You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” ~ Excerpt from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver The room in the Palm Beach Convention Center, filled…
Claiming Your Creativity (and Identity)
I suddenly realized that one of the core competencies of being human was that we were the only corner of creation that could refuse to be ourselves. The Kingfisher doesn’t get to choose to be a crow. And the mountain is just a mountain, and the cloud is just a cloud. The tree is just…
What Is Your 4-Minute Mile?
About ten days of mail arrived yesterday via UPS, sent by my brother-in-law who is kindly checking my mail this month. I opened the large envelope this morning and began going through the contents one by one. In about five minutes, I had opened and reviewed everything. I wadded up the junk and empty envelopes and…
A Creativity Lacuna
“When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring—and where the sea might deposit you-—until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.” ~ Andrew O’Hagan Rothko’s…
I Have Forgotten How to Read
Growing up, my bedroom was small, but cozy with lots of light and well-designed space. It was my haven, and I would spend hours lying on the twin bed my dad built out of wormy chestnut—deeply engrossed in a great book.I discovered Dahl, Fitzhugh, Rawls, and later as a teenager, Salinger, Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Camus, Melville,…
How to Turn on Your Creativity
“An individual’s ability to draw is … the ability to shift to a different-from-ordinary way of processing visual information—to shift from verbal, analytic processing to spatial, global processing.” ~ Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain I’d like to take a moment to thank you for being a part of my community…
