#233: The Creativity Edition

Hello!

Happy to be popping back into your inbox on this lovely Monday morning. I’m feeling hopeful about the week and days ahead, and sending you sunshine.

I’ve been carving out tiny pockets of space for some personal projects, and excited about some upcoming travels. Maybe I’ll write to you from there. Maybe I won’t. It feels like I’m walking towards a bright light and while I’m curious what connecting to the source will do for me, I’m just grateful for its presence. I’m going to surrender to my creative urges and listen closely to my heart.

In the meantime, I put together others’ creative expressions that have been inspiring me. I hope they create an urge in you to make something. Anything.

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Poetry Corner

Autumn Painter by Iwo Zaniewski

Thoroughly enjoyed finding these poems on creativity in its many glorious forms for you, my dear reader:

1. A Literary Miss by Oliver Marble

There once was a lit'rary miss;
And all that she needed for bliss
Was some ink and a pen,
Reams of paper, and then
Thirty days to describe half a kiss.

2. Art Class by James Galvin 

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky!

The horizon moves as we move,
Making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell—

Strange radius whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
The line draws us in,

Requiring further lines,
Engendering curves, verticals, diagonals,
Urging shades, shapes, figures…

What should we place, in all good faith,
On the horizon? A stone?
An empty chair? A submarine?

Take your time. Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us.

3. The Artist Awakes by William Kershaw

Haiku as an art:
To paint a canvas broadly,
With tiny brush strokes.

4. That’s How Things Are by Phil Huffy

Do you want me to paint you a picture?
Perhaps I might author a play.
I’m not so artistic but surely would try,
for I’m over the moon, as they say.
         
Do you want me to carve you a statue
or stand up and joyfully sing,
or make, in your honor, a mountainous climb
or attempt some most dangerous thing?
 
I’d gladly prepare you an omelet.
I swear I would pay for your car
or hold you quite close as a storm intervenes                        
for I need you, and that’s how things are.

5. Sonic Fireflies by Quincy Troupe

the beauty of jazz & blues voices,
syncopation of syllables flowing
free form through improvising sentences
sluicing, embracing, metaphors glowing
eyes in the dark are words imitating
fireflies pulsating bright in a black sky
are gleaming eyes of a prowling black panther
suddenly clicking on bright as flashlight beams
under moon rays probing hidden places
isolated mysterious somewhere
deep in a buzzing alive countryside

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Links of the Week

Ray’s Hands | Image © Eames Office, LLC

• Ray’s Hands

• 12 Rules for Creativity: Grant Snider (he has a newsletter now. yay!)

• “How absurd to be alive and not really live.” -The Absurd Manifesto by Brad Montague (Brad has a newsletter too. double yay!)

• Nintendo experimented its way to a brilliant logo (yum)

• Sidekick: the web browser designed for people with ADHD

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Parting thought

“Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.”
-Tennessee Williams

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GIF by Jimmy Arca

Stay inspired,
Rohini