Tag: inspiration

staying inspired

October 12, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Do you want to have an infinite reservoir of inspiration? Be a perennial student. Learn or try something new, however small, every day (or at the very least once a week). It’s harder to get into a rut or funk if you’re challenging your brain with something new and giving it freedom to play. It keeps Resistance and the inner critic at bay.

Copy your favorites

Be a student of things you love. Notice designs, etc. that you admire and copy them for fun. In your practice, mimic the styles you are drawn to. Gather inspiration from many different sources. The more you study and practice, the more you’ll develop a critical eye and get better at your skill.

Take it all in

Be a sponge. Notice everything. Absorb everything. I’m continually inspired every single day when I drive home from work because of the way the light catches the trees along the road. Sometimes I’ll pull over and wander through whatever patch of nature I can find to take a few pictures. Wandering is good for the creative soul. I try to take in all the beauty I can possibly stand, and that makes me long to capture it somehow in creative expression. Collect images, articles, or anything that inspires you in a notebook or app. I snap photos and save articles and tidbits in Evernote so that I can access them anywhere.

Listen

Seek out others’ stories. Don’t be limited by your opinions or preconceived notions of people, or let others inform your opinions of others. Get the whole story. Take the time to listen to the annoying customer, the office weirdo, the panhandler. Expand your world by always being willing to see it through someone else’s eyes. You’d be surprised how much a little empathy can multiply your experience and understanding and grow you as a human.

Focus on just one sense at a time

Take a few moments throughout your day to savor things. Close your eyes while you eat your lunch. Plug your ears and take a big whiff of cut grass or a freshly sharpened pencil. Zero in on something like the bass line in the song on the radio. Identify in detail the various individual colors in something nearby. The more you notice, the better your brain gets at being descriptive. This is a great tool to have in your belt for any creative pursuit, as creating–whether it be visual arts, writing, music–is a means of description.

Get around the right people

Surround yourself with people who challenge you intellectually and creatively. Stimulate your desire to grow in your skill by being around people who are great at what you want to be great at. Have deep conversations. Just like muscles, your intellect will atrophy if you don’t keep it challenged. If you only spend time with people at your level or lower, you can expect to plateau and get bored. Learn from people above you, teach the people below you. You can’t improve in a vacuum, so get around people who will offer new perspectives and encourage you to strive for excellence.

This may all sound pretty hippy-dippy, but being observant and keen to learn and try new things truly will find you continually inspired. A healthy curiosity begets an attitude of wonder and excitement, and the more excited you get at what is possible, the more you’ll want to create new things. Collect beauty. Soak it up until you can’t contain it, then go make beautiful things.

on journaling

January 23, 2014 / / 8 Comments

originally prompted by julia cameron’s concept of ‘morning pages,’ i have returned to my habit of trying to knock out 500 words in my notebook every morning, however mundane the subject matter. invariably, my entries remain so mundane that i become rather embarrassed and begin to question the benefit of such an exercise. but i keep at it, because so much of writing is making time for it, developing the habit, showing up to the work. get out the nonsense while developing the routine of writing, eventually making room for your creative voice to make itself heard.

so the muse, in her infinite wisdom, must have seen fit to give me a token of reassurance that this undertaking is not in vain. i’m fortunate enough to often be able to listen to my ipod for a few hours at work. i’m obsessed with a handful of podcasts, not the least of which includes Selected Shorts, a collection of short stories performed live on stage. Today I listened to Parker Posy read Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook.”

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

“yes. go on…” said my brain.

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…

this is how i feel about keeping a notebook. it’s not the same as keeping a journal. i do not merely recount things that happen from day to day. i’m free to write whatever i like, even though it is often very dull and seems pointless to commit to paper. but i do enjoy going back and reading the stupid little things that i, at one point, did commit to paper because some part of my brain saw fit to remember it in the first place. even though the insecure “rearranger” in me cringes, there’s something less lonely in the remembering.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker.

she continues that even if the notebook keeper doesn’t herself know the meaning of what she writes, there is merit in the exercise. it benefits the writer to be fanciful and without censor, because it belongs to no one else.

thanks for the nudge, Joan. and happy belated 79th.

daily bread

August 9, 2011 / / 0 Comments

If you are reading this and have not yet laid your hands on a gem of a book called “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, please do yourself a huge favor and grab yourself a copy as soon as humanly possible. In it, Pressfield describes the characteristics of Resistance, which, in short, is self-sabotage that prevents us from doing/thriving at whatever it is we’re born to do. We beat Resistance by sitting down to do our work, inviting the Muse and just doing it.

As mentioned in my introductory post, this is why I’ve begun to blog. It gets me to just sit down and write on a regular basis, whether or not I have anything worthwhile to say. It makes me overcome anything that would prevent me from my creative tasks.

I believe that this is what I’m asking for when I say, “Give us this day our daily bread,”–bread being the creative drive, wisdom, spiritual sustenance. God, today grant me the ability to create. Forgive me for the things that get in the way of that, and help me to stop sabotaging what you have created me to do. Thank you for that spark you have put in my spirit. I invite you to inspire me today.

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