Creativity pt 2

We’re going to travel down a little path in our mind. Maybe it hasn’t been traveled in quite a long time. It might be overgrown with weeds and brambles. Or it might be trampled smooth. Are there benches along the path? The journey can be just as enthrall­ing as the destination. This particular little path leads to our Creative Laboratory.

It’s housed in a brick building, with no windows and only one tiny door. We’re going to remodel!

littlehouse

We don’t need such a sturdy building here. There are no hurricanes, no floods, no lightning, it doesn’t even rain! So, get your work boots on and your heavy-duty gloves and let’s tear down those walls!!

Our Creative Laboratory is located in a meadow. Pine and cedar trees surround the meadow. Is that waves I hear in the distance? We certainly don’t need those brick walls. We can use the bricks for other things! We’ll make a BBQ, so we can have a cookout and invite friends over to create with us. We’ll build a nice patio. We’ll save some for later use.

paintbrushes

That is SO much better! Stand in the middle of the laboratory and look around. The forbidding brick walls are gone. Instead of no windows, now it’s all one big window on the world. That tiny door that limited our entrance is gone. Now we can enter from any point or corner we desire.

Look around! What do you see? We see our mead­ow, trees, green grass, birds, flowers, clouds, sky….the list goes on and on. Look around the inside of your laboratory. We see our art supplies, our fabric stashes, our drawers of treasures. Does this encour­age us to be more creative?

Granted, this is a mind exercise and the Laboratory doesn’t really exist, although in our minds it cer­tainly does. Not many of us are fortunate enough to have such a meadow nearby. But it doesn’t matter!

Let’s tear down those boundaries and forget all the negative/forbidding bits and pieces thrown at us over the years regarding creativity.

Remember I mentioned ‘wasting time’ or our creative efforts being labeled unproductive in the last issue? When you were a child, did you enjoy daydreaming?

dancer

Or for that matter, do you enjoy it now? 🙂 Can you remember lying on the grass in the backyard, watching the clouds and trying to figure out what they look like? Or turning over and watching the blades of grass? Letting dirt or sand sift through your fingers? Can you remember the sights, sounds and feelings of those experiences? When you look at the world through a child’s eyes, it becomes bigger and greater and more exciting. It’s a place to explore and discover and learn. As we become older and move into adulthood, there’s not much about the world around us that is exciting. We’re always in a hurry, on our way to work, to the store, to school. In order to have our breath taken away by the world around us, we have to encounter something big. Yosemite, Niagra Falls, New York City, the Grand Canyon. I’d like for us to learn to find wonder in our world. The yard, the park, the house, it doesn’t matter where. It could be lying in bed reading a book, it could be doing the dishes and noticing the colors of the bubbles. So get comfy and start daydreaming! Try to spend a few minutes a day doing this.

paint

Take some time to look, I mean REALLY look at something. Maybe it’s the fish tank, or a houseplant, or your garden, or just the dirt. Try to do this for a few days, maybe a week. When you find something that seems to be more interesting than the other things, study it. Draw pictures of it, photograph it, plan a quilt of it, make a greeting card of it, use it in a story. The possibilities are endless. Let’s try to open our mind and let our creativity take root, grow and flourish in our own meadows.

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