and working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and last week I got to the section on reading deprivation. No reading for a week. Also, no excessive TV watching. Find other things to do, things that do not suck away time and creative energy. So I put down my books, swore off internet perusing and social networking (mostly), and turned off the TV.

What was left was a lot of time to think, journal, and tinker around the house. I hung pictures in the bathroom and a new photo wire in the bedroom. I refurbished some boring white dishtowels and made a banner to hang over the kitchen sink in place of curtains. I came up with a new furniture arrangement for our bedroom. I took the end tables outside and started sanding. And I made cinnamon rolls from scratch.

When I read the bottle cap, it seemed just right. Creating, making, reconstructing -- these are rehumanizing, redemptive acts. They do not replace the salvation we find in Christ but seem to enhance it. Cameron writes a lot about God working through us in our creativity, that we co-create with him. The act of creation is a spiritual one. I like that.

Anatomy of an Afternoon

Because it's good to get away for a bit, and because I'm still feeling the postparty crash, and because I don't want to end up a runaway mom, I had to get out of the house yesterday. Alone. So I packed the computer and a notebook and headed to the bookstore.

I perused the magazines and grabbed a copy of Writer's Digest because Anne Lamott is on the cover and Mothering. The interview with Lamott is brief, about her return to writing fiction. Her best advice for writers is still to write sh*tty first drafts and to write every day, the same advice she wrote about some seventeen years ago in Bird by Bird.

Mothering has a lengthy article on cloth diapering, one I'd recommend to anyone who is thinking about cloth diapering in the future. It's quite comprehensive and takes up about twenty pages. It's followed by another article on Elimination Communication (or How to Teach Your Infant to Use the Potty). The gist is you figure out when your child is "eliminating", make a cue noise like psssss, and hold the kid over the toilet. It's Pavlovian baby training, and it makes a lot of sense. Still, it's weird.

After grabbing a coffee, I flipped open my computer and read this chapter from The Artist's Way. The book is about unlocking your creativity and it's predicated on two things: morning pages (handwriting three pages first thing every morning -- no filter, just writing) and artist dates with yourself. It's really simple and it's supposed to give your inner artist a chance to play. If you're a creative type, you should give it a glance.
Through my new obsession I learned that it's 'Roid Week on Flickr. In order to participate you have to have an actual instant film camera, not just an app on your smartphone, so I'm out. But I did a quick peek on eBay to see how much Polaroid cameras cost, and they are cheap! The kicker is that the film is expensive (because they didn't make it for a while, though I think that's not true anymore). After telling Adam, he said his parents might still have their old Polaroid and maybe I could have it. Um, yes, please.

In the meantime, my Droid will have to do.

A Creative Life

As I child I drew pictures constantly and wrote many, many stories. I wanted to be a cartoonist, which evolved into wanting to be a studio artist when I was deciding what my major might be in college. But I also wrote a lot of poetry and fell in love with books, and I ended up an English major who dabbled in the fine arts.

Now I have this ongoing conversation with myself about my creative pursuits -- what I want to do and how on earth I plan to do it. It's not easy. The work set before me includes taking care of Lily and Adam and our home, but I also feel strongly pulled to write and take photographs and fill my life with beautiful things.

What I struggle with is how to do it all. I'm aware that I already do a lot more than most, especially new moms. Taking care of a baby is a lot of work, even when you have an easy baby like Lily. But I'm troubled by this need to channel my creativity into something tangible.

At times I wish I could give it all up, but like Madeleine L'Engle writes in Walking On Water, "an artist is someone who cannot rest" (p. 10). L'Engle echoes the ideas in Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about creativity, which I wrote about for the Curator. They both affirm that you must do your work and do it daily, and if you do eventually the work will come together as it should:

We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it. (p. 18)

Still, being a new mom doesn't afford me time for daily work on my art, whatever it might be (except the 365 project, which only requires about five minutes of any given day). So I struggle on. Thankfully, I came across the following list, part of the Artist's Survival Kit, and find in it the encouragement to keep going (particularly because I struggle with #1 and 10).

So tell me, how do you grapple with being an artist?