Another from the Ann Arbor set. (You can see all I have so far here.)
I'm still working my way through my many, many photos from the past couple of months. This one strikes me, though. It's a rather emphatic example, for me, of the creative life.
People say it over and over again, in books like "Do the Work" by Stephen Pressfield or "Mugging the Muse" by Holly Lisle, and in countless blogs, but the idea is: you don't wait for the Muse, you get to work, and she meets you there.
She usually meets me in the shower or while I'm driving, but those are brief visits: if I go down to the diner and get to work, she usually will hang around.
I'm struggling to work, but I'm working. She'll find me with a damn fine cup of coffee and a pencil, or camera, in hand.
You may have seen it, but I'm sharing it again - a most excellent graphic representation of some wise words from Ira Glass of This American Life:
Labels: Ann Arbor, creativity, ira glass, May Lee, meeting the muse, NanoTime Photography, work, writing
¶ 11:40 AM 2 Comments
After writing yesterday about Nick tearing up the carpet, I got into the act to help the process move faster. We split up the tasks, so that he was on "slicing and dicing" duty to tear the carpet into rollable strips for easier transport, and I was on staple/nail duty - given the happy task of pulling staples up from the floor with a pliers, and using a hammer & screwdriver combination to pry up the wooden trim nailed into the floorboards along the walls.
THIS WAS AWESOME. Nick said it was boring, but I had a great time. I love physical labor - it frees my mind to wander around and play with ideas. Also, I love creative destruction. I love tearing things up. I love making a huge mess and getting filthy. Or, as Austin Kleon might say , "Creativity is subtraction". I highly recommend a little creative destruction for getting the juices flowing.
While we were also moving furniture around to pull up the carpet, we decided to also rid ourselves of some of the heavy, unwieldy furniture. So the bulky gigantic chest of drawers/mirror that a former symphony co-worker gave me for free? Down to the curb. We earned pizza and beer moving that thing. Heavy ornamental screen? Gone. I see that someone picked it up from our curb already this morning. And much joy may they have of these items (or, money).
Once you start, though, downsizing gets to be addictive. "Let's throw everything away!" Well, probably not everything, but we're now committed to a campaign of cleaning out the closets and the attic, and taking stock of which furniture items are going to be discarded/put into a yard sale when we (hopefully) move next year.
Now, of course, my office is a tremendous mess, since it received the overflow from the bedroom. I'm kind of revved up to throw more stuff away and organize today.
A note on the carpet - we found a date sticker on the last strip of it. Feb 14 2007. We bought the house in May of 2007. So the previous owners painted the bedroom and slapped the carpet down over the damaged hardwood. Cheeky.
Labels: austin kleon, creativity, destruction, home repairs, photography, removing the unnecessary, ript it up and start again
¶ 4:47 AM 0 Comments
