Reading Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic this morning.
Love this:
…ideas are alive, ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, ideas do have a conscious will, ideas do move from soul to soul, ideas will always try to seek the swtftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).
This is the best description of why one should show up and do the work, daily, hourly if need be. If you don’t show up, there will be no path. And the path gets weedy. She says if you don’t use them, ideas move on. I have at least 10 book starts and can affirm that they do indeed move on because if I let them sit, the energy goes away. She says you have to commit/contract with ideas and dive in.
Back on 2006 I used to write not just one but two daily blogs (one on MySpace and one on my website blog). I did that for years. Then one year I decided to change things around, change the rhythm a bit and found myself slowing down writing considerably.
Now I don’t claim to have written earth shaking pieces back then, but I will say that ideas came more readily. Because I am out of practice, I find it more difficult to open and find something to write about. And I also know that if I keep pushing myself to show up to this page, more ideas will start coming through for me to muse on. So when I read this about ideas this morning, it truly resonated with me. It exactly matched holding a space in community based organizing for folks to stand in and come into their power, and it exactly matched my best art: put my hands in clay, start off in a direction, allow what comes through to come through.
The part I haven’t been doing lately is showing up for practice. The fact that I’m blogging again with any kind of regularity, however, shows that I have made a commitment to my writing self, my artist self, to create a space for ideas to come through. I think that the open space doesn’t just hold to the genre one is showing up for. I think that creativity of any sort begets creativity of every sort.
Because selling real estate is new to me, I am open to creative ideas. And trusting that creativity will beget creativity. Also brainstorming is very creative, and I’m just now coming into how much being in a community of people who hold a space for *me* to be safe, opens channels that might otherwise be choked with mud and weeds (see this week’s musings on cleaning the pond – I did not consciously choose this segue but it came when I wrote about open channels…and THAT is proof of this pudding!).
What also came through as I read Liz this morning, seemingly not appropo of anything here, but definitely connected to my word for the year, was this:
Because the center moves, balance [my word for the year that I’m getting a running start on], sometimes looks unbalanced from the outside.
The pivot point has changed and in order to balance (think of a seesaw with the pivot point moved way to one end of the seesaw) you’re way up in the air or way down low to kee the balance.
Don’t listen to what others see. Feel what you know in your own body.
And trust those channels. So I’m trusting that writing that down will have some import for future use.
Do you have a place to store ideas that run through? How do you capture them? And how long do they last?
1 Comment
This “idea” concept of hers is basically how I think of creative energy and the actual doing and working on projects. But I think that energy is always there around us if we show up…if we open up to receive it. 🙂
I tend to hand write ideas down–whether it is lists or how-to information or sketches. I make a goal list for the year–which is nothing more than one big to-do, to-try, and idea list so that whenever I feel good I can easily go to the list and pick something off and start. I know full well I will never finish everything on my long list each year, but I move them on to the list for the next year. Oh, and I group them into categories, too–LOL! 😉