Saturday, October 4, 2014

I Cut Off My Muse to Spite My Art!

After a brief (ish) foray into the world of WordPress, I have decided to return to this, my old blog and see if I can’t resurrect my blogger muse.  I’d be happy if any creative muse would grace me with her presence these days.  Sheesh!  I can’t knit.  I can’t draw.  I can’t write…  It’s like I’ve had a secret creative-ectomy. 

Not good.

So I’ve been pondering… Where does inspiration come from?

And I’ve come up with a few answers:

Sometimes it’s spontaneous.  It just happens.  An urge overcomes me and I just do.  It’s not thought out or planned.  This is relatively rare.  And getting rarer.

Sometimes it is a response.  In my case it’s often been a response to resistance that I interpret as a challenge.  When someone says “you can’t” or perhaps just poses a negative attitude, I feel compelled to push back against it. 

Three and a half years into my independent life I just realized that I no longer have that resistance to push back against.  There is nothing challenging me.  (Not that life is without its challenges; there are no shortage of those!)  I can do whatever I want now, and, weirdly, that has led me to a state of complacency rather than the freedom I had anticipated.  I don’t have to prove anything.  So I don’t.

How freaking sad is that?

The very thing that made me absolutely nuts it seems was the very thing that fueled my creativity.  I cut off my muse to spite my art!

Well, damn!

There is no longer anyone in my life to bounce ideas off of either.  Thankfully, I still have tons (and tons) of ideas floating around in my head.  There simply isn’t anyone around anymore to play devil’s advocate with them, no one to build excitement for them with and no one to collaborate with. 

With neither a naysayer nor a champion around my creative energy has grown stagnant.  I still want to do the things I love to do, yet doing them isn’t happening. 


So what do I do?  How do I get my muse back?   What will whip what has grown torpid back into a tempest?  I need a generator in which to plug the tools I create with back into.  I need to find the magic again.

3 comments:

  1. When I don't know what or why I should shoot. I force myself to use just 1 lens for a whole day sometimes 2 days.
    This makes me adjust how and what I take pictures of.
    You could try something along the same line by trying to do some of the things you like but not using what you would normally use.
    I find it makes me rethink how to get the end product that I'm still are proud of.
    I hope you find this aMUSEing. or at least thought provoking .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Simon! That was very kind. And inspiring!

      Delete
  2. You can always bounce ideas off of me!!! But I hear you - there's so little challenge, that it's easy to just not DO anything! I like Simon's ideas

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for stopping by! Please feel free to comment or leave feed back. I look forward to hearing from you!