Creative Inventory Part 5

What activates your creative energy? What deactivates it?

I don't think I can even list all the things that get me in the mood to create!! I am inspired always by beautiful things. Now wait, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what can I possibly mean by that? I guess it's more complicated than simply "I am inspired by beauty".

Remember how I said I have a natural talent for seeing the possible? It goes along with that. I am inspired by blank canvasses. A raw, uncut piece of fabric. A huge open stretch of land that has nothing growing on it yet. Entire days where I have nothing that has to be done! (I can't wait for Wednesday, my day off this week!) A basket-full of balls and skeins of yarn that haven't been woven into anything yet.

Sunny days inspire my Earthiness and pull me out-of-doors into the sunshine to dig in the dirt, to design gardens of flowers and vegetables and fruits and to adore the beauty of Creation.

Stormy days bring out my 'hand-made' creativity. All things fine arts are produced on stormy days - new dresses, new crochet designs, new tales of haunted house, pirates, and best friends, new drawings and worst of all - encourage me to redecorate a room of the house. (This occasionally gets me into trouble.)

Days that are in between stormy and sunny make me want to play the piano for hours and sing. Cloudy days don't give a lot of leniency for sitting around, nor do they make me want to coax seedlings to grow taller, and so my heart begins to sing the blahs away.

BUT I begin to feel drained when the project has carried on for too long. This is my creative downfall and why I am so terrible at follow-through. I begin projects with gusto, anxious to bring the thoughts in my head into reality. Once they begin to take much longer than I originally planned - especially sewing projects if they must be ripped apart and resewn - I begin to lose my creative spark toward that project and it will become just another statistic in my pile of things unfinished. When something no longer stimulates my eye for the possible, I lose interest, and, often, move on to the next stimulus. This is something that makes me believe that I need a partner to work with - someone to hold my nose to the grindstone.

Deadlines are especially effective for me. If I promised to deliver something the next day, you can bet I will pull an all-niter to finish it!

Statistically Speaking

My favorite part about this blog is the 'Stats' tab. I think it's so cool to be able to see where my nonsense is being read from. Okay, yes, sometimes it makes me a little nervous to see that 40 people on the other side of the world are reading a certain posting because it makes me wonder what I said it that posting that's so damn interesting, but by and large, I love to see the different countries of the world light up in mint green to show me that there is one or two souls in France, Nepal, Australia, China and Brazil that thought something I put up was worth looking at for a few minutes. :)

Alex and I have been talking about where we would move to if things here in the US were to get really bad. We don't anticipate it anytime soon, but you know how conversations just kind of rise up while you're riding in the car or just before you turn off the lights? That was how this conversation started.

We decided the place we might like to live best would be New Zealand. His company has a large client there where he would likely be able to get a job fairly quickly. And the climate is excellent for mini-farming, which would put me in heaven. Our second choice would be Germany, which is where Alex was born. Again, because of the possibility of him getting a job with one of the 3 companies that his company provides research for. Not my favorite choice though, unless we were to live more south in that country. I'd like to be in a place where winters are a little more mild than they are here.

So if you are in New Zealand, or Germany, or somewhere that isn't the US, Hello! I know I don't usually say anything great, profound, enlightening or otherwise important, but knowing that you're out there does make my day.