Getting in the Creative Groove

When the well runs dry and the ideas won't flow, it's time to get out of your head. Really out of your head. I like walks. Rambling, long walks in places I haven't been. The point is to turn focus away from the critical voices yammering inside the skull. I play a game - looking for x number of things to see. Things to observe. From the macro - Some days there are great alpine glow photos. (Alpine glow on the Olympics here). To the micro - Some days it's nothing more than listening to the gentle cackle of a pair of crows courting one another in the trees. Or the little weird and wonderful things that happen closer to

home - like a seagull trying to make a snack out of something as big as it is. The point is to focus outward, to distract the ego enough that the creative juices have a chance to work in the background. For me, the more I try to pin creativity down with ego-driven critical YOU SHOULD BE <fill in the blank>, the more creativity squirms away, retreating into the dark. If I give the grasping, frenetic portion of my conscious mind something to do, creative stuff is then free to sneak back into the open. I favor walks because moderate physical exertion works wonders for shutting up monkey mind. So does journaling.
 

 In the bad old days before better living through chemistry made ironing work shirts a thing of the past, I would have my best writing breakthroughs while ironing (which I absolutely hated - ironing - not the ideas.) The task was mindless, but you had to pay attention so as not to burn down the house. Or permanently press your digits. Conscious mind got occupied with wrinkles. Creative mind churned in the background, kicking out little 'hey, what if' voices. The closest I get now, is through walking a couple of miles (which occupies the conscious mind) or via deliberate alpha state meditating.

Still. All of that can be a little naval gaze-y. And occasionally, the best option is to stopping focusing inward at all. The best kick in the creative pants comes from looking out at the world and observing. Mary Buckham, in the midst of teaching a plotting course, once said that it is a writers job to see what no one else can or will see and then bring that to the page. We concentrate so hard on getting things to the page, we forget all about being observers of our world - all of our world, not just the bits inside our heads. Which makes me think that maybe tomorrow morning, I'm due for a good, long walk.



Golden Gardens Tour

BWA HA HA! The word of the week thing is dead, which means I am without a topic. Or boundaries. You know what that means??

PICTURES!

This is the beach at Golden Gardens - a city park directly north of the marina where we live. This is Seattle at 7:30 in the morning in May. The sun is coming up on the right hand side of the photo. Left is west. You're looking north. It's almost impossible to see in this little photo, but there's a guy swimming in that frigid water. Sure, he was wearing a wet suit, but daaaang. The water temps around here are between 50 and 55 degrees F. Also? May is jelly fish breeding season. Noooo, thank you.

Yeah, sure. Seagull. Great wildlife score there, Marcella. Mostly, I was just impressed with how sharp the image is when I've got the telephoto dialed way in on the bird. Kind of impressed, too, that he deigned to look at me just as I snapped a photo. See the point sticking out in the water in the photo above? That's where the seagulls were hanging out. It's true that we have more than our fair share of seagulls. They nest in the breakwater. (Huge sea wall of great big boulders that shelter boats from wave action, creating a sheltered moorage.) Every evening, the seagulls swarm, shrieking and alarm-calling because the bald eagles soar low over the rookery looking for seagull chicks to snack upon.

These pilings are all that are left from a couple of docks and boardwalks. The park had originally been developed in 1907 by a real estate speculator trying to lure people out of the city (and sell them a lot somewhere along the way...) The problem with docks in this location is that the sand spit juts way out into the water and the slope down is so gradual, that low tides dry the whole thing. Any boats tied up to this dock would have been aground for half the day. So when the city took over the park, the docks and boardwalks were removed. Walking paths have been established above the tide line, but the beach sand is always available for strolling. 

And even though Puget Sound is technically inland water, it still packs a powerful punch. Storm surge throws all kinds of stuff around. Including rocks into the hollows of beach logs.










This is probably plenty of graphics to ask your browser to load. So I'll leave you with one last shot from the morning of this photo expedition. 8:30. I came home to this: