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Creativity at both ends? My #el30 experience

Be creative. go.

That’s the hardest.

We once had ‘guests’ who came and sat on the sofa (for several days) and said – “Oh, carry on as normal, we’ll just watch the show.” That was excruciating. ‘Watch the show?’ I find creating an artefact to represent my experience that is not somehow interwoven with something else, an active part and not an external representation, very difficult. My experience necessitates connection. Alone or viewed doesn’t compute in my brain. All that means this task was very difficult for me – at least I naturally resisted.

This morning I woke up at silly o’clock (5 something a.m.) and had it. This:

This is a plant from our kitchen window sill. I love plants and flowers, but few agree that I should be tending them. This one is different (although it has certainly looked better and I have watered it now). Both ends. Cannot be contained. Does not conform to a pot. Cannot break it free now as it has adapted to the system of the pot. And it’s useful- it could sooth, heal, and even feed us if we needed. I haven’t decided if my experience is the plant, or if I am the plant, or if the community is the plant. Maybe a bit of all of it.

3 thoughts on “Creativity at both ends? My #el30 experience”

  1. I really like this depiction Laura, and I can see the difficulty with discerning whether the plant represents you, the emergent community, or your experience. Likely all three. To some extent it reminds me of rhizomatic learning, sort of like unbounded curiosity and creativity. I also opted for an image to represent my experiences of #EL30 to date. To harness creativity on-tap is going to take some practice for me!

  2. It’s a bit like asking someone, on demand, to tell a joke. To me creativity is an accident, it is when you line up your thoughts and focus and then get up at silly o’clock and tackle whatever it is that has occupied the back side of your brain. Example: Six weeks ago, sitting down to write the third version of a character sketch (I deleted the first two not out of annoyance or not because I didn’t like them, but because, well, they weren’t there yet — it was an exploration after all) and was sliding along well, getting to the backstory, figuring out how the character fit in with the other characters, the town and then I sent the character on a small journey and, blamo! all of a sudden an apparition appeared in the story, and I went with it, just let it go and now, having finished the piece, having thought about it non-stop it seems, I have grasped hold of who/what this ghost is, and, in so doing, figured out the central tension/secret of the larger story and how this ghost will fit in. I still don’t know who he is, nor do I understand him fully, but there you go.

    So, to me, creativity is really: think, think some more, go, let go.

    Be well, friend. I miss our trans-Atlantic chats.

    g

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