30 Days of Creativity and Play/Vulnerability

When you're being creative sometimes things get you down. When this happens, you may not notice it right away but it affects your work. Keeping the excitement that comes with being creative at the forefront of your mind is a process. In The Artist's Way there's a tool called you're creative well and it's made up of everything that inspires, books, poems, films , paintings, quirks, songs, jokes. If you keep your well fully stocked you'll never forget what a privilege to experience everything there is to offer.

This challenge, easy as it sounds got off to a slow start because I was letting my well dry up. Work was beating me down. And I was sad....yeah big surprise right? Well when I devoted myself to day of creative it ended up being harder than any of the other challenges....because I'm fucked up. What could be better than being in situations where you just get to play? Sounds great. I had to spend a few days just being lame and trying to remember what made me happy.

I wanted to spend this time, this challenge finger painting and shooting nerf rockets but I didn't know what to do. It was a gradual return, I went and brought an album I always loved on vinyl, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow the album is famous for their singles. 'Somebody to Love' and 'White Rabbit' I sat and listened to the whole thing beginning to end. No computers or any of that shit. I took in the music totally unplugged. Next I spent some time trying to work on my script, that was hit or miss. Without putting everything out there, my script is about superheros ( I know) and I needed inspiration so I simply wikipedia'd articles on my favorite comic book characters. Within the hour I was on a message board debating which characters would win in a fight. At first I was embarrassed that I spent time thinking about such juvenile shit but then I realized that was just the kind of play I needed. I spent the next day at the bookstore purchasing comic books and books of poetry.

And toady, I decided a better way to guide this challenge is to do multiple artist dates each week. As opposed to one. One of the most interesting artist dates I came across was: 'Create a book of quotes from your friends'

This was awesome because I forgot how many weird friends and acquaintances  I have. The quotes were sometime encouraging, sometimes , hilarious, often random and so on.

So I'm back on the right track. As far as vulnerability I think I've said enough shit here. Stay tuned.          

Day 2 30 Days of creativity and play and getting my ass kicked

Yesterday was a day of creativity and play. I went to the park and saw animals in the wild. I saw a whole pond filled with turtles and wanted to give the, all names. I saw a bunny and I picked five pretty flowers. I even did something I hadn't done in nearly 20 years I collected rocks!

If you're ever at a loss of what to do with idle time just go find a pretty rock. It's easier than you think. I remember thinking about how much I loved New York and it was odd because it couldn't be further from New York. But I realized how much it was all a state of mind for me. The lightness I feel when I'm in a city I love was, for the first time duplicated right in my own back yard. Not literally. But ya know.

I treated myself the whole day and that doesn't mean I jerked off. I mean I took a walk brought myself lunch than browsed my favorite record store. And did it all in a few hours. Just like when I meditate I couldn't believe how much experience was I'm such a small span of time.

So that's the play what about the vulnerability. I remember just thinking of Whitman being out in nature. And I remember a friend always asking me to read her Whitman like an 8 year old asking for a bedtime story and that was the first time I'd been able to laugh at my friend who I had grown apart from. That's why it's no healthy to try to pretend shit that hurt you didn't happen because you never know when you might look back and have a revelation. People grow apart that's just what happens and it's especially hard when you feel it happening, let them go gracefully but it doesn't hurt to leave something behind :)

30 Days of Creativity and Play

1  30 Days of Creativity and Play

The Talks Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius:  First off this is my all time favorite TED talk. She talks about the many anxieties that writers face and she also discusses how she dislikes the idea that all artists are manic depressive alcoholic pieces of shit. She spends most of the talk pointing out how frightening the prospects of being an artist can be. She tries to backtrack and uncover if previous generations had a less frustrating approach to being an artist. The big kicker is that the word genius only started referring to a single person in recent generations, the word comes from an idea that ‘genius’ is an entity of its own something that inhabits artists every so often, this is wonderful because there is significantly less pressure on the artists. The idea is not only that we have to take the chance and embrace our creative process and think of it that we may be inhabited by this daemon and most importantly it encourages us to check in with ourselves and talk out with our creative spirits. Creativity doesn’t have to be this shitty painful internalized thing.     

Tales of Creativity and Play: This talk is really a blast, for me it’s a little bit tough but it’s really just an invitation to screw around and have a blast with your work. The talk encourages the amount of openness we have as children and when you’re exploring it makes sense. There was the episode of Rugrats where the kids all get really excited about a box because they each imagine it as something else.

The Challenge: Sounds like a simple 30 days but make no mistake friends. This will be an odyssey that will test my mind body at spirit. There are two things to take away from my favorite talk, first is the idea that when people thought a genius was going to possess them they would go out and do their dance and even if they weren’t sure that genius was going to possess them they would dance anyway. So the idea here as beautiful as the whole the thing sounds is to….dance anyway MOTHERFUCKER!! To do your work regardless of the creative spark. The next bit is to check in with myself to reach out and talk to whatever elusive muse is out there and say, can’t you see I’m trying to sleep or just say hey I’m trying to masturbate here? Deal with your muse.

Then the other part should be simple right? Just play preferably something ridiculous maybe I’ll sit in a box or go to a pet store. Or draw some unicorns or take pictures of my dog that’d be awesome right? Just play. But the idea only starts silly it’s not meant to be mindless. It’s to build towards something.