It has been over a month since I updated the blog. It's not like I didn't have ideas, I just didn't formulate them into a blog entry. I waited for the perfect combination of inspiration, creativity and time to craft the perfect entry. As the weeks went by, that perfect combination became more elusive. Suddenly, a month has passed.
It is time to develop a creative discipline. Twyla Tharpe, one of the greatest living choreographers, wrote an entire book called "The Creative Habit." Her premise is that "The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightening bolt of inspiration, maybe more." This would explain why three of my Facebook friends are participating in something called National Novel Writing Month, in which they set goals of word counts to be written each day, with the intention of having a novel written by the end of the month. At that pace, one cannot wait for the optimal set of circumstances. One must just write. Alot.
So what do I do when I don't think I have that creative spark? How do I fix it? Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love", asserts that perhaps it is not for us to fix. (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html) The ancient Greeks and Romans did not think of an individual person as creative, but rather a person was capturing the creativity of the gods, and was just a vessel to express it. It wasn't until the Renaissance that we began to believe that the individual carried around his or her creativity. Thus, if there is no creativity, it seems to be the "fault" of that person, and something that person must fix. By taking a Greek view instead of a Rennaissance view we take a bit of pressure off of the individual person. All we have to do is show up and do our best, and let the creative genius visit us.
And so I will show up, and do my best, and be creative. Thanks for joining me in that process.
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