#22 Reflections on our creative lives
What we think to ourselves
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This week, I collected a few authors reflecting on their thoughts about being creative and what we can learn from others. From musings about career crises to what others think and how they approach their meals, we can see ourselves in those relatable thoughts. Although very different in style, both our first and last articles discuss how our families and the people around us have a profound effect on our lives and relationships with books and other creative arts.
Returning to Angelou
and my own returning voice.
My love and admiration for Maya Angelou really is no secret or accident. The women in my family loved Angelou more than any other writer. Her books were essential reading, second only to the Bible. They were regularly missing from their book-shelved position and psalmic in everyone’s reading voice. My grandmother, a woman who prefers to be told the stories than to read them, kept a number of dog-eared Angelou poetry collections in her home, as well as in the shed that we would frequently visit and clean out during our summer holidays.
Questions from the eye of a career crisis...
The midlife storm is tossing me around this week.
How do you know what advice to take when you’re surrounding yourself with ALL the advice?
How do you know what to do when you can see things from both sides? The pros and the cons. Which pros are worth the compromise? Which cons are dealbreakers?
How do you discern who’s giving good advice and who’s selling you something?
The Real Work of Being an Artist
Building the courage to look pretentious
It’s thrilling and lonely. Dangerous and the only way for your soul to survive intact.
For me, the risk is that someone will think I’m being a pretentious asshole.
It’s a risk I’m willing to take. I’ve tasted the freedom of living life as an artist, and I cannot go back to seeing the world any other way.
That question, "what's for dinner?"
And how everyone else is answering it.
Honestly, I can’t get enough. I’m fascinated by other people’s dinner routines and I have no idea why. I’ll add to this that there are several trends to showcase “real” dinners or “single mom dinners” or “dinner in a trailer park.” I appreciate seeing these real glimpses into life, after the years of having only overly photoshopped and impossible-to-recreate Pinterest and Instagram photos brought to us by food bloggers. It’s refreshing to see dinners that feature ground beef and cans of cream of mushroom soup.
on patience
the nurturer of the creative spirit
Although most well-known for his woodblock print Under the Wave off Kanagawa (popularly called The Great Wave), Hokusai produced a staggering 30,000 works in his lifetime. He began drawing at the age of six; for the next 80 odd years, his brush never stopped moving. His works, produced over two centuries ago, are ubiquitous today — a ubiquity that begs explanation.
Aging Out
It takes a lifetime...
I was their descendant, a pale girl with dancer legs, a shapely figure, a wide face, quick wit, dark sparkly eyes, a hearty and infectious laugh, and the ability to debate any issue. Any issue. Anything. A busy girl, a loud girl, and a sad girl, too. A girl who wrote bad poetry on the edge of all her school notebooks. Wrote in the margins and on the sly, in secret.
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Thank you for including Kindred Spirits in your round-up! Bookmarking every other post featured to read with my morning coffee ❤️
Thanks so much for including my post in here! Looking forward to reading your other recommendations ❤️