Workshop/Salon VII: A Time to Every Purpose

CREATIVITY and TIME

While spending time in the USA again, after nine months in Scotland, the impressions that are coming are almost overwhelming! I'll skip all the cultural details (will post more about that at my OTHER blog) but these two pictures pretty much describe my thoughts today about creativity and time.

On the one hand - especially if you are a dog - you can live for the moment, be in the moment, and oh does that moment look fantastic!? Cool green (tickless, flea-less) grass of Scotland, a summer's day by the river, no worries, no memories, no anticipations.

Or you can be like my dear father, whom we all call Daddy Roy, recently watering his amazing, huge veggie-and-flower garden just ten minutes before we all got in the car to head off for a couple weeks' travel. He tends his garden with care and concern and much labour of love. He times his travels to be back to deal with its needs. He has an annual cycle of must-do tasks to keep it going. It is a high priority in his life. And those of us who are recipients of the organic garlic and onions in his mailed care packages are glad he does!

So some water the grass and some just wallow in it.

Our creative process is a combination of both of these alternatives, and more. Sometimes we can just wallow in it, those fantastic lost-times of creating, where there is no past or future, just NOW.

Other times we have serious tasks and must-does and MUST keep our eye on the history of our garden, what we have learned it needs, and the future of it, if we are to keep it alive and thriving and feeding us and those in our circle of communication/sharing.

The trick is figuring out which mode one is in, or should or could be in, at any given moment.

The other day I was happily reunited with three women writer friends here in Jemez Springs, New Mexico - a reunion of our writing workshop that we have had since 1996. I was lamenting a period of creative blockage last winter and one of them said - with a twinkle in her eye - something about letting the work tell you what it needs, that she had read something about that on some creativity enhancement website...so my words were handed back to me on a plate and I had to munch them down along with the salsa and quiche and champagne of our reunion feast!

I think the hardest and most important part is for us to try to keep that big picture about our lives and cycles and creative processes...that it is never a static thing, that there is a time for this and a time for that and to not worry so much if we are in a stagnant or hybernating or ruminating mode. Because it will change. It WILL change.

Oh hell, I think a bit of quoting is called for here!

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace,
I swear it's not too late

(The Byrds' lyrics based on Ecclesiastes 3:1)

WHICH CYCLE ARE YOU IN? CAN YOU CHOOSE ONE OF THE "A TIME TO'S" FROM THESE LYRICS AND EXPOUND FOR US? I THINK IT COULD HELP US ALL, TO SEE THAT WE DO EACH HAVE DIFFERENT SEASONS IN OUR CREATIVE WORK. FOR YOU, IS IT A TIME TO WEEP? A TIME TO REFRAIN? A TIME TO GATHER OR A TIME TO BREAK DOWN?



WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOST(ESS) A WORKSHOP HERE? It's easy and fun, you don't need any computer skills, I do that part for you...just email me if you'd like to discuss an idea! stirlingshadow@yahoo.co.uk


RECOMMENDED READING:

David Tucker's LATE FOR WORK (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Company 2006). Here is a journalist and poet who uses the day-to-day material of his life in a newsroom to create stunning, powerful poetry and cultural commentary. Winner of the 2005 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry (Bread Loaf Writer's Conference). I grabbed this one off the shelf (leaning perilously over the railing in the coffee shop part of B&N to get at it!) and had to buy it - not because I spilled coffee on it but because I wanted to finish reading it! This one is good if you feel your working life is interfering with your creative life. Excellent inspiration!

From "David Tucker: Poet of the Newsroom Finds Wider Audience" by Barbara Bedway, the following:

"Of course, poets don't face deadlines unless they're self-imposed -- and Tucker, who can take years to finish a poem, has learned to accommodate both currents of time. A day 'goes by in a blur,' he says. 'Journalists are trying to slow it down, for the reader. Poets are trying to stop it forever, if they can.'"


(Thanks to Cat McCallum for the great Shaka photae, above)

DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO!

Michelle Miller Allen
SpiritBear
www.greenphoenixproductions.com