The Creative Life

This week’s theme

 

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.”

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.”

“The extraordinary is what art is about.”

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place.

Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.”

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything.”

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

That’s poet, Mary Oliver.

If you don’t think this pertains to what you do, I think you’re in the wrong business.

Your job is to create something wonderful and new and moving every time you turn on your mic.

Every time!

You may fail more often than you succeed, but the job is to try, to create, and to keep on creating.