PRIMING THE WELL
“I like to think of the Creative Well as a real stone well, like from the “Jack and Jill went up a hill” story. It’s tall and round and sits in the middle of my brain. It is usually full; not of water but of ideas and characters and premises and worlds. It’s where I go every time I sit down to write. I drop a pail into the well and pull up a bucket of magic.”
(Alysha Welliver in Scribbler blog)
When it came to writing this week’s blog I dipped into the proverbial well and came up with such a mishmash of ideas that I didn’t know where to begin sorting and sifting, trying to distill the essence or nugget of what I wanted to express from the dross of so many burbling thoughts.
One thing that stands out from the jumble is a memory of the enthusiasm and sense of potential that I felt while visiting Berkeley, and particularly while dining at Chez Panisse, the brainchild of Alice Waters, mother of California Cuisine. Not only did Waters spark a revolution in healthy, organic, and sustainably sourced cuisine, (think the farm-to-table movement), she was also inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2017 for her efforts to transform public education by using food to teach, nurture, and empower young people.
Reading about Waters’ multifaceted career motivated me to reflect on other men and women who inspire me, to see what qualities they have in common, and perhaps come up with a recipe for living not only an examined life but one infused with creativity and enthusiasm.
One ingredient in this recipe for creativity has to be a willingness to leave the beaten path, my “known” world, my habitual patterns of thought and action. This doesn’t require exotic world travel so much as an ability to be curious about the world around me. Even the beaten path I take to my chai tea destination is different every day if I’m attentive to my surroundings. The light, the weather, the people I pass on the way vary from one day to the next. I believe that any aspiring writer, artist, photographer, or mystic is challenged to find inspiration and wonder in the “ordinary”. I think of Martha Stewart elevating the domestic (I typoed demonic) “drudgery” of keeping house and feeding a family to the fine art of cheffing, decorating and entertaining. Which leads me to a second ingredient in my recipe for creativity.
Though schedules, structure and self-discipline might seem anathema to the flow of creativity, I believe it is necessary to remove mental and physical clutter if I want to create anything of value. This means organizing my time and setting priorities, determining what I can reasonably hope to achieve in the time available to me (so I can publish my blog on a Monday, among other things).
Rightly or wrongly, I have made a list of items I was compelled to tick off before leaving the island two days hence. It is this to-do list that sits atop any inspiration I might hope to draw from today’s creative well, and that wakes me up at 1:30 a.m. in a sweat of unsolvable (first world) problems. This in turn moves me to a third ingredient of , my creativity recipe. GO PLAY OUTSIDE…preferably in the daytime.
Whether from paralysis by analysis, or a too-long to-do list, when my creativity is blocked I find my mental and emotional well-being are best served by a change of scenery. A brisk walk, swim, bike, hike or paddle expands my sense of things, and shrinks my mental obstacles into insignificance. So here I go!
And now, it’s tomorrow. In fact, it’s getting closer to Wednesday. I woke with a mildly panicky feeling that I had writers’ block, on top of — or snowed under by — things I couldn’t resolve but which wouldn’t give me any peace until they were solved. So much clutter to dispense with. So many balls in the air. But, by this evening, the lion’s share of my to-do list has been done.
Which brings me to a final ingredient in the (as yet incomplete) recipe for creativity: when in need, call for reinforcements. Creativity doesn’t flourish in a vacuum. For each task on my to-do list I recruited (aka begged, borrowed or coerced) people whose expertise far exceeded my abilities. If you’re having a spiritual emergency I’m your person, but for landscape planning, interior design, de-cluttering or personal beautifying, I need people (which, according to Barbra Streisand makes me extremely lucky). And I do feel very lucky. And very relieved to have had help ticking off the mother of all to-do lists, so I can now leave the island with a sense of peace, harmony and ease of well-being. If not enthusiasm and creativity.
(I’m thinking this blog/recipe should have been about productivity, but perhaps that goes hand in hand with creativity. Well, too late now. It’s bed time).
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.