Weaving The Dream

A friend of mine, recently fascinated by the Greek goddess, Artemis (also known as the Roman goddess, Diana), made me realize that Artemis the Huntress is a good role model for creatives—for artists and musicians and writers and such.

Why?  Because she is the goddess of the forest–all that is wild and untamed and unknown.  With her bow and arrows, she both protects the chaos of the forest and captures whatever she hunts.

Like Artemis, I, too, am the goddess of a wild, untamed and unknown forest.  No, not my backyard.  My creativity.

I don’t know about you but I have myriad interests and abilities that sometimes make it hard for me to decide what to focus on first—a case of not being able to see the tree for the forest!

I easily lose track of priorities.  I often fail to act first on projects that will produce the most results.  And, because I work at home, I can spend days on details, reading email, doing research, and reading the latest professional journals (and baking cookies), before I realize that I’ve spent no time writing, weaving, or lining up work—a case of not seeing the forest for the trees!

I take the bow and arrow of my energy and, in essence, shoot at anything that moves, like a branch waving in the breeze, or a shadow moving beneath the leaves.  Not only am I apt to miss, I end up with a lot of wasted arrows I have to hunt for and nothing that can sustain me.  This makes me—and Artemis—unhappy.

Shooting hither and thither might sharpen my eye and build my muscles (have you ever tried pulling back on a bow?) and that is a good thing, but ultimately, if I am going to develop more than muscle—if I want to write a book, snag a speaking engagement, and bring home food for the table—I need to first, choose my target, and then take careful aim.

Today I am aiming at editing a manuscript and finishing the weaving of a shawl.

What are you aiming at?
 

It is daylily season.  

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have inherited close to fifty   different daylilies from my father as a result of the sale of my childhood home last fall.  He divided all his lilies so I had one of each kind, including and especially the ones he bred himself.

Daylilies are not really lilies.  They are hemerocallis from the Greek hemera (day) and kalos (beautiful).  Now, in mid-July, most of them are in bloom.  And my husband is entertained by my daily walks among these generous blossoms since I talk to them as I walk, complimenting each type on its beauty while I also remove the previous day’s dead blossoms. 

Even though many of the types put out numerous buds so that it seems they are in bloom for weeks, in fact each bloom only lasts one day.  All that effort, all that energy, poured into each bud, only for it to have one glorious day of bloom and color.  One glorious day to attract hummingbird and butterfly and bee for pollination and propagation. 

Last week, my husband, Bob, and I were in Austin, Texas for the wedding of his brother, Ted.  While out with his brother and siblings at a local nursery to buy a palm tree for the bridal couple’s wedding gift, Bob’s brother asked about an agave plant that had died in his front yard.   The nursery man in his sunglasses and cowboy hat nodded and asked, “Did it bloom?”  When the answer was yes, the nursery man told us that agave plants grow slowly, some for 15 years or more, gathering the nutrients they need to put forth blooms.  Then, once they bloom, usually with one blossom, and set seed, they die. Years of growth all to produce one tall bloom.

These plants remind me of the sand paintings done by the Navajo that are painstakingly created for ceremonial purposes and then destroyed at the end of the ceremony.  According to one source, the Navajo word for these sandpaintings means “the place where the gods come and go.”

Where the gods come and go.  Like the daylilies and the agave, the sandpaintings remind us that the Divine often resides in the act of creation as much, if not more so, than in the creation itself.  It is in the secret growth beneath the dark of soil and winter, in the determined reaching for the spring sun, and then the sudden glorious burst into summer bloom, that the mystery and celebration of Life, of creation is found.  The end result – the painting, the bloom, the plant are only temporary and make room for further creation.

We can get so focused on the end result – on the book, the play, the art exhibit, or the performance, that we often forget to give mindfulness, commitment, and value to the act of creating.  And in doing so, we can shut ourselves off from the transcendence of creation, from the experience of the Divine.

So when your published book seems light years away, when your stage performance is over before you know it, when the perfection of your creation is fleeting and then gone – remember the daylily and the agave. Give yourself to the moment of creation, where the gods come and go.

Summertime, like Sundays, used to be a time of rest and relaxation. Of renewal and restoration. Of recharging batteries drained by the demands of the year.

Not anymore.  We don’t know what it means to relax anymore.  We have to take classes on relaxation so we can learn how to stop our endless, and sometimes meaningless, motion.  So we can learn how to breath deeply from our bellies instead of only the upper third of our lungs.  So we can learn how to unclench our muscles and our stomachs and our jaws.

Our advanced technologies bring us so many advantages, but they also sabotage every effort to unwind, to get away, to get quiet.  They sabotage us because we let them.  We feel compelled to stay tuned in, turned on and accessible—afraid we will miss something important, earth-shattering, life-changing.

It is that accessibility that is life-changing, however.  When we fail to give ourselves time away or alone without distraction or interruption, without any intent or purpose other than to have none, we fail to nurture our souls.  And we definitely fail to nurture our creativity.

One of the hardest things for artists, writers, and other creatives is the ability to get away from our creativity.  So many of us work in studios in our homes where our work constantly calls to us.  Others have such limited time for creativity because of demands of work and family that each free moment becomes a challenge to fill it with our creative work.

Yet empty moments and time out of the studio are necessary to refill the well of our creativity.  It is in the silence and stillness that our spiritual and creative batteries are recharged, that our creative well is refilled. 

Summer is a good time to slowly sip the sweet refreshment of silence and stillness.  To sit on your patio to watch the birds dip and weave their ways through tree and bush. To float on your back in the water and watch clouds drift by. To stare up at the moon while she bathes you in light.

Be still.  Be silent. Your body, mind and spirit will thank you.  And so will your creative muse.

How will you give your creativity a summer moment?

1. Honor the Dream!

Many people assume that sleep dreams are nothing more than a rehash of the day’s events.  I speak from personal experience when I tell you that they are so much more than that.  Most dreams, like a fine work of art, are multi-layered, and offer much in the way of inspiration, guidance and motivation if we give them the honor of paying attention to them instead of deleting them or tossing them into the recycle bins in our minds.

2. Keep a Dream Journal

One of the best ways to honor them and to mine them for their creative wealth is to keep a dream journal, recording our dreams on a regular (not necessarily daily) basis. Give your dream a title, record its date, and then write the dream down in present tense.  Why?  Something about the way the brain works—if you record it in present tense, you remember things you might otherwise forget.

Writers, from Dante to Poe to King, used dreams to feed their writing.  William Blake used dreams for both visual and verbal inspiration.

3. Use those Dreamscapes

If you are a painter, making use of the dreamscapes of your dreams can be a straightforward matter of painting the image.  If you are a writer, playwright, or choreographer, consider the dreamscapes as settings or backdrops for your story.

Examine the landscape for mood, colors, odd juxtapositions of images or visual puns, and for time period and place.  Record any scene that captures your imagination in as much detail as you can, either verbally or visually or both.

4. Who are those Very Important Dream People (V.I.D.P’s)?

Just as the people that cross our paths in waking reality are grist for our creative mills, so too are our dream characters.  And they will fade into the ether never to return if we don’t capture them in our dream journal.

First, record or give them their names.  If you have no name, then give the character a name according to her role in the dream, for example, “mother”, “scary old man”, “benevolent guide”.  Then, write a description of the character, including clothing.  Is there something about this person’s character that plays into your current project? Does he take center stage, or act in a supporting role?  What does she have to say to you if you dialogue with her?

5. Ask for a Dream

If you could ask your creative muse a question, what would it be?  Make the question as succinct as possible and then write it down and put the paper under your pillow. Yes, I know this seems a little out there but, for whatever reason, it helps.  Think of your question as you drift to sleep.

 You may find the answer floating to the surface of your hypnogogic (that time just before sleep) dreams, or it may come to you in a spontaneous dream.  Record your dream or whatever images, words, or feelings come to you.

Don’t discount anything even if it seems too far out in left field to be applicable.  Remember to look for puns and other verbal riddles within the dream.  And finally, be patient.  The answer to your question may not show up the first night, or the second.  Sometimes it takes a week or more.  You don’t have to ask every night, but at least do it several times a week, trust in the process and stay patient.

Whether you need to break through a creative block, figure out the next scene or step in your project, or want an idea for your next book or painting or song, dreams are an unending source of inspiration and one of the best tools for a meaningful creative life.
 

More than twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks in August at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, while my mother and husband took care of our three sons, who were between the ages of eighteen months and six years.  It was a special time for me to explore my creativity after constant childcare since the birth of the first of our sons.

One night, I entered the women’s bathroom and found a woman at least ten years older than me, standing over the sink and crying.  When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that that day would have been her son’s 20th birthday but he had died several years ago in a car accident.  I didn’t know what to say so I stood and listened to her tell the story.  And, of course, I felt the fear that every mother fears when she hears stories like this—what if?

I have a nephew who, with his wife, lost his child to a rare disease before she had a chance to reach her first birthday.  Attending the funeral, I watched the mother grieve and thought—why?

I have a friend who, as a single mom, lost her only child, a son, to cancer when he was in his teens.  Her journey through grief has been one of desperate courage in the midst of pain and depression.  And I wonder—how?

When we give birth to our children, we give birth to hopes and dreams and possibilities.  But we also give birth to our worst nightmares and to nights of constant worry.  To crossed fingers and endless prayers.  And to all the whys and hows and what ifs.

Once we give birth, become mothers, we are always mothers.  There is never an end.  It is who we are for the rest of our lives.  Even when those we mother are gone before us.

Today is Mother’s Day when, if we are lucky, our children send cards or call to wish us Happy Mother’s Day. 

But what do we say to those mothers whose children are gone?  Happy Mother’s Day seems wrong somehow.  And yet they remain mothers.  Mothers who need to be recognized and honored for the love they gave and for the love they still bear.  Mothers who need to be held and supported as they remember the sons and daughters they have lost to illness, violence, and war.

Being a mother—or a father—takes great courage in today’s world.  And great love.

Here’s to all the mothers on Mother’s Day.

For several years in the spring, an area of unidentified plants sprouted and grew in our back yard.  They didn’t seem to blossom so, having no idea what they were, my husband cut them down with the first mowing of the yard.

But then, a couple of years ago, my husband and I went out to dinner at our small local restaurant.  The menu noted that it was ramps season and then listed several specials for the week featuring ramps.  I decided to give one of the dishes a try.

After the waitress set the artfully prepared plate before me, I looked at the leaves and said, “Bob, look!  Aren’t these the same leaves that are growing in our yard?”

After consuming the dish with its pungent, yet earthy taste, we came home and hurried to the back yard.  Yes, ramps were running riotous in our backyard!  Hurray!

What are ramps?  Wild leeks that grow in places like Quebec and West Virginia and here in New York. Some places hold festivals to celebrate this plant with its unusual flavor combination of onion and garlic. Ramps may be short for rampions, which are native to England and other parts of Europe, (though somewhat different there) and play a central role in the story of Rapunzel.

Remember?  It’s the theft of those rampions from the witch’s garden that forces Rapunzel’s parents to give her up to the witch where she is then imprisoned in a tower with no door.  And even the witch has to use Rapunzel’s long hair to get into the tower. In fact, the name Rapunzel supposedly derives from the Latin name for rampion, Rapunculus.

To me, the ramps definitely have their own kind of magic, growing wild in the spring, sending up those leaves with their red stems for several weeks and then seeming to disappear.  Because they grow wild, you have to look carefully to find them.  And, if you aren’t paying attention, you can miss them altogether and miss an earthily delightful addition to your diet.

Just as we can sometimes miss the seasoning and magic of the wild things that sprout up in our writing or other creative project.  We can be so focused on our vision for that book, or painting—how we imagine it should look—that we enthusiastically weed out and mow down anything that doesn’t seem to belong or, perhaps worse, we fail to recognize the freely offered wild and tasty things that spring up along the way.

Yet, sometimes, it is precisely those magical wild things that can add a flavorful seasoning and significance to our writing or creative project.

True, we don’t want to harvest them all.  If we did that there would be none for the next time.  Nor do we want to add so much of that wild seasoning that we overpower our work.  But a careful selection, a willingness to expand our creative diet and to experiment could result in an expressive dish that is uniquely ours.

Last night, my husband and I had grilled salmon, sweet potato fries, and ramps sautéed in butter.  Yummmm!

Yes, it’s spring.  Are you harvesting your creative rampions?

Last weekend, my husband and I watched a movie my aunt recommended to me, “You Kill Me.”  Ben Kingsley stars as a Polish alcoholic hitman from Buffalo whose drinking inevitably ends up causing him problems “on the job.”  The mob sends him to San Francisco to dry out, with interesting consequences for everyone.

In the opening scene, it is winter in Buffalo (i.e. snow up to your …) and Kingsley’s character, Frank, is in his kitchen drinking from a bottle of vodka that he puts down long enough to put on a coat and hat.  He picks the bottle up, opens his front door, steps outside, takes a slug or two from the bottle, caps it, looks carefully, and then tosses the capped bottle down the steps into the snow. 

Frank shovels down the steps until he gets to the bottle, picks it up, uncaps it and takes a few more slugs, caps the bottle, and then tosses it farther along the walk.  He shovels more snow until he once again arrives at the bottle and then repeats the process all over again.

Isn’t that a great image or metaphor for the power of motivation?

Frank knew himself well enough to realize that if he was going to get all that snow shoveled, he needed motivation.  Granted the motivation was an addiction, but because he wanted that vodka badly enough, he shoveled quickly and efficiently to get to it, several times over.

Motivation is important for creativity.  How badly do I want to get my books written?  If I want to write—and sell—a book, then I have to be willing to shovel the snow, to do the work to make it happen.  Then I can drink in (don’t moan, it’s a good pun) the feeling of achievement and success.

Whether it means doing research, planning story structure, or ultimately, sitting down and putting one word after another, I have to do the work.  I have to be willing to dig in and pick up shovelful after shovelful of words.  A writing friend of mine recently commented to me on how much fun it is to come up with the idea and storyline for a novel, but how much work, how even painful it is to sit down and actually write the story.  Yes, it can be backbreaking, painful, exhausting work.

But how badly do I want it?  How badly do you?  If you want to see that story in print, hear that composition performed by an orchestra, see that landscape hanging on the wall, you have to want it enough, desire it enough with your whole self to do the work.

The scene also reminds us that it is a good idea to reward ourselves along the path of our hard work.  The creative project can require weeks, months, or even years of our creative time and energy before its completion, so treating ourselves along the way to some of the things that nourish our creativity can keep us going.  You know—like dark chocolate, a hot bath, reading a good book, watching a darkly humorous movie like “You Kill Me,” going for a walk—little rewards, little sips here and there, to keep us going.

So plan some rewards along the way, remind yourself how badly you want to see that completed project, and start shoveling.  And tell me, what keeps you motivated?

And while you are doing that, I am going to go see if I can get my husband to massage my back!

I was talking on the phone the other evening with a writer friend of mine.  She and I along with three other writers check in with each other by email on Sunday nights to share our weekly writing accomplishments, to state goals for the coming week, and to occasionally whine or commiserate when the writing—and our lives—don’t go as planned.

After reading everyone’s check-in for the week, my friend was feeling impressed by the accomplishments of several of the writers but, by comparison, that she just wasn’t doing enough.

“Hmmm,” I said.  “Let’s see.  You have a full-time demanding job and you…” I listed several other activities she was involved in during the week and on weekends, including family commitments.

“AND you are working on a book…Yep, you are definitely sitting around doing nothing!” I finished.

Laughing, she thanked me for reminding her of all that she does.  Then we brainstormed ideas for her book.

What is it about creatives, especially creative women, that we constantly feel the need to compare ourselves to others?  Why do we succumb to doing that especially when the usual result is a feeling of not being enough, not doing enough, not succeeding enough?

Feelings of “not enough” often translate into feelings of incompetence and lack of self-confidence.  It is hard to be creative in that space.  It is hard to believe in the value of our work and from there it gets hard to make our creativity a priority in our time and space. In fact, we are apt to waste time beating ourselves up about our shortcomings instead of writing or painting or composing.  We end up creatively blocked.

When I get into that place of feeling like I don’t produce enough, that I’m not earning my keep, so to speak, I start making lists of everything I have accomplished for the day no matter how small.  In addition to helping me see all I do, it also nudges me into my creative work because somewhere on the list, by the end of the day, I want to see my writing or weaving included.  I don’t want to see that I spent all my time taking care of everything and everyone else while neglecting my creative work.

If you want to avoid odious comparisons, try this journal technique.  For five to seven days (depending on how you work), make a journal entry for that day that lists everything you do between the time your feet hit the floor until you fall sighing back into bed.  You can include everything from brushing your teeth to writing a chapter, to paying bills, or you can list only what you deem are the important activities (but be careful how you define that), or you can list only those activities related to your creative work.  At the end of that list, write one creative task you want to do the next day.  Then challenge yourself to make sure that task makes it on the next day’s list of accomplishments.

At the end of the five or seven days, look at all you’ve accomplished over that time and compare yourself to yourself!  Did you do more than you thought (which is what often happens), or was this an easy week and you’d like to accomplish more next week?  Don’t berate yourself for not doing more because that takes you back to the place of “not enough.” Instead, consider the easier week one of gathering your energy for the week to come.

Adopt the practice of self-acknowledgement.  Save the odious comparisons for car shopping.

Last night my husband and I watched Michael Clayton with George Clooney.  When it was over, we looked at each other and wondered…

Why had it been nominated for so many awards—including Best Actor and Best Motion Picture?

We agreed we liked the movie, and that the storyline was interesting (and probably all too close to reality), but overall, it just didn’t evoke enough mental or emotional hooks to have us saying, “Wow!” at the end.  I am glad I watched it for just two reasons—because I wanted to be informed about it, since it was nominated for an Oscar, and because the performances by Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson were very well done.

But our response to the movie proves a point that is important for most professional artists to remember—art, in any form, is a personal experience, a matter of taste.  While I wasn’t wild about the movie, someone else, like our son, Chris, who has introduced us to a number of good films we might have passed up otherwise, may have enjoyed the development of Clayton’s personal and professional dilemmas and that odd scene where he communes with the horses.  Or not.

When I first started attending craft fairs to sell my rayon chenille wearables and throws, I had to keep reminding myself that not every person who walked into my booth was going to like my work, let alone want to buy it.  Not everyone likes rich colors or swinging fringe (I know, hard to imagine).  Still, if I was patient and persistent, eventually the right people, the right customers, for my work would come into my booth, engage with me about my work, and then make a purchase.

I keep this in mind when I send out query letters, article submissions, and book manuscripts.  Not every agent or editor is my ideal customer, nor is every reader my ideal reader.  Just as everyone doesn’t love colorful, velvety scarves, not everyone loves the combination of myth, fairytale and fantasy.  Some people like their fiction hard-boiled, fast-paced and action-packed.  Some people prefer stories about real (as opposed to imagined) people or events or information. Some readers like writing with lots of dialogue and action and minimal description.  Others, like myself, like writing with that Victorian tendency to fall into luxurious paragraphs of description.

Even those who love the combination of myth, fairytale and fantasy like different twists on it—some preferring romantic, others horrific, and still others, contemporary. 

As writers and artists who depend on the acceptance of agents, editors, selection juries, and the general populace, it is important to remember that art is a personal experience—for everyone.

This is why it is important to do our homework before we submit our work for review, researching the agents and editors, the galleries, or the venues that represent our kind of work.  By looking carefully for the right fit, for people with similar artistic tastes and interests, we are more likely to find our niche in the marketplace, and less likely to be disappointed when our work isn’t snatched up like the amazing goldmine of creativity that it is.

As for “Michael Clayton”…Well, now don’t roll your eyes, I confess that I would rather watch Cher in “Silkwood”, but then, I suppose that is just a matter of taste…
 

Although it is March and the sap is rising, it is still winter here in the Northeast.  A few days ago we woke to a temperature of minus 6 degrees, while at least ten inches of snow blanketed our yard—and our roof. 

As I sit here going through email and scanning for freelance writing jobs, my eyes stray to the icicles hanging from our roof. 

We live in an old Greek Revival farmhouse built sometime in the 1840’s and although my husband has re-insulated most of the walls and roofs of our home, this roof is not steep enough, so snow builds up.  Heat escaping through the roof from the bedroom melts the snow from underneath.  The snowmelt runs down to the eave to drip, drip, drip and then freezes, creating icicles of varying length and thickness, from the delicately beautiful to the monolithic.

Watching this process teaches me an effective way to create—the drip, drip, drip approach to creating—slowly and steadily.  I call it the icicle theory of creativity.

This theory chips away at the daily worry about creating enough, the guilt when we don’t, the procrastination that can then ensue, and the depletion of energy from dealing with the guilt and worry and procrastination.  And, this theory also melts that chilling excuse of not enough time.

Here’s how it works.  Instead of committing to writing, for instance, for two hours or one hour or even a half of an hour, arriving at the end of the time having done nothing more than watch the cursor blink at us while the clock ticks, what if we made a commitment to write one page a day?  Too much?  What if we wrote one paragraph a day?

Just like the drops of melting snow sliding inexorably down the icicle to freeze at its tip until finally the icicle is so heavy, so large, so…complete that it breaks free and falls to earth, one word, one sentence sliding past another and freezing there can create a poem, a short story, an essay, or a novel.  One brush stroke sliding over another can create a painting.  One note sliding past another can create a sonata.

In fact, Jack M. Bickham in his book, Writing Novels That Sell, advises writers to commit to writing not for a length of time every day, but for an amount of writing.  “But if you promise to yourself that you’re going to do five pages a day (or ten!), and stick with that decision, then you won’t just sit there very long.  You’ll get productive in self-defense.”

But if five pages are too much, then try the icicle theory.  A page a day will net you 365 pages in a year—or even 200 pages if you take the weekends off along with a few holidays.  200 pages is a short novel or half of a longer one.

The point is not to let the idea of the end result—that huge monolithic icicle of a novel—keep you from starting or from writing a paragraph or page a day.

Try it.  Drip by drip.  Inexorably writing, painting, or composing.  The icicle theory of creativity!