In her book, If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland wrote:
When we ignore the imagination, we stop living from our center, from the creative fountain, and we live from the periphery, from externals.
Imagination brings possibility. As educator Maxine Greene said, “The role of imagination is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected.”
When you open the imagination, its spaciousness will feed you.
The physicist Arthur Zajonc says that our culture needs the artist’s cognitive capacities. But what is it that poets and artists do that take them beyond ordinary capacities of knowing? Perhaps it’s the artist’s willingness to be confused, welcoming any unlikely connection that shows up; or his or her sensitivity to nuance and qualities…
Nearly everyone I know right now seems to be “waiting.” We’re waiting for our new president to take office of course. We’re also waiting for congress to make decisions about economic recovery packages and greenhouse gases and overseas wars. That list seems endless. But I’m doing another level of waiting. Robert Romanyshyn called it “waiting…
1. Be Authentic. Where are you out of integrity with yourself? Our creativity flourishes when we’re in alignment with our loves, passions and true desires. 2. Make Connections. At its most basic, creativity is about making connections between things…connections that no one else has yet seen. 3. Be Something Else for a Moment. What does…
“If we get lost in dark despair, beauty takes us back to center.”-Piero Ferrucci Anyone need that right now? 🙂
“Most of us typically associate metaphor with the flowery language that poets use or with things that are made up: ‘That’s just a metaphor.’ In other words, we typically treat metaphors as outside of ourselves, when in fact they are the deep, sensory, intuitive language of the feeling center of our brain. To say that metaphor is…
I heard some amazing poetry on public radio last week. Terry Gross interviewed Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, a poet whose daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. After her daughter’s death, Kathleen wrote a collection of beautiful, poignant poems, recently published as Slamming the Door Open. One reviewer called her poems “spare, unflinching, and powerful.” I couldn’t…