21 ways to be creative

from Christine Kane's blog - well worth exploring

"Creativity isn’t a big deal. It’s like our breath. It’s just a part of who we are. Some of us don’t realize this. People who say, “Oh, I’m not creative,” or “I don’t have a creative bone in my body,” sound to me like they’re trying to convince themselves of something, rather than telling themselves the truth. They make the idea of creativity a BIG DEAL because then it will stay safely at arm’s length out of reach and require nothing of them.
Again, creativity isn’t a big deal. It’s not an event. It doesn’t so much happen, as it is allowed. It comes out slowly.
When I found my dog, she had been badly abused. I was walking in the countryside, and she was watching me from a mound of dirt in an old church yard where she had been dumped. She started to follow me. If I turned around, she’d stop. If I tried to walk towards her, she’d tuck her tail under her butt and walk away from me. But if I moved along on my own way, she’d follow me. She eventually got closer and closer, and ultimately she followed me home.
This is how I experience creativity. Anytime I try to turn around and catch it, it turns away. It’s not about willing it. It rarely takes to announcements like, “Today I’m going to be creative! I’m going to write a whole song!”
In my experience, it’s a process. It is slow. Creativity is a way of being, and though it can’t be forced, it can be cultivated and allowed. It happens when I’m already open and my mind is receptive and quiet. There’s almost a joyful laziness to it. Kind of a “Hmm, well, what if I tried this?Ķ?”
There is definitely a happiness to it. A deep happiness and peace. My theory is that when we cling to our vices, when we do unhealthy things that we adamantly say we deserve, what we’re really trying to do is give ourselves what we keep denying ourselves - a fully creative and artful life. Once we start allowing more creativity in, we might find some of those old habits and “vices” just fall away. After all, they are not a substitute for the real thing.
So, if you’re opening up to a more artful and creative life, know that it’s not something to push. It’s something to allow and live. Here are 21 Ways to be more creative, and subsequently, more happy!
1 - Stop watching television
Or better yet, get rid of the damn thing. Any time I teach writing or creativity, this is one of the biggies. TV is a mind-killer. It numbs you. It fills you with emotionally-charged images and over-simplified solutions. It dulls you. Turn it off. Even if this idea scares you, turn it off.
2 - Take a 20-minute walk everyday
It’s easy to become driven about exercise. You go to the Y. You go running. You think that a 20-minute walk isn’t productive or worth much. Take a 20-minute walk and allow the world to just be. Watch things. Stop and smell things. Notice birds. Let the world unfold and show itself to you.
3 - Write with pen & paper (or pencil and paper)
Keep a journal. Do morning pages. Write in long-hand. Typing on a keypad into a computer doesn’t always open up that tactile sense-loving part of us that loves to create.
I can sometimes get weirdly happy just hearing the sound the pen makes scribbling on paper. I also love it when the paper is thin, and my pen makes indents so it feels sort of Braille-y, and the paper makes a snappy sound when I turn the page.
4 - Write songs to your pets
At the first women’s retreat I ever facilitated, (at a college campus in St. Louis) a group of women sat on the floor one night in the dorm and sang each other the songs we’d written to our various pets. It was hysterical. The more we sat there, the more women came and sat down with us.
I’ve written many songs to my dog. Greatest hits include “Mom’s Little Girl,” “She Is Going to Be a Very Clean Girl,” (a bathtub song) and “She is Unbelievably Cute.” Of course, there’s also the “Good Morning Song.” My cats each have their own songs too. I actually make myself laugh as I’m creating them because my animals look so truly unimpressed with me.
It’s easy to do because you can do it anywhere - while you drive to work, while you make dinner, while you lie on the couch with them?Ķ
5 - Dance around the House
Put on old disco (Earth, Wind, and Fire, baby!), or new Madonna, or swing. Put it on loud. Dance around your house while you make dinner. Or start the day shakin’ your groove thang.
6 - Walk in the rain
I haven’t owned an umbrella in about 10 years. I love the rain. I love walking in it. I wrote the song Everything Green after I hiked in the mountains in the pouring rain. I was journaling about how alive everything was, and I wrote “It was all just rain and mud and wild and green.” That’s how I got my CD title. Walking in the rain can be a happy thing. (Use an umbrella if you want. Rain on umbrellas makes a good sound.)
7 - Make a collage
Magazines. Some Yes Paste. A scrapbook page and lots of crayons and paints and stickers. (And thou.) This isn’t a vision board. It doesn’t have a purpose. It’s just for fun and beauty and making something. I love collaging. I’m not great at it. But I’ve gotten better and better at laying out the page and learning what colors and shapes I love. I always feel more alive when I do one.
8 - Make a list of things you love
My song Loving Hands (on my first CD) was born out of a journal exercise I did where I just wrote a long list of all the things I love. That song remains one of my most requested songs. I had so much fun thinking of things that delight me in the world. Finding feathers, finding pennies, the sound of big flags flapping in the wind, the smell of my cat’s fur when she’s been out in the snow (she smells like a big box of wool mittens). I remember reading it to a friend of mine who just sat there smiling and nodding his head. Even though this was years ago, I still remember how much fun I had making that list.
9 - Write 10 postcards
Go pick out some really cool postcards, and then go to a cafe? somewhere, and order your Genmaicha Tea (Okay, get yourself a Latte if you want) and write postcards to friends and family.
10 - Get up early and watch the sun rise
11 - Listen to music you’ve never listened to before.
After I saw the movie Tortilla Soup, I downloaded a bunch of Latin music from iTunes. One of my favorite nights in my memory this year was a hot rainy night thick with humidity. My husband and I opened up all the windows and doors. We pressure cooked (I love our pressure cooker) some black beans, shared a froo-froo mixed drink and made a fantastic dinner while all of my new Latin and Tejano music was cranked up. It was one of those really happy nights, partly because I loved discovering new music.
12 - Eat with your hands
Be a kid again. Make a meal and put the silverware back into the drawers. Eat with your hands. Have some friends over for a silverwareless dinner.
13 - Be quiet
Light a few candles after dark and just sit. Don’t meditate if you don’t want to. Just sit quietly and listen. Watch the candles. Allow for more silence in your life.
We are a noisy people. I hear people say they can’t stand silence. But it is in silence where we can hear the voice of our creativity. Maybe not at first. But it will come.
Drive with no music on. Make dinner in silence. Pay attention to your hands as you slice the veggies. Just be quiet.
14 - Take a nap
15 - Take photos. Real photos. Not digital photos.
My favorite camera is a Pentax K1000. It’s completely manual, and it’s how I learned to take pictures. I’m not very good. When I first moved to Asheville, I used to walk around town on Sundays (the whole town was closed up then) and take pictures of all the buildings. These photos are now a treasure to me because nothing is the same anymore. (Every building has been bought, remodeled and now is filled with stores that sell trickly fountains, Buddahs, and things that smell grassy.)
Take pictures of anything. And have fun in the old method of actually getting your film developed and the excitement of flipping through photos you haven’t seen yet.
16 - Make an event out of watching the full moon come up
One of the things I love about my husband is that he’s always looking for the perfect place to watch the full moon come up. He’ll make an event out of it. We pile in the car and go to this one field or to a bench on the college campus and sit and watch the moon rise.
17 - Read poetry aloud
Poetry is meant to be read aloud. The words and phrases will tilt your brain and open doors like you never thought they would. My favorites: Mary Oliver, e.e. cummings, Rumi, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Barbara Brooks, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker. There are lots of collections of poetry if you don’t want to pick just one.
18 - Go see a play or live music or live anything
Get out of the house and experience creativity. Avoid mega-blockbuster-Hollywood movies whose trailers begin with the deep gravelly voice saying, “IN A WORLD?” (And then bombs go off and Mel Gibson appears)
Live performance is an exchange. As an audience member you get to participate. I know this because I perform. Every night is different. Everything is about the audience. You receive so much more energy from live shows. Go see the symphony, even the small local symphony. See a play. See some improv. There is so much life on a stage, so many improvisational moments, so much about authenticity. You can’t help but take it in.
19 - Visit a gallery
See another artist’s creation. The downtown of any city is bound to have some great galleries. You don’t have to buy anything. Just experience the artistry of someone gifted in glass blowing or pottery or woodwork.
20 - Write a letter
When was the last time you wrote a letter? I just got a long letter from one of the women who participated in my last retreat. It was funny. And it was fun to read. And I kept thinking, “Damn. It’s been too long since I’ve experienced this.” Every time I write a letter, I feel clearer and happier. Not only is it more fun to make something for someone else, it’s also just a way to get out of yourself.
21 - Stop watching television
This is an important one. It bears repeating. There are so many better things you can do than watch American Idol?"

Thank god for coffee and buns. Am having both at the moment - the greyness of the day is getting to me.

£1.15 for real coffee at Lidles and apparently £1 at Ikea...

Wandering around craft blogs instead of doing the washing up. Found this MOO - which looks great and might even push me to sign up for flicker. I love the idea of minicards of my photos.

If you want to indulge in craft blog surfing try Loobylu's links.

I'm just back from the Science of Sleep a free screening. Not sure quite what I think. I'm just impressed that I got out of the house for 11am.

Yesterday in Glasgow. Its been a long time since I've been through. No more shop at CCA! It rained as usual.

I'm going to warm myself up and then head for the shops.

Bespangled by Angels

Yesterday I had breakfast in North London with the friend I was staying with. She left the cafe early due to an appointment with the 'nit nurse' so I stayed on. Two women came to share my table one pushing a pink pram with the cutest baby in a pink jumpsuit. I do wish I'd taken a photo.

Other London highlights include:-

Seeing my best friend's feature film at a press screening in Soho.

Visiting Liberty's and soaking up all the yummy goodness - furry chandaliers being a particular highlight.

A late and slow and yummy lunch with best friend at Mildreds.

Being prevented from seeing the Pet Shop Boys videos at the Portrait Gallery due to two middle aged women crowding around the monitor. My other best friend telling me about an embarrasing encouter with Neil Tennant in the ICA with one British Friend and one German Friend accompanying her. The British Friend hissed 'That's Neil Tennant' and the German Friend said, in a very Loud Voice 'Who is Neil Tennant?' (I can't write in the German accent)

Early lunch at Verde - Jeanette Winterson's shop/cafe in Spitalfields. Its almost perfect but needs a fat cat to sleep in a window.

Foyles bookshop has a very nice Jazz cafe with almost reasonable London prices (Charing Cross Road).

Seeing the Indica Gallery in Soho and seeing a mention of it in this essay about YES.

British Library has wonderfully cheap lockers (£1 returnable) 3 excellent free exhibitions. London in maps, the permanent collection (South Polar Times, Magana Carta anyone?) and one on Migrant magazine.

However loved this quote from the small William Blake exhibit.

"He witnessed visions form an early age - he once saw a tree in Peckham filled with angels 'bespangling every bough like stars' - and in his working life wrestled with new ways to portray his complex ideas about the power of imagination, the nature of religion and the shape of society."

@~@~@~@~@

Something else I noticed on this visit to London. Strange moments of care. Often when I come to London I'm struck by anomie, the disconnectedness of it all, but this time I saw French schoolgirls giving up their seat to an elderly woman, people giving directions, and I didn't not feel as pressed and josseled as I normally do.

Train late yesterday - the hail started at Berwick upon Tweed. I could not see it but heard it on the train.

Remember You Are Beautiful

Collecting colour

I've been taking loads of photos in London. Leaning against walls and loading the Holga with more film. I do do hope that some of them come out. The colours of London are quite different from Edinburgh.

Oooh quick ! Wait! I said to my friend at lunchtime. Deep pink top, orange seat behing and a shocking pink tomato sauce bottle in front of her. I had to take a photo.

Full moon

I went to see Blackbook tonight but it was sold out, so saw The Queen for a second time instead. Walked down Princes St inbetween the 'friday night people' forgetting that most people are celebrating this night because its the end of the work week. It doesn't quite have the same aura when you are a freelancer.

Hummm beautiful moon. I keep trying to take photos of it and it mostly doesn't work.

Bought rather squandered £30 on film medium format for London trip tomorrow. Long chat in Jessops with the man at the counter. I waved my Lomo at him (I also wanted 'ordinary' film) and he said he'd had one way back when they 'only' cost £25. I countered that way back then £25 was probably worth a lot more!

Back late Wednesday.

When will you arrive at the best possible moment? When will you have the perfect opportunity? When will you know without doubt, that you are doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way? Never! If you ever do experience such confidence, you should mistrust it. It is probably born of euphoria, not wisdom. Always, there will be an argument in favour and an argument against. Always, there will be an element of risk. Today's risk, though, is one that is worth taking.

Jonathan Cainer for Virgoes

Good timing! A work situation may have unravelled. And I'm thinking what bad timing . Perhaps in its badtimingness is its realness and something better will come of it. A risk worth taking.

How to be a freelance journalist

from Bad Language blog.

Highlanders Too

My friend Stuart's film is being shown at the Dundee Contempoary Arts Centre. Their website isn't very uptodate but will be on sometime Friday 2nd Feb. His short 10 min film is about being gay in the Highlands. Described by The List as “worth staying in and standing up your hot date for!”

3 questions to find your passion

If I didn't care what anyone thought I would....


If I knew my parents would never find out I'd....


If I could be sure I'd do it right, I would.....


from Martha Beck

stuff

Seeing feathery old lady hats at The Rusty Zip - I can just see one of my cats chasing those. One looked like peacock feathers had been used. I resisted

This book

Stumbling into the Fine Art Library after many years. Reading a wonderful book on Fortuny and refinding Selvage magazine which mentioned Teddies Sans Frontieres or Teddies for Tragedies which my mom knits for.

Ok its a picture of an Australian landmark - hence its squiffness.

More images here.

Alan Wilson has a new photography blog Stare

Craft is radical

"In this age of corporate-driven mass-production, the act of an individual making a useful thing is radical. The act of buying a useful thing made by an individual is radical. It is akin to living off the grid: trading outside the big box.
Craft is to shopping what slow food is to restaurants. Buying high-quality things that needn’t be replaced over time but instead may be passed on to future generations is not only old-fashioned, it is also worldchanging. Craft is slow retail, slow consumption. "

More from World Changing

Strategies, guidelines and rules of connecting

This is from NotSalmon (Karen Salmonsen's website) newsletter.

"All things being equal, people like to do business with theirfriends. All things being not quite so equal, people STILL wantto do business with their friends."...so says Jeffrey Gitomer, author of "The Little Black Book ofConnections."
In his book, Gitomer lists "17. 5 strategies, guidelines andrules of connecting." Here are a few of my faves to ponder:

1. Project your self-image in a way that breeds confidence. Everything from your hair to your shoes sends a message.

2. Your ability to look someone in the eye as you speak is a telltale sign of both self-respect and truthful speaking. Make eye contact.

3. No connection is made without some form of risk. Dare yourself. Take the risk to make the connection.

4. The less you focus on your motive to meet someone, the more likely it is that your connection will be successful. Drop your agenda. Focus on connecting - not extracting.

5. Take a genuine interest in people before you ask them to take a genuine interest in you.

6. The sooner you find something in common with the other person, the sooner barriers will vanish.

7. Your projected image is what mostly determines your ability to make a real connection.

8. Provide a value-exchange. Give if you want to receive.

9. Staying in touch is more important than making the initial connection.

10. Be authentic: Talk real, act real, be real, and you will find others will do the same in return.

My emphasis.

One of the exercises I give to my students is to take plastic bag empty it out on the table and ask them to choose 5 postcards they like and to write to 5 people they would love to hear from. 'This is stupid' I heard one muttering the last time I did it. But at the same time that we would like to recieve from the world support for our creative projects, money, connections, inspiration we have to give back to the world and one of the ways is making unexpected and uncalled for connecting. Its not exactly 'networking' but connecting covers it better. The more we are connected to ourselves and to other people - its like we have plugged ourselves into the universal flow.

Danny Gregory on the Artist's Way

I'm fairly certain that you will find that when you give yourself permission to be creative, your life will change. You will either leave or transform your job. You will open yourself up to new people. You will develop new relationships. You will find that serendipity plays a very active role in your life. You will worry less and appreciate the universe more. You may not lose weight but you'll enjoy food more. Your body may not look better but your taste in clothing will improve. You may not become wealthier but money will matter less. You may not improve your health but each day will matter more.

More discussion here.

Artist's Way Courses starting soon

12 week course based on the best selling book of the same name by Julia Cameron.

The Artist's Way provides a pathway to acessing your authentic creativity or rediscovering it if you feel it has been lost. It works on the principles of having fun, accessing pleasure, doable actions, dreaming BIG with the support of likeminded people. It helps you to become the 'artist of your own life'.

Intro sessions are £5 (try before your buy!)

Glasgow Thursday 15th February 2007 6-8pm at Adelaides 209 Bath St
Edinburgh Friday 9th February 2007 608pm at Buddafield Blackfriars St

Call 0131 555 2636 for more info or to book a place. Email creativevoyage at hotmail dot com.

When is enough enough?

When you have done your best and can do no more without personal injury, breeching the bounds of ethics, harming others, or resorting to illegal activities.

When it is clear that a hope, a dream, an expectation, or a vision is not going to happen.

When some plan is not working now, and will not work in the future, without doing harm to others, lying, cheating, or fiddling the figures.
When the cost of some enterprise, in terms of hours worked, people harmed, relationships ruined, or principles and values compromised, exceeds any possible benefit in anything but monetary terms.

When continuing in the same direction will destroy any civilized standards of workplace action.

When the only outcome is more money, more status, more power, or more responsibility—and you cannot spend the money, wield the power, handle the status and responsibility, or live your life, without destroying who you are and the values you want to live by.

From Slow Leadership

Happy Now?

(I've copied this from The Independent as their articles go paid access pretty quickly and I thought what was written so important)

As a nation, we are more affluent than ever. Yet, strangely, we only seem to be getting gloomier and more pessimistic. William Leith takes a personal journey to the heart of our collective darkness
Published: 21 January 2007
It was the week before Christmas. I should have been happy. The people around me should have been happy. We were safe, we had enough to eat and drink, homes to go to. More than this - we were affluent, we were on holiday. We were in the middle of a cycle of feasting and partying. In two days' time, we would eat a meal that had taken several days to prepare, and toast each other with fancy drinks.
I was walking through a shopping mall. Everybody around me was doing the same thing - buying gifts for their friends, their family. I can't remember when, exactly, but at a certain point, I had a thought I've had about a million times lately.
None of this is making us happy.
People were standing outside shops, laden down with heavy bags, and they were snapping at each other. Or they waited in queues, restless and tormented, barking instructions into their mobile phones.
I heard the word "No!" a lot of times.
And: "For fuck's sake!"
And: "What were you thinking?"
And: "You cannot buy that!"
I was looking for gifts myself. I felt pressed. I had the sense that all of us, all the shoppers, were trawling a huge Aladdin's cave for something it could not provide. We were all looking for (omega) something that was not available. I noticed the way people were searching: there was something familiar about it. Then I realised: we were rushing around with the anxiety of people who have lost something. Where was it? Where was the thing we were looking for? We were hurried, harried, self-blaming, desperate.
And it occurred to me that, in the past few days, several people had asked me the same thing: "How is it going?"
They were asking about shopping.
We would look at each other, and shrug. The talk was of struggle, of hours put in, unexpected lucky breaks and reverses. There was a sharp sense of competition, of winning and losing. Here we were, affluent people involved in leisure activities, taking time out to be kind to each other. But it did not feel good. It didn't even feel like leisure.
What was it like, exactly?
It was like work.
We were buying hard, in the same way that, days earlier, we'd been working hard in order to achieve an acceptable level of buying.
Something was getting out of control.
Walking through the mall, picking up and discarding objects, I began to think about the way we live now. Christmas was an intense expression of it, certainly, but it happened all year round. I thought about the thing we were looking for, the thing we couldn't find.
What, exactly, was it?
I went to Starbucks. For the millionth time, I thought about happiness in the modern world. I also thought about Starbucks - how I love the place, and also how it makes me deeply uneasy. I once interviewed Howard Schultz, the chairman and founder of Starbucks, who told me: "The environment that we create has given people a respite for themselves, or a sense of gathering and community with people at a time in their lives when there's no human connection."
I drank my coffee. I thought, not for the first time, that Starbucks makes us uneasy because it tells us something important about the world we live in; it tells us that we need Starbucks.
Would it be trite to say that what we've lost is our ability to be happy? Perhaps it would. But here's something I've heard a lot lately: as a society, we are getting sadder. According to a recent poll, conducted by YouGov, only 11 per cent of us think Britain will be a better place in five years' time. On the other hand, 53 per cent think it will be worse.
And: less than quarter of us are optimistic about Britain's prospects in 2007; 58 per cent say they are not.
And: just 7 per cent thought last year was a good one, as far as the country is concerned; in contrast 55 per cent thought it was a bad one.
The headline of one newspaper report about the poll was: "Britain in Gloom".
These are the words I keep hearing: bad, worse, pessimistic. And also: crime, divorce, alcoholism. And also: self-harm, drug addiction, Prozac, bingeing. And this doesn't just apply to Britain, but to the rest of the Western world, too. In his book The Noonday Demon, a study of depression, Andrew Solomon tells us that one in every 10 Americans is taking Prozac, or similar drugs, to treat their depression. He says that while 10 per cent of Americans are likely to suffer major depression, about half will experience some symptoms.
"Diagnosis is on the up," he tells us, "but that does not explain the scale of this problem."
Solomon, himself a depressive, says that people are getting depressed earlier in their lives, too. The typical age is now 26. A review of his book called it "a key text for a generation that has depression at its core" .
Solomon sums up our situation starkly, with four words: "Things are getting worse."
As the economist Richard Layard points out in his book Happiness: "In many ways life is better than 50 years ago: we have unprecedented wealth, better health, and nicer jobs. Yet we are not happier."
Layard tells us about the social indicators for happiness. Crime, which fell from its all-time high point in Victorian England to a low around the First World War, remained steady until we started to become more prosperous around 1950. Then it went up hugely. The same goes for alcohol. Consumption fell in the first part of the last century, and remained steady until until we started to become more prosperous around 1950. Then it, too, shot up.
Another thing I keep hearing is that we are gloomy, not in spite of our prosperity, but somehow because of it. As Layard says, "What is worrying is that depression has actually increased as incomes have risen."
Which reminds me of a brilliant book I read by the economist Clive Hamilton, called Growth Fetish, in which he analysed data from a survey prepared for the Merck Family Fund in 1995. Here, Americans were asked about their quality of life in the consumer society. The report said: "They believe materialism, greed and selfishness increasingly dominate American life, crowding out a more meaningful set of values centred on family, responsibility, and community."
Hamilton said: "The richest people in the world are saying that they are miserable, that it's not worth it, and, most disturbingly of all, that the process of getting rich causes the problems."
Worse, there was no escape. They were getting sucked into the system. " They can see that materialism is corroding society and themselves," wrote Hamilton, "but they are too fearful to change their behaviour in any significant way."
We're rich. We're unhappy because we can't deal with being rich. We know this. And yet we can't escape - we feel trapped in the system. How bad is that? Solomon says: "The climbing rates of depression are without question the consequence of modernity."
Or, as Oliver James writes in his 1997 book Britain on the Couch: "Put crudely, advanced capitalism makes money out of misery and dissatisfaction, as if it were encouraging us to fill up the psychic void with material goods. "
Or, to put it even more crudely, as James does in his new book Affluenza: " Cards on the table, I contend that most emotional distress is best understood as a rational response to sick societies."
I tried to think of my own personal spectrum of happiness and misery. I remembered moments, afternoons, longer periods.
The happy memories were defined in moments; the misery in months.
I remember a particularly happy moment: waking up, at (omega) the age of about 15, in my bed in a dormitory, and realising that it was the last day of term, that I wouldn't wake up in a dormitory for months to come. Everything around me seemed pleasant and sunny, even the menial tasks I had to perform. Folding blankets and emptying lockers seemed to be exciting.
And I remember a period, just before this, when I told myself that I would be happy on a particular day, because, on that day, a quarter of the term would be over, and a quarter was a perceptible chunk. And then the day came along, and I was happier than I had been. I told myself to raise my spirits, and I did. But it was nothing like the feeling on that last morning.
I can think of an exceptionally happy moment from my childhood. I went with some friends to fish for mackerel at the end of a pier; it was the middle of the summer holidays. I was, I think, 12. Being part of this group of boys meant a lot to me. Up to this point, I had caught very few fish; the thought of catching a mackerel was beyond exciting. It would, I felt, also bond me to the group.
We arrived at the pier. A few yards away, bubbling on the surface, was a shoal of mackerel. We set up our rods in a ham-fisted frenzy of excitement. By the time I was ready, the shoal had disappeared. I stood at the end of the pier and cast my line out repeatedly, catching nothing. But every time I pulled my line out of the water, the disappointment that I had caught nothing was replaced by an even greater excitement that I might catch something with the next cast.
At one point, one of my friends tapped me on the shoulder and said he thought we ought to pack up and go.
I was shocked.
I said, "What, already?"
I wondered why anybody would want to leave after just 20 minutes' fishing.
"Well, we've been here nearly three hours," he said.
Later, I remember thinking I'd never had such a radical misperception of time. Later still, I understood that those three hours were some of the happiest I'd ever spent. A couple of years after this, I became so efficient at catching mackerel that I sold them to the neighbours. This was fun, and mildly lucrative, but in the end there were too many to sell. Before long, everybody's parents' freezer seemed to be full, and fishing began to lose its edge.
And I can think of an example of happiness from adult life - after years of overeating, of wanting something that food could not give me, but not understanding this fact, I started eating better and exercising more, and one day I went on the longest walk of my life, 25 miles, with my girlfriend, and when we stopped, feeling tired, creaky, actually in pain, we had a meal and checked into a hotel, where I lay on the bed and passed out without taking my clothes off, even my shoes, and when I woke up the next morning I thought of the exact moment of passing out - possibly, I thought, the happiest moment of my life.
Just a fleeting moment, before I passed out.
A year later, when my son was born, I was elated, and the elation felt turbocharged - I was shot upwards, had almost forgotten who I was.
Then the doctor told me there were complications.
He said, "He's a fighter, though."
He said, "If anybody can pull through, it's him."
Three days after this, my son did pull through. Another doctor said the words: "He will survive."
I started crying.
Later, I left the ward, and walked through the corridors of the hospital. I'd never seen such wonderful corridors. The linoleum floors looked superb. The bloodstain outside the door of the A&E department looked good, too.
It was the happiest I'd been.
As Richard Layard says, happiness is, in a Darwinian sense, our primary motivating force. And this explains everything. That's why it's fleeting. If it wasn't fleeting, our ancestors wouldn't have been motivated to do the things they needed to do, in order to survive. If you're happy, you don't want things to change. If you're less than happy, you do. Imagine a Stone Age tribe after a successful hunt. They are lazing around the fire, full of venison. Soon, one guy will become anxious; he will want to start planning the next hunt. This guy, the one whose happiness is the most fleeting, will become the leader. He will pass on his genes.
A capacity to experience happiness fleetingly, then, must be adaptive, in the same way that a capacity to store fat is adaptive.
These characteristics, of course, become problematic during a period of abundance. What happens to somebody who always wants more, when there is always more to be had? He gets fat or depressed. In a modern capitalist society, he becomes a patsy for advertisers. He keeps on buying things, thinking that material wealth, the owning of possessions, must be the answer to his problems.
And pretty soon, he has more problems. Pretty soon, he knows that whatever he's doing isn't working. So he loses his sense of purpose. Common misery, which might have been a motivating force, turns to depression.
What happens? He goes to the shopping mall, and rummages through the objects on sale, discarding them. He is not satisfied. He becomes angry and bitter, laden down with shopping bags. He barks into his mobile phone. He knows what the problem is, but he feels trapped. He is me and you; he is everybody we know.
As Andrew Solomon says, sometimes, and with increasing frequency, somebody will fall off the edge - existential misery will become major depression. Nobody knows why, in the same way that nobody knows why a combination of weather fronts sometimes produce a tornado, and sometimes don't. Our brain chemistry is fragile. As the psychopharmacologist William Potter says, " It's like a weather system."
And the modern world, it seems, is changing the weather inside our heads.
The important thing about happiness and misery is that we need them both; they define each other. In order to survive, our ancestors would have needed a balance of both states of mind - a capacity for elation, but not too much complacency. The elation serves as a reward; the end of the elation signals a spur to action. This is how the mind should be. The trouble, when it starts, is environmental.
In a world of abundance, when everybody has what they need, something strange happens. They begin to want what (omega) they don't have. The psychological forces which motivated their ancestors to survive are still in place. Envy appears. If somebody else has more than they do, they want it, too, even if they have more than enough. In wealthy societies, people exist on the "hedonic treadmill" - they want something, then, having got it, they get used to it. They want more. They want their neighbours to have less.
A Russian folk-tale, cited by Layard, goes like this: A peasant is poor; his neighbour has a cow. When God asks how he can help, the poorer guy says, " Kill the cow!" Now think how this might affect wealthy people. Well, we know how it affected Ashley Cole: at Arsenal, he was offered £55,000 a week, but he felt it wasn't enough. He wanted £60,000. Upon learning that the Vice-Chairman David Dein would not offer the larger amount, Cole wrote, " I was so incensed. I was trembling with anger. I couldn't believe what I'd heard." But was this just about money? I imagine that if nobody at Arsenal had earned more than £55,000, Cole might have stayed.
Misery, for me, was various things. School - years of worry, loneliness, and trouble, with some great moments, such as when a guy ran at me, downhill, trying to kick me up the arse, and I stepped and turned, very balletic, and somehow caught hold of his outstretched foot, and conveyed him past me, an unbelievably lucky thing. Other things that made me miserable: bad relationships. Poverty. Carrying around a general sense of failure. Hypochondria - the belief that I was dying from a terrible disease. And trying to compensate for these things by bingeing on food, drink, and drugs.
My most miserable moments happened when I was also wealthiest. Suddenly, I could have what I wanted. The trouble was, of course, that I didn't know what that was.
I was suffering what the sociologist Barry Schwartz calls "the paradox of choice" - when you have a huge range of options, you become consumed by a fear of disappointment. Wealthy, unhappy, and in a difficult relationship, I found myself snorting cocaine - once a month, then once a week, and, before I knew it, every day.
I had fallen into addiction. And addiction, I believe, is a near-perfect model for modern capitalism and the unhappiness it spreads. As Andrew Solomon puts it: "Feeling the wish to repeat something because it is pleasurable is not quite the same as feeling the need to repeat something because being without it is intolerable."
This, of course, is exactly what happens in an affluent society. In order to maintain economic growth, people who have what they need must be made to feel that, in actual fact, they don't. They must be made to feel anxious, empty, unfulfilled. They must be made to buy new things, not because having them is pleasurable, but because not having them is intolerable. For economic growth to be healthy, mental health must be rocky - the ideal consumer is the person who looks at what he's got and sees nothing worth having.
And this, in turn, means that the products that succeed in the Darwinian marketplace are things with built-in obsolescence, things you want more of, that don't satisfy you - high-carb snacks that make you hungry, fashion items that go out of fashion as soon as you buy them, pornography, cosmetic surgery, sugar and cocaine.
When you snort coke, you become the perfect consumer. Having more makes you want more; wanting more makes you want more. As a product, coke never works, because consuming it feels like an index of loss. As a product, coke works brilliantly, because consuming it feels like an index of loss. As you continue to snort, the coke you've had becomes your enemy, reminding you that the coke that's to come will never be enough.
I realised, at one point, as my white powder was beginning to run out, as I thought of the intolerable, sleepless hours ahead, that this was, more or less, a perfect example of unhappiness - I had made myself want more than I could ever have. Misery was thus guaranteed. The answer, it occurred to me, was simple.
The answer was: don't want so much.
Want less.
But I knew that already.
Things do not look good for the future of happiness. In Affluenza, Oliver James looks at what he calls Selfish Capitalism - our system - and sees it as a virus. We have a free market, we promote the idea that economic growth is good, that wealth makes you happy, that possessions free you. And this system is infectious - it makes people depressed, and competitive, and bitter, and depressed. People aren't quite so depressed in countries such as China, because they're at the start of the cycle - the honeymoon period.
It's just like the honeymoon period of an addiction.
You do something because it feels good; you don't realise that, pretty soon, you'll be doing it because it feels intolerable not to do it.
No, things do not look good.
The system is out of control. Richard Layard makes an interesting point. According to survey data, people would rather be richer than their neighbours than earn more money and be poorer than their neighbours. Happiness, they feel, is not linked to actual wealth, but to the feeling of being superior. When it comes to leisure, though, people are not rivalrous. " There is thus a tendency," writes Layard, "to sacrifice too much leisure in order to increase income."
Which is partly why the system is out of control. We're working like maniacs to compete with each other, and it's not working. We want too much; the economy depends on it. We should want less. Another folktale tells us about an unhappy man who doesn't have enough to eat or drink. Also, his tiny house is too crowded. He goes for advice to the village elder, who tells him to take a goat into his house for a week, and come back in 10 days. The man, of course, is overjoyed by this time: the goat has gone.
The answer: want less.
But that's not likely, is it, on a global scale? As far as happiness goes, things will have to get a lot worse before they get better.
These were the things I was thinking in the shopping mall. It was the week before Christmas. I should have been happy. The people around me should have been happy. We were safe, we had enough to eat and drink, homes to go to. More than this. We were affluent. And we were on holiday. s
William Leith is the author of 'The Hungry Years' (Bloomsbury, £7.99) a memoir of overconsumption

Slow down week

damn ! I missed it!

Keri Smith gives a list of ways of being slow. Mine was practing mindfullness while lodger and father tried to work out why the broadband wasn't working. It took nearly 4 hours and its being held together with elastic bands, wool... and the provider promises a new modem on monday.

Gardening

I forgot that gardening, growing things, pottering in soil, is a real experience for many. I love being in my garden but I couldn't call myself a gardner. This year I will get a composter...

Meanwhile You Grow Girl for inspiration.

Bonus link on authenticity Crossroads Dispatches who is writing a blue streak recently.

more on authenticity

I've been thinking about this a lot since I last posted. I've been trying and failing to get upgraded to broadband (this post is still on dialup!)

What else is real and authentic?

The is a slowness, effort and appreciation in it is a theme.

A walk v taking the car. When you walk you can appreciate everything from the strike marks of matches on door ways from the 19th Centuary when walking through the New Town to a dog with cute coat. In a car all you notice is traffic.

A train journey v plane travel. Again you notice that you are travelling and journeying but in a plane it all becomes tied up in the sheer uncomforatbleness of plane travel the herding of passengers between lounges, security.

A meal cooked from scratch v warmed in the microwave. As the ingredients cook there is a culinary alchemy going on. It shows that you have the luxuary and care of yourself to cook a real meal. Bonus if you go to somewhere like River Cottage and use the seasonal recipies then you are also connecting with the seaons and nature.

A letter v an email. Again it marks care and time to connect.

A phone call v a letter or email. A deep hungering to connect. I had a wonderful conversation with a friend who I hadn't spoken to in a few months. After I put the phone down she called back after a minute to thank me for the conversation.

A visit in person. Its my plan this year to make sure that I actually see more of my friends in real life. I plan to start buying tickets and making itineraries as soon as I've got the money. I will be dropping in on friends who live near by more often! Again on Sunday I saw The Last King of Scotland with a friend S who I hadn't seen properly for months... afterwards we were able to connect and discuss and argue and get the low down on his new year in the company of Romanian drag queens. I left his company completely buoyed up and I hope he did too.

Authentic experiences

Its the only way I can describe it. Last night I sunk into the sofa and watched Desperate Housewifes. Afterwards I felt like I'd had a meal packed with artifical additives and E numbers. Not real food at all. What my soul needed was a real uplifting experience. So I left the house about 4.30pm today after teaching. I got the bus to the beach and walked along beside the waves. As I walked the light went, the waves were being blown sideways, the white horses where high, the wind made snakes in the sand and off in the distance I could see the lighthouses twinkle every now and then. The roar was magnificent. I leant against one of the groins and just listened and listened to the elemental eternal noise. I didn't take any photographs it was too dark. After about 30 mins of walking I came back home. I feel that a mass of dust has been cleared off and am determined to not live a second hand life. (Or at least not as much!)

Letting Things Go

... moving forward always means leaving something behind; often something you don’t much want to let go.

An interesting article... and its flipside is that sometimes you need to leap and let things go before you will find out what you actually need. In certain situations we are so beset by our circumstances we can't think our way beyond it and action is the only antidote. For example I've found several times that just leaving a job that was a bad fit for me was the only way to open up space for something new.

Make your own envelopes

out of magazines, wrapping paper etc. Its a great way to recyle. It fun to get something in the post which isn't a boring white envelope.

The Art of Schmoozing

A great posting by Guy Kawasaki.

I've found over the years other things that have helped.

Join groups and volunteer. If you organise or help to organise something you get a natural reason to speak to big wigs and they do remember you. I've been members of several film/video organisations and by being on the board or organising events I did painless networking.

Be open and interested - contacts of the useful kind are all over and are not in the most obvious places.

Get out and about.

Be social. Again if you find most socialsing toecurling be a host. Organise Hallween parties, meet your new cat parties (yes I've done this). Invite everyone. Don't worry the natural drop out rate is always 40% and naturally you have kept your social network up to date.

Canaletto in Edinburgh

There is an exhibition of his works in The Queens Gallery at Holyrood. I managed to see it on the last day. All the works were collected or commissioned by Joseph Smith the British Consol in Venice. Who sounds like an amazing man. His palazzo being a centre for the arts and patronage in the 18th Century.

The picture above is from the National Gallery not the Royal Collections but I had a fantastic time. Able to go within an inch of the pictures and see the amazing detailing. Washing on the roofs! Canaletto was a native of Venice and it seems that his pictures are imbued with the total love he had for his own city.

It was wonderful and inspiring and I want to visit Venice at once.

The last day of Christmas

I started taking down some of my cards (some of them were from last year) but I got down to the essentials sweeping the kitchen floor, tidying away piles of half made New Year cards, and magazines. I've found one way to deal with holiday traditions is to institute your own. 8 years ago just before Christmas I invited friends over to my house for mulled wine, nibbles, provided cards, stamps and pens and asked them to write cards to Amnesty International Prisoners of Conscience. I've done it every year since. I now get people asking when I'm going to have my evening. I decided this year to tweak the tradition and this year held it after the main holiday period. This way things are quieter people are less frazzled and I think I'll do this again next year.

It was lovely to catch up with a bunch of people - I threw out a load of invites, on the one hand I ran out of chairs occasionally during the afternoon and on the other I saw several people who I haven't seen for months.

The Amnesty campaign carries on until the end of the month. So if you have a stash of Christmas cards left over check out the link above. Their campaigning does work. Someone I wrote to last year has been released. I and the other 5000 people who wrote did make a difference.

11 Tips to surviving a day job with your creativity intact

As the work year has started again I thought there might be someone crying out for this.

How to be free - again

Alastair Appleton has a great post on the book where he posits that meditation sets you free.

"Hodgkinson is my age and the editor of the excellent Idler magazine. His answer to this back-breaking cycle of covert feudalism that the puritan work ethic has loaded us with is idleness. Express non-action. Laziness. Loafing. Taking the time to lie in bed and not stress about ‘getting things done’. Catching the bus and staring out the window. Growing your own vegetables. Not throwing things away all the time - being thrifty, because not spending so much money mean you don’t have to work so much.
He doesn’t mention it but meditation is a form of purposeful idleness. (He’s big on a jolly sort of existentialism - the tag line of the book is: ‘Life is Absurd. Be merry. Be free.’) But Buddhism offers a different take on the whole idle question.Over the years, with my experiences in Brazil and on the meditation cushion, I’ve also learnt to step back from what we assume is the correct way to live and acually ask: does this way of living really make me and the people around me happy? Does keeping up with the Joneses keep me smiling? Does the insatiable desire for new things, different things - the radical discontent which fuels capitalism - does that ever lead to permanent peace and happiness? Clearly not.
Sitting crosslegged and just breathing is a much more radical thing that it looks. We don’t need to spend any money. We don’t need to be discontent. We can be happy with so little.
Radical idleness will dissolve everything. That’s the core of the Buddha’s teaching. Finding peace means disentangling yourself from those inherited, brainwashed patterns that we swallow wholesale from our parents, our teachers and everyone around us. Perhaps it seems mad/selfish/irresponsible to be idle. But perhaps it’s mad/selfish/irresponsible to spend your whole human life doing something that harms you, the people around you and the environment. What’s altruistic about heart-corroding stress, no time for your chidren and a scorching hole in the Ozone layer?
The Buddha was quite clear about the need to disentagle. Meditation is all about dismantling of all the constituent bits and pieces of existence - form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness - and noticing how they all work together and what they create. Sometimes what we see completely contradicts what we thought we’d see.
Just allowing ourselves a 20 minute breather twice a day is the cold-shower of reality that stops us walking sleepy-eyed into a hypnotic life of believing the hype. And those 2 lagoons of clear-sightedness also spill out into the day."

Project 365

How to take a photo a day and see your life in a whole new way. A photo project for the next year. I'd join in but as I don't do digital I think I'd fail the posting every day bit!

Tips on taking photos at the website and examples of people's work who did it last year.

Links

New independent video/film organisation/network in Scotland - FilmLive

Practice and feedback have a higher impact on performance

Prodigy or Mozart V Einstein

In praise of serendipity

Hogmanay Greetings!

I'm off to write a list of what I would like in my new year and plans for each thing....

Then I will do my 'to do' list of the minitunae I must plough through in January.

Being green can make you happier.

Makes sense. One of the greenest things you can do is slow down, work less and instead be more. Being is greener than doing. I highly recommend Tom Hodginsons book 'How to be free' its a great manifesto. I agree with almost all of it except the move to the country bit. The country is very ungreen.

Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius.Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation. - Moshe Feldenkrais

Great quote from Molly Gordon's email list

I also like what she wrote here about being whole:-

'Living a Whole Life, One Part at a Time
=======================================I
don’t know about you, but trying to live a balanced life as a self-employedperson has got me plumb wore out. (Or is that plum wore out? I suppose spellingis not a terribly serious matter when using the vernacular.)

My friend Jennifer Louden once remarked, “Balance is the new girdle.” I agree.

Balance has become, as so many good ideas do, a tyrant. I love balance; don’t get me wrong. I just don’t experience it very often. And I’ve noticed repeatedly that life is better and I am kinder when I accept myself exactly as I am rather than spending hours pre-occupied with the way I think Iought to be. So here’s a question: If everything is perfect, and it is, why are we trying so hard? And what are we trying to do?Here’s my simple answer: we’re trying to be whole. It’s the most important thing in the world, and because we usually experience this wholeness in relatively small parts, we don’t often realize that we’re already there. Wholeness doesn’t look the way you might think. Wholeness is all of it – all of you – right here, right now. You may be completely, fabulously, rampantly crazedby the holidays or some other aspect of your life. You may be blessed out or in, swimming in a current of gratitude, praise the Lord! You may be heart broken orexalted; your checkbook may be balanced or in chaos. Whatever state you and yourlife is in, it is the state of Grace.'

Mist all around

Edinburgh looks like something out of a RL Stevenson novel in places.

I'm about to return home, tidy kitchen and start my prepartions for tomorrow's lunch. We're having summer pudding as I prefer it to Christmas Pudding.

Solstice Greetings

I have a friend arriving this afternoon from London. I'm racing through a list of to do's and am feeling a little behind.

I have plans like make cranberry jam and then the other voice is saying 'be sensible'! (recipe at 101 recipies website)

I find downscaling my expectations essential for my sanity this time of year.

I've had the secret santa at work. I've been up until midnight writing cards... I'm now going to do the 'bare mimimum' even 'lower my standards even further'.

Internet access will be intermittant until the new year so posting will be light.

Pre Christmas nuttiness

I'm not sure that I can give any helpful advice on keeping ones sanity at this time of year. I seem to be keeping going with keeping going with an excessive book borrowing habit from the Edinburgh Library system coupled with going horizontal on a regular basis with cats using me as a hotwaterbottle. I'm also ditching loads of 'shoulds' and 'oughts' and am down to the bare minimum which consists of seeing people before they dash off hither and thither to relatives.

I did find the quote I wanted to use on my New Year Cards this morning so I might get those out after Christmas.

On Sunday I visited a friend but unfortuantly I was ill (it really is a sign of true friendship and sand froid that said friend could take me throwing up while she ebayed for christmas pressies!)

We agreed that finding our passion for life was the no 1 priority for 2007. Which reminds me one book I really enjoyed was Julie & Julia based on the blog by Julie Powell (I'm in an internet cafe so won't publish the link) Anyway Julie devises this crazy idea of cooking every single recipe in Julia Child's The Joy of Cooking in a tiny NY appartment on her tiny secretarial wages. (Her descriptions of being at the bottom of the office pile revived many painful memories for me). However in the midst of this insane project - at one point her husband remarks that she is so casual about meat that she would start deboning puppies without turning a hair - she rediscovers her lost passion for life and awakes from that grim plodding one foot in front of the other life I know so well as a temp.

ALSO please go to Hendrix-Cat's blog and get the info about her song which was released yesterday. It is available to buy on line. I tried to buy the Eskimo Disco record yesterday but failed in a shop... I must have been asking inthe wrong places. Anyway please buy it as she wants no needs new shoes.

A Cosmic Tantrum

Is helpful when things go completely pear shaped.

I've had a list as long as your arm of techical things not working, money 'issues', I've been dashing hither and thither doing work before the 'holidays', ground down by the dark and wet and wind. Mood not improved by receiving christmas cards from people bloasting of their immient move to 17th Century Tower houses * in the company of younger boyfriends in the new year, being escorted across the road by lollipop 'people' as if I was some kind of 3 year old with limited intellectual capacity. (I'm 38 years old, I may be on the short side but I've been able to reach up and press the crossing button for some years now).

So I really lost it yesterday. I mean really. And if the lollipop 'person' tries that again I'm off to the council.

This is a truly hideous time of year. No pratling about how you just 'love' Christmas. If you want to do that just bugger off to someonelse's blog. Every loss, every potenial loss, everything that is missing gone deleted absent thing from your life is highlighted with a huge cosmic highlighter pen. Thought you were doing ok - well shrieks the universe HA HA HA! We crawl towards the shortest day our nemises are waking up and dancing about in front of our eyes and as I wrote in an email to a friend I contemplate the ' grey dry graveyard that is my life'.

So what to do? I do not think that looking on 'the bright side of life' is the way to go. Indulge in the total shittiness of it all. Imagine becoming a hermit dressed in shapeless garments until mid January. Close the door, put on the anwering machine and INDULGE and revell in the dark side. Tell the fecking people who are annoying the hell out of you to bugger off.

THEN my friend you will feel better. Then you can imagine an outing to see a seasonal film with some friends you truly like. Then you can imagine sending a few cards, possibly even after christmas, then you can think about giving yourself the biggest fattest, most tasteless Christmas tree that was missing from your childhood, then you can go out and buy exactly what you want for Christmas, wrap it and and write 'To me love from me' on it.

Do this.

If you do it means that anything else you get is a bonus.

* A friend who formerly was in the 'heritage biz' assures me that she will have to fill out a form in triplicate if she ever wants to open a window - it cheered me up somewhat

Eskimo Disco

Remember I urged you to look at their video on You Tube? My friend HC is to be heard on their current single - well it apparently got to no 1 in the BBC chart last week!

On My Desk

Creative types working spaces via 52 Projects. Not all the pictures loaded when I looked at it - but they all looked extraordinarily tidy. My desk is 3 inches deep in paper ( it only lies in imperial measurements), a cat is sleeping on the monitor, my ikea drawer thingy has receipts peeping out the drawers, CD's of photographs lie jumbled in front of it, one dead phone in front of the keyboard, origami paper which I bought 6 years ago in Singapore awaits being sent to my friend in Germany, a 16mm film canister perches on an in tray, an old film programme for the Edinburgh International Film Festival from when I wrote a biographical essay on Margaret Tait 3 years ago, a yellow pages, a few books, my holga camera box, a purse which was lost on the beach and picked up at the police station, a copy of O magzine, Divine chocolate bar wrapping, postcards, an old passport, a box which had tulip bulbs in it (now planted) but has the number for the tree people at the council on it, a roll of fax paper still in wrapper ( I don't have a fax machine anymore) a smattering of bills, postcards. Lets not get onto what's under the desk.

Sorry about lack of updates I've been having internet connection trouble. I've been forced to frequent sleezy internet cafes on Leith Walk to check my email but things seem back to normal. I might even get my phone back tomorrow.

The Work Manifesto

by Pamela Slim, Escape from Cubicle Nation
1. Work is your real life. It is the way you translate your feelings, your thoughts, your hopes and your desires into something valuable, tangible and useful every day. You can choose to make work into a dreaded, necessary evil that you can't wait to finish so that you can get busy with your "real life." Why not just do work you love?
2. Good work will improve your sex life. Frustrated employees desperately long for excitement and release in the form of fantasy football, internet surfing, porn, and the affections of their stressed and overworked spouses. No superhero could fill the gigantic void of a passionless man or woman in a 15-minute tryst in bed. Express your passion through your work every day, all day, and find that you will be less needy, more attentive, open, giving and loving to your partner. Which makes for better sex.
3. Your secret desire holds the clue to your best work. You say that you would love to do meaningful work, but don't know how to find it. What is your secret desire? What idea are you a little embarrassed to share with someone because it is so delicate or bold or crazy or exciting? You often claim to not know what you want to do, but in fact censor yourself from what you know you want for fear of appearing ridiculous.
4. You can't fool your kids. Many of you claim passionless, dull and frustrating careers with the excuse that you must provide for your family. Providing for your family is noble; using it as an excuse to hide from your own greatness is a bad example for your kids. If you want them to grow up motivated, creative, free and enterprising, be that yourself. They are watching and emulating your every move.
5. Fear is the great inhibitor. All of the excuses that you find for not doing work you love have solutions. You do not enact them because you are afraid: of showing up too big in the world; of failing; of appearing as an imposter; of living in poverty. There is nothing wrong with fear. Feel it, talk to it, examine it and walk with it. Then step out and let yourself show up, warts and all. It will liberate you.
6. Owning is better than renting. While you may feel "safer" renting out your skills for a paycheck and benefits, you often sell all your energy this way and have nothing left at the end of the day. If you don't get what you need in this employment arrangement in terms of money, recognition, power or responsibility, you feel angry and frustrated. Own the means of production and the factory, and at least your glorious disasters will be your disasters. Accountability breeds passion and desire.

from Gaping Void's on going series of Manifestos.

Gathering Winter Cheer

Its been one of those miserable gray and off and on wet winter Sundays. I lay in bed listening to The Archers which is a cheerful mix of stalking, breaking down marriages, infertility and a spot of cow AI! I managed to start dull tasks like cleaning out the cat tray, washing up, and chucking a few things awa in the cheerful company of I'm sorry I haven't a clueI was to make dinner for a friend and meet her at the library before but she cancelled due to the inclement weather. I showed a potential lodger around my spare room and then scarpered to get essential supplies (coffee & chocolate). Dinner is now on the go and I'm comforting myself by reading an old Vogue I found. The great thing about losing things is that when you find them again its like new. I shall put on the coffee while my dinner cooks and I urge you to search google images for 'Anne Redpath' she is the painter of the image above. I wanted to find something cheerful and cozy to look at. She is a magnificent colourist. A great role model of a woman who was a single parent and still managed to rise to the top of her profession.

Also worth checking out is Skirt magazine

Balsy Blog which I'm just exploring!

Stillness is my submission to Photo Friday this week. Go to Photo Friday to check out the other great photos.

Jackson Pollock

go and have some fun!

Happy St Andrews Day!

National Day for Scotland is 30thNovember. There are a few events happening around Scotland to celebrate a sort of mini festival.

I'm going to try and make it up to the High St in Edinburgh if the weather holds tonight.

More info here.

Not Martha is a sort of upscale crafty/foodie blog. All this dark cold weather we're having makes me more crafty/ foodie minded. I've organised a Stitch & Bitch intervention for an at home single parent. We go around there and teach her to knit as she is unable to leave infant. Also cool - possibly for presents - knitted felted boxes.

The Creation Myth: Family v Creativity

Article on work life balance in the Guardian

Why Work?

I conducted my life as though it were a foregone conclusion that losing my job would mean homelessness, hunger, or complete insecurity. But the lesson here for me was that no matter how much we may want it to, security does not come from outside ourselves. Security does not come from having a job or money, despite what we may have unconsciously absorbed from living in a money-worshipping and job-focused culture. We can live in a shack and feel secure; conversely, we can live in a mansion and be filled with fear and insecurity. Real security, the kind that will last a lifetime regardless of job status or bank balance, comes from facing up to our fears and mastering them. We may have heard this before…but do we believe it? Failing that, are we willing to at least give it a try, and act as if we believe it? It couldn't hurt, and it might actually work. This is not meant to suggest that we don't need any money or support to live comfortably. It is meant to suggest that if we're afraid that we can't survive without a job, we have a perfect opportunity right now to face that fear and master it. We can use that fear to learn how to find real security!

My surface questions about how to pay the rent without a job were a red herring. They covered up my unexamined and deeply ingrained fears of scarcity and lack. Once I learned to ask myself some deeper questions, I was able to address what was keeping me feeling stuck in the daily grind regardless of whether my survival needs were met. Here are some examples of how the voice of my fears cropped up. Each is followed by the response my deeper awareness gave when the question was posed.
1) "There isn't enough wealth to go around, and if I don't work hard and strive and compete and achieve, I'll be homeless or hungry or destitute."
(Are you aware that the World Game Institute, the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, and many others have confirmed scientifically that we live in an abundant world with sufficient resources to care for every person on the planet? Are you aware that the only obstacles to all of us manifesting this abundance in our lives are personal and political - e.g. our deepest beliefs about wealth, and how the resources are distributed? Are you willing to let go of your fear of scarcity, work toward more equitable distribution of the world's abundance, and ALSO replace your fear with trust in an abundant world?)

More here at the Why Work website.

Money / workis a huge issue for people who want to be creative and well just for those who work. I've not posted a huge amount about it about it but want to explore the issue more.

Have I mentioned Supernaturale? Great crafty site - the articles and links are great and the forums are very lively.

Thankful for

The early 80's khol rimmed Marc Almond alike look on my cat's face.

My cool student for telling me about Sheila Scott Scottish Aviatrix who flew around the world in a purple flying suit with a matching skirt which could be donned when she needed to make a public appearance.

Real coffee in my moka coffee pot - though I didn't realise the link between coffee, aluminium modernism and fascism...

Finding my Holga camera after many months of it being MIA.

Delightful friends

Fabulous soap (orange & geranium best) and Lush Angels on Bare skin.

Libraries

Making Polaroid Transfers

interesting how to article here.

beta blogger

Thinking of upgrading DONT - just wasted an evening trying to turn off the annoying feature which tells you how many posts you have done in an archive month and can't - so removed the &%"$! archives wholesale. If you know how to put the archives on without the post numbering let me know....

Heaps of Books

I've been on a reading deprivation week - as perscribed by the Artists Way in order to allow a little creative outflow. Well I did start sewing up a scarf project which has been stalled for two winters.

I gobbled up Michael Chabon's The Final Solution last night which I loved - since going on the reading deprivation week books have been raining in on me and now I've been tidying the house in preparation for letting my spare room and found a ton of books to read and re-read. Please please universe send me a nice lodger.

I liked this post by Evelyn Rodrigrez of Crossroads Dispatches about only saying yes to what one has a deep internal YES to.

Portobello Arts & Crafts Christmas Market

Saturday 2nd Devember 1.30-4.00 p.m.

40+ makers selling hand crafted items - wood turning, jewellery, bags, scarves, felted textiles, paintings, cards, silver sculptures, prints, photographs, bead work, glass work, books.

For all your unique and unusual Christmas gifts.

Teas and coffees - 50p, children free.

at Portobello Community Centre - 3 Adelphi Grove, Edinburgh EH15 1AP

Together better

It really amazes me how this stuff works. I have classes where people admit to wanting things which they feel are impossible and the person next to them casually offers information to the contary. One student admitted to wanting a new job in a field that she said was very difficult to get jobs in - her neighbour offred up two potenial contacts from friends of hers in the same field who were leaving their jobs in the next few weeks. Another student confessed to a desire to go into space - a seemingly impossible wish. She wanted to be able to see the earth from the air. Another student pointed out that there are currently two supasonic planes in development to follow on from Concorde which will fly up to the edge of space above the earth and you will be able to see the curvature of the planet.

We should stop hugging our desires and dreams to ourselves and go out and broadcast them to the world because we never know someone out there may have the solution.

The Tea Leaf Oracle

Reading No. 22
Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.
~ I Ching

Writer Anne Lamott espouses the idea of "shitty first drafts." Not quite as elegantly put, but the same thing.

Don't try to do it perfectly the first time.

Just do it.

You can refine, perfect, polish later.

Get it out.

Take the first step.

Run with it.

Chaos, then brilliance.

from www.willa.com

Newspaper bags

I'm a bit of an ecological fundie. I often wrap presents in paper ripped out of magazines and tied up with ribbon. One year I made hand decoupaged shoe boxes for all my christmas presents and nearly made myself ill with the effort. Each box was carefully designed with images which matched the recipient. Result Christmas Eve me lying on the sofa giving feeble squeeks while directing my friends B & C which item should go in each box.

One of those crafty projects which went a bit awry. However ! Last weekend for the princly sum of 50p I bought a cool 'newspaper bag' made from an Indian newspaper with a cool help handle from the shop at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Funky, recyled and helping street children. The label says 'The organization was started in 2004 by street children who wanted to give something back in return for the opportunties which had allowed them to escape desperate circumstances. These elder children, now married with children of their own, generate an income by making newspaper bags and juste items. This allows them to take care of thirteen street children that they have saved from the street's surrounding Delhi train station, support for this wonderful project means that these children can enjoy going to school and playing, rather than pulling rickshaws, shoe polishing, rag picking and worse.'


www.indiashop.co.uk

Do more things badly

encourages the writer Sark.

On that same theme take pleasure in the Really Terrible Orchestra who say on their website

'The Really Terrible Orchestra exists to encourage those who have been prevented from playing music, either through lack of talent or some other factor, to play music in the company of similarly afflicted players.
The policy of the orchestra is to make no distinction between the various grades of ability and the various forms of music, or time signature. The RTO looks forward to a further lowering of standards, in order to underline its commitment to accessibility and relevance.'

Stephanie Dowrick's key themes

"The thing about art that delights and confounds us is that it never happens again. This delights us if we have learned how to look because the esthetic experience allows all of our human faculties to be absorbed in the environment of the present and for a while to be fully alive without reflecting, without turning back or looking ahead. Uniqueness confounds us because there are no rules for guides. There can be no science of the particular. In a sense this confounding is a delight because it puts us in touch with that aspect of reality which is described as uniqueness--the fact that nothing ever happens twice in the same way in every respect." ~corita kent


from Keri Smith

Extreme Craft

A conversation on the intersection of craft and environment.

Very cool interview with Adrian Meade

How did you start writing?

I was 33 years old, living in New York and stressed out after 15 years working in the pressure cooker world of hairdressing and fashion shows. On the weekends I was helping out downtown in a gang's projects, persuading kids to give up their guns. I'd travelled the world, been in some VERY strange situations and people were constantly telling me that I should write about it all. A kid from Kirkby in Liverpool becoming a writer? Surely you needed a degree in English Literature to be one of these rare and exotic creatures?

Desperate for a new career I moved to Edinburgh with a plan. I would become a criminal psychologist! So I signed up for an Access course at Edinburgh University. Then that strange phenomena that I have come to love and trust kicked in. You instigate change....and totally unforeseen events begin to take over and carry you forward...in a different direction.
I was asked by some students to be a stuntman in their no-budget short film, as I had a background in Martial Arts and, more importantly, I owned a suit and tie! Once on the film set I realised that THIS was what I was meant to be doing. I'd always sketched, dabbled with music, LOVED films and was never afraid of hard graft. Making films and TV combined all those elements. I was smitten.

Now absolutely determined to to be a writer/director I planned it like a military campaign, visualising every step.
Step 1. I needed training and a calling card. I would make a short film. But first I needed a budget.
I worked 5 days a week in a Salon, 1 day a week at the Access course and 6 nights of the week as a bouncer. I snatched any time I could to write, five minutes here and there but every day I would write. On Sundays I would take out all my scraps of paper, write them up into a script and then pay a student £20 to type them into a screenplay format for me (I didn't own a computer and couldn't type.)
In nine months I'd saved £7,000 and went back to New York and made a short film on 35mm. I passed my Access course, the short won some awards and my two short scripts and feature (written mostly on the toilet in work ) secured me an agent at ICM London. I was off.

More here and a wee reminder his film Night People is on next week at the GFT and Cineworld Fountain Park

Interesting article in the FT about social networks online.

Autumn pleasures

Its suddenly gone rather cold here. Luckily yesterday I began a frantic clear out where I found my pink cashmere gloves.

I made soup from scratch. Lidle has half price veg this month. I am becoming a Lidle bore.

Autumn soup
fry one onion, chop a carrot and fry. Then put in a packet of cooked beetroot, one large potatoe, one tin of tinned tomatoes, one tin of butter beans, add some dried ginger and a spot of chili. Sloosh some water in.. Cook, food process about 3/4 of soup and serve with homemade bread.

Home made bread
500g of bread flour, one table spoon of sugar, a pinch of salt, one teaspoon of yeast, 250 g of luke warm water, one table spoon of olive oil, one egg. Mix and knead for 6 mins. Oil and leave to rise under cloth. When doubled in size knead in sunflower seeds ( a generous amount) then shape into round shape and bake about 30 mins at gas mark 6.

Finally the Archers has at last got some interesting story lines, adultery! gay marriage!

The Art of Craft is a great blog I've just rediscovered on the topic of marketing works of art and craft.

Instincts and tulips

About 5 years ago I met a person who was very successful and I ended up having a professional connection with them over a creative project. I always had a 'funny feeling' about her. Whenever I met them I felt odd, off centre, something was not quite right and I couldn't identify what it was. I eventually had a great deal of trouble completing this creative project and in order to do so found that I had to remove myself from this person as far as I possibly could.

A few days ago I got some information about this person which confirmed all my instincts that there was something off and odd about them. I had not been imagining anything all this time, I had not been 'jealous' and I had not been making it up. My instincts had been telling me the truth all the time.

The more important question is why don't I listen to the 'still small nagging voice within'. It doesn't always bear bad news - I was once standing in Marks & Spencer trying to decide on the flowers to take as a present to an interviewee. Suddenly and clearly I felt myself self thinking 'I must take the red ones'. When I got to this woman's house her kitchen was acessorised in exactly the same shade of red.

Rather than ally ourselves with outside authorities we (and I) fail to take seriously what we already know but will not give credence to.

Zoe the cat has started blogging. She lives around the corner from my cats but is an 'indoor' cat so they have never met. I don't think mine would be into blogging - it would interfere with tree climbing time.

Make yourself a virtual pumpkin!

Night People Screenings

Night People, the debut feature film from Mead Kerr Ltd, backed by Scottish Screen and SMG’s New Found Film initiative, is released in Glasgow and Edinburgh in November.

The film won the BAFTA Scotland Audience Award 2005, and has been shown on the international festival circuit, to much critical success; it will be shown at HD Fest in Los Angeles this December. Night People takes us on a journey across the city of Edinburgh, introducing a cast of characters for whom there will be no sleep. Each is faced with a dilemma that may change their lives forever.

Catch Night People now at:

Edinburgh Filmhouse
Tues 31 Oct (one night only)
8.15pm + Q&A session with Clare Kerr, Adrian Meade and cinematographer Scott Ward.
Showing as part of the Reels Scottish/Irish Film festival for one night only.

Edinburgh Cineworld (UGC)
From Friday 3 Nov – Thursday 9 Nov.

Glasgow Film Theatre
From Sunday 5 Nov - Tuesday 7 Nov.
Director Adrian Mead and producer Clare Kerr will introduce the screening on Sunday 5 November at 5.15pm.
~~~~~~~~~~

Adrian & Clare are fabulous people and I've seen the film already and would highly recommend it.

Interesting blog post on Leni Reifenstal.

Compare and contrast with the life of Ruby Grierson her contempoary in the UK.

I can hear random fireworks going off every now and again. Its open season with Halloween coming up. I rather like Halloween as a festival and am sad to see that some shops are already putting up Christmas displays before Halloween has even come and gone.

I went to a fantastic fancy dress Halloween party last night. I went as the 'Knitter of Hell' apparently a character in Heart of Darkness but I've not read the book so I'm taking that on trust! Someone else came as a professional Victorian mourner with stovepipe hat. She had a card - professionally printed and I was pleased to discover that not only would she do wailing and moaning at gravesides, she would also take on the mantle of guilt. Now I don't have guilt but I do have guilt that I don't have guilt... ie I've done somethings that previously would have me metaphorically writhing on the ground with guilt but actually I'm not... so she said that for a small fee she would be happy to take on the guilt about the lack of guilt! One of the hosts was dressed in twigs and ivy as a green man (he also had hampster grass attached to his person but that escaped the costume and was strewn around the flat). There were bats hanging everywhere and cobwebs. But the piece de resistance was a headless body lying in the bathroom which I had to veiw on arrival. The neck was a watermelon wedged into a shirt. It was amazingly realistic with blood oozing out all over the bath.

I discovered that the host was a primary school teacher by trade and I realised where this crafty excellence came from. I've seen this before offices of extreme dullitude where worksations are transfored into snow scenes with cotton wool or the three wise men trecking across the desert. All meticulously done in cardboard and paint. Somehow these festivals allow people to let out their creativity whether it be transforming a paper lampshade into an alien head making a working ghostbusters back pack for a fancy dress costume. It all shows how amazingly creative people can be with they just give themselves permission to be creative.

snickers fairy?

One has been operating in my area. I came home on Tuesday night to find two full sized bars lying in my hallway. Obviously posted through my letter box. No friends have admitted to doing good works - so I wonder is this scenario being replicated across this city?

Eskimo Disco

Yes I know you have never heard of it (some popular music combo thingy) but my friend HC made well noises on their new release and if you go here you can read about it and help her out by rating it that new fangled website for young persons - oh you know Your Tube or something...

Still here - knee deep in life - rather like standing in a flooding river. Its raining again here. My computer isn't working 'properly' so I'm unable to post links hence my lack of internet practice.

@*@*@*@

Yesterday I left the house and decided that I should do some exploring. I walked down a street normally I just whiz past on the bus. I walked past the big houses built for merchants in the 19th Centuary. Visited the cemetary and checked out cemetary fashions (photographs on gravestones, painted bears are all coming in). Then I walked off the main road an ambled around suburbia, large fluffy cats watched me from front steps, a secret collection of allotments hidden from view, mysterious houses behind high walls, high hedges and firmy shut gates. I took a few photographs and walked home. I have a confession to make .... I 've lived in this area for nearly 8 years and this is the first time that I've gone for a wander without any kind of errand or aim.

How to be creative

Hugh MacLeod's ideas which I was reminded of recently on an email list I"m on.

Artist's Way Course

I'm starting two new courses based on the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

I've facilitated these groups for over 10 years now and I'm an experinced facilitator in getting people back in touch with their creativity, discovering previously hidden creatitivity and leading people back to becoming the 'artist of their own life'.

Introductory sessions are a bargain £5 (try before you buy!). The afternoon class is 2-4pm Thursday 19th Oct and the evening class is 6-8pm Friday 20th October. Both are at Buddafield in Blackfriars St off the High St. Email me on creativevoyage at hotmail dot com to check if there are places.

sorry about lack of updates but blogger being very uncooperative

”As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned.” -Agatha Christie

from 37 days

Embracing Mistakes

Yesterday I got up early, dashed to Woolworths to buy a card and present for a friend's child who was turning 3 that day. I got home wrapped the present, walked to catch the bus and journied across the city. I got off the bus and luckily remememberd the instructions on finding my friend's house (I've only been there once before). As I walked up the street I saw my friend and her daughter outside her house and she said 'Hello what are you doing here?' I'd arrived a day early for the birthday party. So I abandoned the present inside the house, got into the car with them and went to the Morningside 'Festival' which consisted of a few stalls in a street. I bought a cool necklace made out of buttons, a few nice postcards and my friend and I caught up with each other over lunch. It was lovely. My friend it turns out always assumed that her childless friends were busy on a weekend so never arranged to meet any but enjoyed having some adult company. I enjoyed catching up with my friend who I'd last seen 6 months ago. We then ambled through the charity shops of Morningside and then I went to try and do publicity for my classes.

Similarily whenever I go and pick up pictures and they say 'oh they are ruined' at the processor I get more excited as I take the package of photographs. I've learned that this often means more interesting colours or even this rather mysterious picture of double exposures. What is seen as ruined and mistaken is often wonderful.

Fragmentary Glimpses