“Your creative work is not your baby…
If anything, you are its baby.
Everything I have ever written had brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way.
I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into.
Creativity has hand-raised me and forged me into an adult.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 233.
“I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies–not from the pathologies themselves.
But so many people think it is the other way around. For this reason, you will often meet artists who deliberately cling to their suffering, their addictions, their fears, their demons.
They worry that if they ever let go of all that anguish, their very identities would vanish.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 211.
“To yell at your creativity saying, ‘You must earn money for me!’ is sort of like yelling at a cat;
it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing in scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 154.
“Never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people’s judgments about you are
NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 121.
“Even if you grew up watching cartoons in a sugar stupor from dawn to dusk, creativity still lurks within you…”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 89.
“…Creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience…”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 72.
“Dearest Fear: Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand that you’ll be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job to do in my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do anything interesting-and, may I say, you are superb at your job. So by all means, keep doing your job, if you feel you must.
“Fear and creativity shared a womb, they were born at the same time, and they still share some vital organs. This is why we have to be careful of how we handle our fear-because I’ve noticed that when people try to kill off their fear, they often end up inadvertently murdering their creativity in the process.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. p.24.
“…Creative living is a path for the brave, We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it. We all know that fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 13.
10.27.2015
TODAY I AM giving my dog a bone…
It turns out that there are many reasons for the recent “slump” I have been feeling in my life. One of these is the lack of creativity in my life. It turns out that apparently I have a border collie in my mind, running wild!
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent article entitled “Fear is Boring, and Other Tips for Living a Creative Life” she says:
“If you have a creative mind, it’s a little bit like owning a border collie. You have to give it something to do or it will find something to do, and you will not like the thing it finds to do. So if you go to work and you leave your border collie unattended and unexercised in your apartment, you’re going to come home and find out that that border collie gave itself a job that it gave itself was probably to empty all of the stuffing out of your couch or to take every single piece of toilet paper off the roll, because it needs a job. A creative mind is exactly the same…”
I can attest to this first hand! I need to have a creative outlet or else I begin to get restless. When I have a creative outlet, a project, a direction, my mind stays in creative/productive mode. I feel excited, exhilarated, alive, and energized, scheming how to bring it to fruition.
When I don’t, I begin to get bored, and my mind shifts into destructive mode accompanied by its rotten fruits of judging, comparing, blaming, criticizing, depression, and anxiety.
“My experience with having a creative mind is that if I don’t give it a task, a ball to chase, a stick to run after, some ducks to herd, I don’t know, something, it will turn on itself. It’s really important for my mental health that I keep this dog running. So give your dog a job, and don’t worry about whether the outcome is magnificent or eternal, whether it changes people’s lives, whether it changes the world, whether it changes you, whether it’s original, whether it’s groundbreaking, whether it’s marketable. Just give the dog a job, and you’ll have a much happier life, regardless of how it turns out.” (retrieved October 25, 2015, http://ideas.ted.com/fear-is-boring-and-other-tips-for-living-a-creative-life/)
So, it is high time to give this wild and crazy border collie that is wreaking havoc something to do, a creative venue. This blog is an effort to do just that…
TODAY I AM…giving my dog a bone.
project warrior queen 