“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines and music… you will automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry period in my life because I feed myself well.” Ray Bradbury, who’s written a LOT of books.
Could this somehow possibly miraculously be true?
Dear Songwriting,
It’s not you. It’s me.
Actually, I’m not sure if it’s me. It’s the colors and shapes and light and shadows.
Can’t you see them? And can’t you see that they have me all confused?
Or maybe I’m not confused. Maybe I just need to clear my mind, free the words, and let them come back to me wrapped in tones and textures. Maybe if my eyes start working, the words will be more distinct and more true and less noisy and less wordy. Maybe I just need a blank space to think in. And maybe I am coloring in that space with things I see everyday.
Maybe.
It’s all running together, and melodies pop out of the energy of the images. I can hear them. And it’s all coming from the same place and it all feels the same in my head–the same as when I was younger and I would draw and paint and draw some more. And my mind was filled with pictures and replications of the world and interpretations of life.
Remember where you came from? That’s where you came from. And I’m convinced that in all this gestation you will grow and you will sing stronger than before.
And you are me and this is me and it’s all me. It’s still me. It’s always been me.
And I still love you,
mandy
Art is an echo–of beauty–of message–of line and rhyme and color and tone. What do you hear? What are you saying to your soul so it can whisper back in paint on canvas, in word on page, in lyric on melody? Are you listening? Are you really listening, processing, thinking, and repeating? Or are you just parroting?
Artists don’t parrot. They reflect. They whisper. They sing. They soar. They say. They don’t just parrot.
Xeroxed art is no art at all. The art of echoes change and shift the tone, based on the material with which it’s being reflected. One, are we reflectable material? And two, do we alter the tone accordingly? Do we process it and manipulate it and make it our own?
Einstein advises that we hide our sources… If we are strong enough the echo will be a sound all its own. Are we strong enough? Are we loud enough? Is our art its own entity? Or are we xeroxing our way through creativity? That is not creativity at all.
Find your voice. Find something to say, and say it. Say it with your own words and with your own colors and your own tones. And don’t worry that a bit of someone else’s voice is in the mix, but focus on your voice as it adds layers and depth in a beautiful harmony of expression and art. Partnering. We are creating and singing together in one voice. Join the chorus.
Echo.
Create.
Say something worth repeating. Worth echoing.
The future is now!
Ok. Let’s not be that dramatic. But, the future is in the journey we take with others who are like-minded. I’ll give you an example of the future, by looking at the past.
Ever heard of the Inklings, with their fabulous British accents and cigar smoke? The accents and smoke belonged to the likes of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And legend says that some lighthearted challenge between the two of them birthed The Chronicles of Narnia and those Hobbit creatures. Or something like that.
So, maybe the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia series will shine forth from us! No? Well, I’m confident that something will transpire (oh! See? I’m already using smart-people words!).
I’ve witnessed this in my own life–the surge of creativity through communal energy–through the “us.”
You can probably relate. You probably have a few community relationships that you draw from already. But, my hope is that the conversation and community in this corner of the internet becomes a well of inspiration and ideas for you.
Until then: Who’s your “us?” Who inspires you? Who cheers you on? Who runs with you and alongside you?
I’m all into lists right now. I’m pretty sure it’s because they give me a false-sense of order in this “growingly-chaotic” season of life (I know that’s not a grammatically correct phrase, but my brain is suffering the effects…):
What inspires you?
