Order, Order in the Studio!
OK - so my studio goes through periods of looking like it just burped after a heavy meal…
Like right now. I asked my fairy godmother if she would just wave her magic wand and clean it for me but she thinks it is better if I clean and organize it myself.
“Then you are less likely to make such a mess again,” she tells me, pointing her wand at me. (Really, after all this time, you’d think she would know better!)
But if I am just going to mess it all up again (me and those reproducing cones of yarn), then why bother? Why not just leave it the way it is after a swipe with the dust cloth and push of the vacuum cleaner along the path through the jumble of books, cones, pillow forms, and projects?
Well, because just as much as creativity loves the freedom of chaos, it also loves the space and clarity of order. After a while, the jumble of papers, books, yarns, and other things that sneak in, makes me feel chaotic inside, and a little claustrophic. Clutter weighs me down–mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
I usually try to give the studio a thorough cleaning–reorganizing, vacuuming, dusting, and washing windows-at this time of year. I throw out old files and magazines, and give books I have read and don’t need anymore away to friends or my local library. And when I am done, I feel lighter, happier, and eager to get back to weaving and writing.
Apparently, I am not imagining this as experts in Feng Shui say that clearing out clutter eliminates negative Chi (energy) and makes room for new ideas and developments.
So I need to create order in order to create. After all, how can I choose the colors to weave a new luscious shawl if I can’t see all the yarns I have available? I might miss that ocean blue or that deep forest green. How can I let my mind adventure off into the next scene of my fantasy novel, if bills and writing assignments are scattered around the computer competing for my attention? I may manage to write a few pages somehow but it often takes longer and uses more energy. Eventually, I start to procrastinate writing or weaving, or even going out to the studio at all, a sure sign I need a little order.
Sigh! So I need to get to work because I have seven feet of workspace and you can’t see the surface of any of it anymore. And something important may be buried there…like my creativity.
Now where did my fairy godmother go?
January 29th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Order! Order! Come to Order!
Was it you I was talking to about this very subject last week? Perhaps not, it was in context to house cleaning, and how I need to have my environment in order before I can focus on a project. Be it creative or studying while I was in school. My meditation teacher would say that it is important to have your environment in order, because the outer is a reflection of the inner. He said it was important to have lose ends tided up so to speak, before meditation. Whether that be taking care of paying off debts before going into retreat, or tidying one’s meditation cabin first thing upon arising in the morning. This would allow the mind to be at peace, and not have those things nagging in the background, and then one could focus on the meditation at hand allowing one to enter the void unencumbered. This is the state from which all things arise.
On the more mundane level, if things have a place, and they are in their place, you can always find them. I am finding this is especially important as I age. It makes finding things far easier, when you know where to look. Now getting things to where they belong is another story. But if things don’t have a place where they belong, you have no hope of finding them. That is the current problem with the three stacks of papers I have covering my project desk. I have no system for sorting all that information. So what good is it. I kept it in the first place, because I thought it would be useful, but have no way of finding it in the future, because it is in a stack, and therefore, I have probably forgotten I have it. Unless I develop a good filing system, I might as well get rid of it. But I can’t, so it sits there, and grows. And the bigger it grows, the more I procrastinate putting it in order! One of these days, I will get to those stacks, and then I will feel liberated. It is good to know that others have similar sorting and filing problems. Some have cones of yarn, others, mountains of paper! We’re not so different.
Just a bit of musing on the subject of Order. It happens to be a deep subject, once you dive into it. Who would have guessed.