Chasing Your Muse

I love to write. Words give me a sense of both freedom and control in a way that nothing in my life ever has (or ever will, I suspect). I spend as much time writing inside my head as I do writing on a computer screen or on a page. And when I don’t get those words out and into some written format, they stay in a confused jumble inside my head and drive me crazy.

So the fact that I haven’t been blogging much over the past month or two is making me feel very sad. And incomplete. And lonely. And guilty.

I will admit that my 40 days of Lenten blogging both excited and drained me. I loved the exercise of having to write on a given topic (one not of my own choosing) every single day. I loved the challenge of taking a photograph based on a phrase or concept and then having to write something about it. As an intellectual challenge, I found it thrilling, and exciting, and invigorating. And yet, at the same time, finding time to both write and take an appropriate photograph was a very difficult challenge. I often felt a sense of guilt, as if I were abandoning time spent with my children in favor of time spent writing a blog entry. Every day was a trade-off; every day I had to give something up in order to find the time to write a blog.

For 40 days, I struggled with a sense of guilt, a sense that I was spending time on something frivolous when I should have been focusing on my children. My children, who give me a sense, not of freedom and control, but of purpose and meaning. And the fact that I had been neglecting them in order to write also made me feel very sad. And incomplete. And lonely. And guilty.

But aren’t both writing and parenting a trade-off? Don’t they both require a kind of separation, a kind of breaking away? Writing requires breaking away from the world around you and giving yourself time to get inside your own head. And parenting requires breaking away from all the demands of everyday life (laundry, showers, grocery shopping, making dinner) to focus on your children. Both are continual, constant demands. Neglecting either of those roles, writer or parent, results in a sense of guilt, or lost time, or missing a moment that will never happen again. Both the muse and the childhoods are fleeting.

I spent the 40 days of Lent responding to the muse; I spent the days since responding to the children. And now I am trying to respond once again to the call of the muse, but hopefully without sacrificing too much time with my children. I am trying to let my children be an inspiration rather than an impediment. I am trying to blend both my passions by letting my children serve as my muse and my inspiration.

And that is truly what my children are: an inspiration. They inspire me to be not only a better parent, but also a better human being. In the words of Stephen Sondheim, “Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn what to be…careful before you say, ‘Listen to me.’ Children will listen.” Even when I don’t mean for them to watch me, to imitate me, to learn from me, to listen to me, they do. They say what I say and do what I do. If I mutter a nasty remark about another driver, my son will ask me about it. If I criticize my daughter about something, she will repeat that criticism. I don’t get to pick and choose the behaviors that my children imitate. They imitate everything they see, so I need to be careful – and aware – of what they see.

And because of that, I continue to write. Because I want them to follow their muse. I want them to chase their passion. I want them to do what they love, even if they find that it requires sacrificing something else. I want them to learn – from me, or from anywhere else – that it is worth giving up some things in order to do what you love, what excites you, what you have passion for. I want them to find their own muse, and to follow her. Because wherever she leads them, it will be a wonderful place. 

The Art of Making Art

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly artistic person. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life; my attempts at a self-portrait are barely recognizable as human, never mind as myself; and the only thing I’d ever be able to sculpt from a lump of clay would be, well, a lump of clay. I do, however, consider myself to be creative. And there are two places where I consider myself most creative: at the stove and at the sewing machine.

Although I generally like projects that require precision, I dislike the need for perfect accuracy in baking, so my kitchen exploits have always leaned more toward cooking than baking. Baking involves chemical reactions and balanced equations, and a bit too much of this or not quite enough of that changes not just the taste but the texture, and indeed the entire composition. You can’t just “play with” the amount of baking soda or salt or butter in a pastry recipe and come out with a good result.

Cooking, in contrast, allows the chef a huge amount of creative freedom. Recipe calls for shallots but you don’t have any? Throw in some onions, maybe some scallions, whatever you happen to have on hand that sounds good. Like it spicy? Go ahead, double the Tabasco. Got a more delicate palate? Scant that tablespoon of chili powder. Leave out what’s not to your taste, add things that aren’t called for but that sound interesting, test and taste and fiddle and create.

My favorite cooking category for creativity is soup. I rarely use a recipe for soup. I pretty much start with a basic idea, perhaps “chicken soup” or “bean soup,” so I pour some chicken or beef broth into a pot and start adding whatever I have on hand that sounds good. Some vegetables, some meat, some pasta, some herbs. The problem is that I usually keep thinking of more and more good things to add, and although the final result is invariably delicious, there also tends to be a lot more of it than I intended by the time I’m done.

This weekend I discovered that making a hat is very much like making soup: You start with a general idea, but then you look around you and keep finding wonderful additions, and you end up with a delicious concoction but one that is quite different – and significantly more voluminous – than your initial idea.

The reason I was making a hat is that my husband and I were attending a Kentucky Derby party. We had attended the party last year, and it included a competition for the best hat. My hat had been one of the winners. 

That particular hat was intended to be tall, voluminous, and bold. I knew I would have a tough time outdoing myself in terms of sheer size, so I decided to take a totally different direction and make a funky but petite fascinator. I poked around my sewing table and came up with a piece of fake leather that I had bought to make a grill cover that I could use for a base. A few more minutes of poking unearthed some lime green chiffon left over from a Tinkerbell costume I had made for my daughter a few years ago. I made a couple of small chiffon florets and stitched them to the base, but although the color was striking, the overall effect was a bit dull. So I dug out a few fancy buttons I had cut off an old, worn-out dress and added them to the flower centers. Better, but still too two-dimensional. I needed a bit of architectural structure. Perhaps some brightly colored pipe cleaners? A quick forage through my kids’ art drawer yielded only brown pipe cleaners, and once curled they didn’t have the height or visual interest I had in mind. One brief Google search and one trip to the recycling bin later and I was cutting an empty water bottle into a spiral, covering it with ruched fabric, twisting it into a funky coil, and stapling it on.

My creation was beginning to earn the name of “fascinator,” but it wasn’t quite done yet. It needed some kind of backdrop behind the plastic coil, so I dug back through my fabric bag, coming up with some bits of green and white tulle. I zipped them through the sewing machine, stapled them on, and surveyed my work. It was coming together, but something was still lacking: color. The fabric was bright and eye-catching, but it needed some contrast. I had learned many years ago in a theatrical costuming class about a concept called a “poison color.” A poison color is a small splash of contrasting, even clashing, color that sets off everything around it. A bright blue dress might have a vivid orange sash as its poison color; a pale pink shawl could be held in place with a deep emerald brooch. I needed a solid contrast to my acid green. Yet another trip to my craft drawers unearthed one of the red roses that had graced last year’s hat – perfect for the Run for the Roses! And right alongside it were a few black and white feathers from last year. In for a penny, in for a pound – three or four staples later, and I had my poison. My petite, graceful, feminine, delicate fascinator was complete!

Well, okay, it was neither petite nor delicate. But it was graceful and feminine. And cool. And much like my results when I make soup, it was unlike anything I have ever made before, and I don’t think I could recreate it if I tried. But it was wonderful in its uniqueness. And in its creativity. I suppose, if you were feeling generous, you could even call it art.

If You Must Sin, Sin Boldly

When I was in college, I performed in a symphonic band under a conductor who often told his players, “If you must sin, sin boldly.” We usually heard it while rehearsing a new piece, when a particular section or performer would make a tentative entrance, unsure of an unfamiliar melody or harmony or rhythm. We were inevitably scolded for being hesitant, whether the notes we were playing were right or wrong. The conductor preferred that we play a wrong note confidently than to sneak in, unnoticed, while playing the correct part.

I find that adage to be applicable to many creative endeavors. You might not be 100% sure of what you are doing, but it’s better to throw yourself into it, heart and soul, and fail, than it is to hold back, give less than your all, and kind-of-sort-of-succeed. Creativity by its nature involves risk. For every spectacular success there are dozens of spectacular failures. But what’s much worse is that for every spectacular success, there are hundreds of dull, hesitant, half-hearted, could-have-been successes.

Because of the fear of failure, I was often one of the players in the band sneaking in on my part, hoping to stay unnoticed. I was willing to pass up a chance to be noticed for my skill in favor of hiding my mistakes. That’s not the best way to express creativity. Fortunately, my son has apparently not inherited my fear of creative failure. He thinks outside the box in many ways. Possibly, being only 3, it’s because he’s not entirely aware of the box. But I love how unlimited his imagination is.

For example, he has a game made up of different colored, different length wooden blocks. There is a deck of cards showing various arrangements of the blocks, and the players try to copy each pattern. Sometimes he likes to find a card to copy, but more often than not, he makes up his own designs. He doesn’t limit himself to the square layout shown in all the cards, either. He makes oblongs and polygons and sometimes even 3-dimensional towers.

He thinks creatively about food, too. For lunch today, I offered him a choice of a peanut butter sandwich or a grilled cheese sandwich. He thought for a moment, then proposed, “How about a chicken sandwich?” OK, I have chicken, I can do that. Then he grinned and offered his topper: “How about a chicken AND APPLE sandwich?” Hmmm, that sounds kind of weird, but I have apples, so OK. And you know what? It was really good! If I had pooh-poohed his request because it was unusual and different, we would both have missed out on a really good treat. If he had hesitated to make his request because he thought it might be weird, we would have missed it, as well. But we both took a leap – boldly – and we were rewarded!

So, as I often do, I will take a lesson from my son. A lesson to think outside the box. A lesson to not be limited by rules and past experience. A lesson to not fear spectacular failure, only to fear boring success. A lesson to go ahead and try a chicken and apple sandwich!

 

The Games People Play

My son loves games. He loves active games like Hide and Seek, Catch, and Simon Says. He loves board games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. He loves brain games like I Spy and What Shapes Do You See. But the games he loves best of all are the ones he makes up himself.

The first game he ever made up was something he calls “Bing, Bang, Boom.” This is a game played by two people using two large balls. The players each hold a ball and sit about 6 feet apart, then chant, “Bing…bang…BOOM!” and on the word “BOOM” they roll the balls toward each other and try to crash them together. When they crash, both players laugh uproariously, chase the balls, and do it all over again.

Another recent favorite is “Soccer Falling.” Another two-player game, this one requires only one ball. The players stand facing each other a few feet apart, and one player kicks the ball to the other. Instead of kicking it back, the receiving player immediately falls over. Cue uproarious laughter. My daughter helped create a 3-player variation of this game where the third player randomly wanders in between the other two and either kicks the ball back to the first player (usually by accident) or gets hit by the ball and falls over. This variation is somewhat less popular because it occasionally ends in tears instead of uproarious laughter.

He’s also created a whole series of dancing games that can be played by any number of players, from one person right on up to however many can fit in the room. These games generally have names like, “Penguin Dance,” “Robot Dance,” and “Silly Chicken Dance,” even though there’s no resemblance to a penguin, a robot, or a silly chicken that I can see. I’m not even really clear on what the difference between these games is, as they all seem to involve madly stomping, flailing, wriggling, shimmying, twirling, and spinning around on the floor like a manic break-dancer. But that fact doesn’t bother him in the least.

Explaining one of his games to cousins John and Catherine.

 

I love that these games are further proof that he can find ways to entertain himself. I love that he understands the concept that games have rules, even if he often changes them. I love that he’s occasionally willing to let his little sister join in his games. I love that he uses his body creatively. I love that he totally cracks himself up when he plays them. And I love how completely uninhibited and unselfconscious he is whenever he plays any of them.

But most of all, I love how uninhibited and unselfconscious I am when I play those games with him. Anyone want to join me for a few rounds of “Silly Chicken Dance”?