I’ve been hanging out with Anne Lamott and Madeleine L’Engle and Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson lately. And we’ve been having some interesting conversations.
L’Engle is telling me to take time for “being” in order to truly listen to God and myself, and Wilke urges me to ask in the deepest moment of my night if I can live without being an artist. Dickinson wrote for no one, which bleeds through in her beautiful honesty, and invites me to live that way as well. And Lamott? Well, Lamott is giving me permission to be comfortable in my own faith-skin–daring me to, in fact.
But, more than anything, these mentors are challenging me to ask deep and purposed questions of myself–questions that will call out the building blocks of my own words and lyrics. Problem is, I’m still not sure what questions I need to ask.
So, once again, I draw from the most vastly renewable resource among internet: you.
What soul-mining questions draw out the deepest treasures in a person? If you ask, I’ll go digging.
So I’ve spent the first three months of the year spending a pretty consistent amount of time on the elliptical. Finally. The secret? Watching Alias while swishing. The forty-five minutes fly by.
And then I got all into Alias and then I broke my rule and watched an occasional episode while *not* on the elliptical and, like magic, my mind and body go into “let’s get moving” mode (you know, like when you’ve had one-too-many cups of coffee).
Interesting…. I think the thing that’s happening in my brain is kinda like Pavlov’s salivating dog (I. Hate. Saliva.) experiment, except with more agreeable results. It’s a trigger.
Ooohhh! I can use this to make our brains get all creative! I need a trigger. A set of steps.
Right around the time I was thinking about how to trigger myself (that sounds awful), an article came out about the creative’s routine–their mundane morning routine that gets them in gear. This is some of what the 99 percent had to say:
The different elements of the routine become associated with this creative state of mind, so that they can re-enter it by simply repeating the steps of the routine.
So I decided I’d go for it, and I’d start using this method before any intense time of creativity. I needed something that’d take about 15 minutes. Get me away from technology. And still my mind.
I talked to Drew about it, put a routine together, and the results? Well. They were sparkling. They were mesmerizing. They were sedately explosive.
They were, to say the least, fruitful…
I decided to go analog the other day, to jar my brain and get the juices flowing. No computer. No couch. No Masterwriter. Just floor & pen & paper & guitar & iPhone recorder. The effects, 3 hours later, were pleasantly surprising:
Whole point of this post? If you’re in a creative funk, try something drastically different… Change forces us to adjust/react/realign. And that takes creativity. Your brain, by force of change, will immediately jump into creative mode. Don’t believe me? Try it.
(Link, if player doesn’t appear.)
Some days I have to remind myself that this molded dust and clay holds life. And not the “oh wait, is my heart still beating?” kind of life. But Life. Capital L. Life.
Some days it just gets boring. Or frustrating. Or impossible (Don’t go all Mt. 19:26 on me. You know what I mean. It just feels impossible.)
And in those days I try to remind myself that this is just the way Life is lived right now. All dusty and messy and fallen. And the only true test of knowing whether or not I’m Living is if I’m Breathing.
Not breathing in the breath of lungs. But the Breath of Life. That is what we were given in The Beginning. And that is what will sustain us until The End.
If you are looking for signs of Life among your days, look for Breath. Look for the sacred inhale and exhale. And if you can’t find it–if you can’t locate that sacred Breath, then turn your face to Heaven and just Breathe. Let that inhalation be a prayer–a prayer that you will see Life…
