"Downtime" - Rod MacIver

A crucial consideration in creating a [creative and authentic] life,
 is downtime.  By downtime I don't mean just time away from
the work.  I don't mean time to run errands or time to watch TV,
but time for reflection and solitude.  Time to let your mind
just wander to wherever it wants to go.  Time to absorb whatever
messages the larger universe might want to send.  Time to give
the messages deep inside your inner world an opportunity
to bubble up.

Without downtime [solitude], and it does require discipline and
planning, you lose touch with yourself.  You lose perspective on
the challenges of your life, and they start to take over.  You lose
access to your creative juice.  You may think that what you are
doing is dealing with pressing issues, and that those issues are so
important that you can't afford time away, but the message your
inner world will receive is that it is not valued.  It will then
retreat, and your [creative] work, your life, will lose power.

All the major setbacks in my life have come after a protracted
period of addressing pressing issues and not taking time off to
relax my mind and gain perspective.

Rod MacIver
Artist 
Heron Dance

~

Photo from the Internet

Happy July :)

Has anyone got an igloo I can use ?

LOLOLOLOL

 

The Creative Drive - Galway Kinnell

One can have a lot of time and yet feel one has very little.
A person who wants an inner life needs what you might call
"open" time - time that hasn't already been filled before one
enters it with minor concerns, little duties.  The more
conscientious a person is, the more easily small things force
themselves into the consciousness.  Precisely because they are
so small one knows one can easily take care of them.  I keep
finding in my pockets old lists of errands that in hindsight are
incredibly trivial.  It's the fact that the items are crossed off
that 's so pathetic - the fact that I actually worried about these
tasks and actually did them.  Tillie Olson has written an essay
on the penalties of postponing serious work for the sake of
things of this kind.  It's a fine essay.  She advocates going
straight for the real work and to hell with everything else.
And she's right.  The creative drive withers away otherwise.

I produce most and write best when I have no schedule at all,
when I'm able to wander where whim carries me - both physically,
through a city or a countryside, and mentally, in reading, talking,
scribbling, thinking, whatever.  Poems don't come to me often
when solicited.

Galway Kinnell

- from an interview published in the book Walking Down the
Stairs.

Downtime is the basis of creative time.  It is important that that
time not be filled with trivial things --  errands, doing the
dishes -- but rather time to day dream, [to spend time in
"The Silence"], to meander through the backwoods, to wander
around town, notebook in hand, just in case something bubbles up.

Rod MacIver
Heron Dance

~

Art - Mystic Meandering

Vortex Art 2024

Water Whirlpool
on black paper