I’ve been out of the blogosphere for a month.
When I began the countdown to publishing my book, I cut back to writing my blog twice a month, rather than weekly. Then, as the deadline drew nearer, I stopped blogging altogether.
Oh, what I learned from that experience!
I keep relearning an essential truth: treat my creativity with respect. Nurture it daily, and don’t demand that it perform like a circus animal—that kills the spirit. Creativity is not tame and orderly; it’s a deep, mysterious process.
The moment I put demands on my creativity, the muse retreats like the moon at morning. Inspiration and imagination get blocked, and nothing works.
But when I shift from demanding that my creativity produce, to playing with my imagination, my creativity slowly begins to flow again.
I call this “seeding my subconscious.”
This morning, I felt really blocked. So I looked at objects on my desk for something to paint, just to play, without any expectation that I would produce something “good.”
I sketched a gray conch shell.
I put watercolor on paper, quickly sketching sunflowers in a blue vase.
I played with my sun and moon motif, using a fountain pen with a semi-flexible nib.
Still feeling blocked, I chose four words (conch shell, sunflowers, sun, and moon), then I wrote a short vignette, using each word somewhere in the story. It felt like I was in the flow, at times, but most of what I wrote seemed flat and uninspired.
That’s okay. The muse is temperamental.
The shapes, colors, and words from this morning are all offerings to my subconscious, little nourishing seeds for it to absorb, or use to bring forth something new.
And that experience brought me to write this blog post, after waking this morning, unsure I could write anything.
That’s a good start to my week.