Quote of Creative Encouragement
Thursday, December 1st, 2005I love quotations. When I have time, I collect them. I once put together several pages of favorite quotes, nestled inside my very plain-looking but bursting-with-words LDTH Poetry Collection (a web page I put together many years ago, perhaps 1997).
Lately I feel like my life is in flux, but I am not sure in which direction it is moving. I don’t know what to focus on next.
Things are good, I’m bursting with creativity, I have loved ones surrounding me and great places to work. Yet for some reason I think I can ***KNOW*** what I should do next. That somehow I can figure out the exact right thing to do today, tomorrow, the next day. But a creative person can never know anything for sure… probably no human can, creative or not.
One thing I am not, is lazy. I work myself hour after hour, almost the whole time I am awake. I love my work so this usually pleases me.
However, I am frequently not efficient, and I am often not well-focused. When I am in a good emotional space, this feels OK to me. I follow my muse, I do things like making a skirt from a sweater or sending embellished wig heads through the US mail system… and following that odd muse can give me much joy! Who knows, maybe it will inspire someone else to follow their own muse? I hope so.
On bad days (especially those gray-sky gloomy winter days such as we have had this week), I think I need to be more like someone else. I am sure that if I only could think like an accountant, if I could somehow see the balance of my life all at once in my mind, if I only knew what would be best… well, that my life would be manageable.
But passionate people always have more to do than fits in 24-hour days. And you can not buy passion! Which I say to others all the time, but when it is cold and dreary outdoors I forget my own advice.
So then today I find this quote from Alan Alda on my near-archival web page, Quotes on Artful Living:
Be brave enough to live life creatively
The creative is the place where
no one else has ever been.
You have to leave the city of
your comfort and go into
the wilderness of your intuition.
You can’t get there by bus,
only by hard work and risk,
and by not quite knowing what you are doing.
What you will discover will be wonderful.
What you discover will be yourself.
Alan Alda
Dang! “…not quite knowing what you are doing.” I guess I’m just where I need to be.
Image today is a blockprint I made on soft blocks/erasers, many years ago. I used four different print blocks in all, to make this image.