Category: Creativity
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Outlet Shopping…
I’ll bet you do some creative thing each day that brings something new or improved into your world. My friends who throw pots have homes filled with clay creations. My painting friends grace their walls (and others’) with colorful scenes. I’m often surprised by unexpected beauty. The other day it was a naked tree painted…
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The WHYs Have It…
On Monday we recognized those who make our world a better place. Why do they do it? Maybe they wouldn’t answer with “It’s what I do!” A more likely answer might be to pay the bills, put food on the table, or it’s what I could find. I have a problem answering the question “What…
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Welcome to the Improv…
I am thankful for the smiling faces that fill my screen for morning writing times and evening class times. Unlike most people, I am not so over zoom. Virtual meeting spaces are where I hang with like-minded folks. Last week, a handful of us listened, wrote and shared words in a generative writing class. Below…
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Secondary Play…
Do you love what you do each day? The lucky ones get to spend their days creating beauty in whatever form and go home with a paycheck. Equally lucky are those who are filled to the brim with the satisfaction of accomplishing a previously thought to be impossible goal. As humans we yearn for someone…
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Temporary Tempo…
Consider ebbs and flows, waxing and waning, growth and fallow times. I know they are necessary phases. Yet when slow times come, I need reminding that my lento tempo will soon return to moderato or even presto. Can you tell I’m listening to Chopin as I write this? Music employs lilts and pick-ups to make…
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Do One Thing…
ELAN Principle 6 is Make Things Happen, the basic premise being to be active in your world, rather than sitting by, sitting out or sitting in. Pick one thing to accomplish this week. We know writing goals and breaking them down into tiny, chewable bits leads to success. Taking a Daddy bite out of a…
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Play/Money…
Creatives live to play but there is a flipside: money. It may be sharp edges rubbing against the roundness, but commerce is necessary to share our gifts with the wider world. Otherwise, what’s the point? Picture toppling towers of handmade and thrown pots, each one a thing of sacred beauty, closed to the world for…
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Square Peg…
Being a square peg means the world’s view of perfect roundness rubs against your sharp edges. Roundness means no friction, no tension, no change. It means being okay with the way things are, never seeing a better, or more creative, way. I’m grateful to every artist who resists the rounding. They see with a painful…
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Funky Flunkdom…
Sometimes I feel like the dullest tack in the drawer, or the greenest member of the group. Such doubts are deeply internalized even though I don’t flounder at the bottom of the sea of smarts. I live on the curve and seek new growth activities, so multiple areas of interest chop given hours into bits…
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Settling In…
I heard recently that we are meant to be unsettled. That seems counterintuitive to the conventional aim of peaceful balance or equilibrium. Only a few times have I felt all types of serenity; mental and emotional and physical, at once. I’m not meant to be still or quiet, at least not for long. I am…
Patty Mayeux Blog 