Agenda Today:
1. Love meditation
2. Read "The Creativity Book"
3. Evaluate my creativity habits
4. Do the smallest thing
1. Love meditation:
Every month after the full moon, in the quiet-energy yin time of the waning moon, I practice a love meditation that progresses from receptivity, to gratitude, to generosity:
Day 3: Practice a love meditation, and then journal about generosity with time and attention - start with ideas for being generous with myself, then my family, my neighborhood, community, and the earth. I might decide to give money or a gift, or simple acts of helping and sharing my time.
2. Read "the Creativity Book":
A few years ago I started but didn't finish this book by Eric Maisel (one of my favorite writers). The subtitle is "A Year's Worth of Inspiration and Guidance." Who doesn't want that?
I'm on part 7, Connect, and Week 27: Get Lost in the Landscape. He’s talking about the first drawing class he took and how revelatory it was; “just looking, seeing, and transcribing”. It was his first experience with letting go of thinking and just paying attention to reality, the reality of the natural world. When you draw you have to keep your eyes open - you cannot look within for awareness. This is exactly the awareness I want to encourage for Nature-Culture, where we stop thinking about nature and immerse ourselves in it.
It's the perfect exercise: Sit in nature and draw what you see, not worried about the results, but giving yourself over to the awareness state of the artist’s eye.
3. Evaluate my creativity habits:
Once a week I try to take stock of my creative habits:
Have I launched into a large creative project, one worth exhausting myself on, and if not, why?Have I constructed a schedule for my creative work and am I keeping to it?
Do I set goals at the beginning of each week?
Do I have a daily routine that that supports my creative efforts?
Journal: The next few weeks are going to be pretty chaotic and disjointed, with travel. My goal is to finish a couple of projects this week, and prepare and pack some small projects: some sewing, craftivism to spread here and there on the road, maybe some drawing.
5. Do the smallest thing:
Eric Maisel has many suggestions for managing creative anxiety. Doing the smallest thing is a great way to make courageous creative work less frightening. In "The Sweet Spot", Christine Carter suggests finding the "minimum effective dose", the amount of work that keeps me challenged and joyful, and if I keep at it will get me to the finish line on time. The key is to create a pace and schedule that keeps me excited to get up in the morning, and feels ridiculously easy (so I will do it): It's effective but not stressful.
Today I will list specific goals for this week's creative projects and what to complete each day, and also itemize the preparation steps on a check list. My creative projects plan this week:
No comments:
Post a Comment