The students have returned from their long winter break, and things are very busy around the University this week with meetings and appointments throughout the day. It's been difficult to steal away, but I wanted to give a little update to last week's post about setting aside writing time as part of my Daily Routines, and my
Here's what I observed about last week:
The evenings after work are tough. While I did make some time to go back and read through work I've already written, making small edits and tweaks here and there, it was also the case that two of the evenings last week were devoted to other obligations--a much needed haircut, cleaning the bathroom, and a few other perfectly unglamorous, but necessary tasks.
I also learned this: I am good for an hour at most after work and then I need to be done for the day.
But, the good news is this: I wrote on both Saturday and Sunday for a stretch of time (even longer on Sunday--about three hours), and I believe I have a piece (one that's about a year old now) finally ready for submission.
And this feels very, very good.
In my ongoing pursuit of words, voices, conversations and advice about how artists find balance and nourish and nurture their craft, I stumbled upon some of the coolest pieces collected by Maria Papova, the author and curator of all things creative at www.Brainpickings.org.
Maria devotes quite a bit of page space to creative collaboration and the meditations of artists on the practice of feeding one's mind, heart, spirit, and creative energy. There's so much good stuff on this site (I'm excited to keep exploring), but one piece that really stuck with me is from Anais Nin, called, "Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Creativity." Yes! Because it is. This is a beautiful excerpt from the fourth volume of Nin's diary:
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
Check out more brainpickings here. Hope your week is off to a happy, inspired start.
Cheers!
(top photo: www.workspaces.tumblr.com--thanks!)
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