Good morning from New York City. What I’m thinking about today is this idea that we are all artists. It’s definitely in the zeitgeist, not only in Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act’, which I cite often. I’m seeing articles pop up and in fact I just listened in on this month’s Creative Mornings. If you don’t know about Creative Mornings, it’s an organization with chapters all over the world. They get together – physically and virtually – once a month and have very interesting authors and speakers on a whole host of topics.
Today’s session which came at just the perfect time was entitled ‘We Are All Artists’. What it really all comes down to is intentionally paying attention. Thinking of the world as your studio . Thinking of your life – how you design it, how you live it, how you nurture it – as a creative act. It’s about sensorial stimulation. It’s about making the unconscious conscious. It’s about noticing what you’re noticing, becoming the observer. And of course, it’s about living with intention.
As I’ve said before, I wax rather philosophical and woo woo to a large extent but I want to believe – and I want to hope – that all of us want to live our life with all of our senses and as conscious as possible, right? It’s so easy today to be numbed by all of the stimuli and of course the risk is that we shut down, and in doing so we fail to cultivate our interior life. Thinking of yourself as an artist and thinking of living a creative life is really about affirming your desire not to shut off your inner murmurings. If we’re overwhelmed, we tend to go numb and in the words of the poet philosopher David Whyte “we fail to cultivate the spaciousness that comes from attentive presence.” In fact, he talks about sustained attention in silence bringing the world alive again. It does take intention and effort to reorient ourselves and to make space in the midst of the distractions and the noise.
One of the things that was asked today of the group was what’s in your creative toolkit? He was talking about carrying around a notebook and colored pencils or whatever it may be to make it a habit to capture your thoughts, to ask yourself questions, to jot down things that call your attention. David Whyte calls these rituals to cultivate aliveness. In a world of output and results, it’s really about inhaling inspiration and creativity.
While I said that Wednesday is the day for questions, I want to end today with a couple of the beautiful questions that were put forth in today’s Creative Morning session. The first one is this: what is my greatest harbored hope? What would it take to bring that hope to life? Again, what is my greatest harbored hope? The second question is ‘what matters most to me? The third and last question for today is this: how can I defy the gravity of what is?
That’s super important because of course, a recurring thing for all of us is this: we need to defy the gravity of what is to make space for what deserves to be. I’ll leave you with that today. We need to defy the gravity of what is to make space for what deserves to be. Have a wonderful weekend. Until next time, from my heart to yours.
