In a class I taught last fall, I posed the question, “What inspires you?” The following is what the students came up with. I’ve had it taped to my office wall ever since. In my opinion, inspiration is what life is all about. Lucky for us, it comes in many forms.
I’ve always had trouble voicing things… speaking up for myself, calling out deception, and owning my own value and worth. When I was growing up, my mother would always tell me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I wasn’t sure that whatever I was thinking was nice, so I stuffed my…
It’s been a horrific fire season in Northern California and yesterday I had a speaking engagement in San Francisco where I knew that some of the participants would be evacuees from the fire. (So far the death toll is 40 and 90,000 are homeless. Wildfire has consumed people’s homes, entire communities, schools, businesses…) I didn’t…
The composer Leonard Bernstein would complain sometimes about being dry and blocked. During those times, he’d sit for long hours at the piano and just improvise–strum chords or try a sequence of notes. And then suddenly, he would find one chord or note that “hit.” That one note suggested the next. Bernstein said that the…
It’s destructive. The creative process is as much about destruction as it is making something new. It needs space, and one way the creative process makes sure it has that space is to clear out the old or what’s no longer working. It will destroy whatever is in its way. (Don’t worry, if you really…
To create is always to learn, to begin over, to begin at zero. — Matthew Fox In John O’Donohue’s book The Invisible Embrace of Beauty, O’Donohue mentions St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that beauty was the perfection of a thing. “To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence.”…
I’m feeling moved to share one of my favorite poems by Maya Angelou. Although she mentions “my children” in the first line of Elegy, I’ve never felt her poem was to be read literally. This poem is about our creative offspring… whatever they may be. What have we nurtured in our lives? What are we…