more on creativity from Free Play...

Creative inspiration is not the property only of certain special people like professional artists. To give away our creative ability to professional artists is like giving away our healing ability to doctors. The professionals are vitally necessary, as repositories of knowledge, tradition, resources, and most of all as catalysts to the power that is within us.

But the real creativity, is done by us, and we abrogate that power at our own peril. Sir Herbert Read writes, "The aesthetic view of life is not confined to those who can create or appreciate works of art. It exists wherever natural senses play freely on the manifold phenomena of our world, and when life as a consequence is found to be full of felicity."

The capacity to personify, mythologize, imagine, harmonize is one of the great mercies granted in human life. We are able to conceptualize unknowns which, if left in the unconcious, would overwhelm us.

artist [n.] - someone who chooses to express their creative spirit revealing the call of their soul, through artistic passions and authentic approaches to living life. someone who is not afraid to share his or her true self with others.

posted by bluematrix at 01/30/06 12:16 | link | comments (1)

pop quiz, big money.

what is the fastest growing segment of all advertising? here are some hints...
- it is a bigger recipient of ad dollars than any tv network or newspaper chain.
- the top 2 companies made $6 billion and $3.7 billion respectively last year.
- the segment barely existed 5 years ago.

the answer? pay-per-click, those little blue text links you see when you do a search on google and yahoo. $10 billion for those two companies alone, in one year? sure would be nice to come up with a big idea wouldn't it?

bonus question...

how much money did the band u-2 take in last year? how about a quarter of a billion dollars. not bad for 4 guys playing rock n roll who can't even read music.

'Money will not buy happiness, but it will let you be unhappy in nice places.'

posted by bluematrix at 01/26/06 09:03 | link | comments (1)

the water danced
at least on the surface
squinting, i pull on my sunglasses
as she pushes hers off

it's all about focus, she says
pointing her camera towards the water
dark glass filters my view
clear glass narrows hers

yes, i see the diamonds on the river
floating by, a school of light
not moving past, shimmering in place, she corrects
focus

-

you know that old piano won't hold a tune
the young bartender nods in agreement
but i try anyways
thinking if i could find enough keys
a doorway would open
and i could share
a piece of me

the white paint is chipped from
the faux ivory majors
but the ebony minors look fine
so i decide to decide
and give the dark side a ride

but she's right
it's hard to make discord
sound like a real chord
and the moment passes

more drinks come
cheers to you, cheers to me
and things go slowly
softly
quietly
out of
focus

posted by bluematrix at 01/22/06 22:42 | link | comments (1)

i know...
but i don't know why

i wish...
but i know the answer

i always wanted to...
and i really tried too
but just like me, she's left with...

i know i'm responsible
but i never thought i'd wake up one day and...

if only i could tell her...

posted by bluematrix at 01/17/06 19:07 | link | comments (2)

I read recently where Purdue University scientists say extreme weather events, such as floods and heat waves, may increase in frequency and severity in the coming years. Being an eternal optimist, i've never been accused of being a chicken little, but just looking back over the past year, the weather does seem to be getting a bit more extreme.

- The worst modern era disaster in man's history with a quarter of million people dead from the Indian Ocean tsunami.

- One of the largest hurricanes ever to hit the US coast in one of the busiest storm seasons on record leveled a major metropolitan area.

- The southwestern US is in the midst of a seven-year drought that is one of the driest in recorded history. Research suggests it may be the driest in 1400 years. Climatic patterns for the past 150 years in the Southwest support the prediction that the drought may last five to thirty more years.

- More than 400 miles of eastbound Interstate 70 (the main artery connecting the two US coasts) was closed a few weeks ago, from Denver to Salina, Kansas due to an unusually large and early snowstorm.

The Purdue scientists expectations also include:

• The desert Southwest will experience more heat waves of greater intensity, combined with less summer precipitation. Water is already at a premium in the four-corners states and southern Nevada and, as years pass, even less water will be available for the region's burgeoning populations, with extreme hot events increasing in frequency by as much as 500 percent.

• The Gulf Coast will be hotter and will receive its precipitation in greater volumes over shorter time periods. "The region actually will get more rainfall than it does now, but it will not be steady," Diffenbaugh said. "We project more dry spells punctuated by heavier rainfalls."

• In the northeastern United States – roughly the region east of Illinois and north of Kentucky – summers will be longer and hotter. "Imagine the weather during the hottest two weeks of the year," Diffenbaugh said. "The area could experience temperatures in that range lasting for periods of up to two months by century's end."

•Similarly, the continental United States will experience an overall warming trend: Temperatures now experienced during the coldest two weeks of the year will be a past memory, and winter's length will diminish as well, according to the model.

-And, oddly enough, this warming trend is going to be just the opposite for those in northern europe, because as the globe gets warmer more of the ice caps melt, releasing cold water into the warm gulf stream. and that stream is what keeps countries like england and norway, which really aren't that far from the arctic circle, reasonably temperate. so it could get mighty chilly up there.

Again, I'm not saying this is bad - hell warmer winters here in st louis is a good thing from where I'm sitting. Nor am I suggesting God is mad at us, or man is destroying the earth with pollution - change is inevitable. Just that Mother Earth is feeling a bit restless lately and I've noticed more than in the past.

posted by bluematrix at 01/14/06 11:38 | link | comments

ok, so in '06 i've been really workin on putting out a positive vibe. for the most part its all good...been workin out more, cuttin down on the partying, and most of all, workin thru the sister dying thing. my parents, normally pretty with it, are still totally helpless/clueless when it comes to dealing with jacquie passing. like when two days after christmas, dad calls in a panic and said they wouldn't accept her body at the research facility. she had wanted to donate her remains to this facility and after 3 months of study they were to cremate her and give us back the remains. since no one else was deciding anything, i decided that we would do a memorial service once we got her ashes back in late march. lisa, jacquies friend who took care of her in her last few months of life, was adamant about not letting her remains go back to kansas with my parents and sister. and they were adamant about not letting her final place be at lisa's. so i mediated and we decided to spread the ashes in a park in ohio, the day after the memorial service. problem solved.

well i guess christmas eve was a popular time to meet your maker, because the facility did not have a chance to pick up her body. so dad calls me asking what to do. shit i don't know, dad, i guess just sign the forms and i'll arrange to move the service up to a few weeks from now. he of course said ok and i got things set up and all was good going into the new year. i contacted the unity church she used to go to, and got everything arranged.

well now it seems that lisa doesn't want to give her ashes to back to us, her family, for the service. i tried to remain calm...why not i asked her. long winded, emotional answer, but basically she's pissed because my mom never reconciled her differences with jacquie and basically abandoned her at the end. 'which is true, lisa, and totally fucked up i agree, but it sure would be nice to have her remains at her memorial service and for you to do what you what we agreed on, which was to spread her ashes at a spot of your choosing lisa.' 'well i'll think about it.' and she hung up. nice. i mean this woman was a saint and all for my sister, and yea, and my sister always distanced herself from us her whole life and so my family is totally disfunctional about the whole situation now, but c'mon, her remains belong to the family legally and morally, and we are cool with leaving them in ohio, but it just seems pretty damn weird to have a funeral and not have jacquie there and her have final resting place be at some friend who only knew her in her final years.

man, this whole thing is just way too weird.

posted by bluematrix at 01/11/06 22:26 | link | comments

More on creative blockage from Free Play...

'Buddhists speak of the Five Fears that stand between ourselves and our freedom: fear of loss of life; fear of loss of livelihood; fear of loss of reputation; fear of unusual states of mind; and fear of speaking before an assembly.

Fear of speaking before an assembly sounds a little silly next to the others, but for the purposes of Free Play it is the central one; let us extend it as "fear of speaking up," "stage fright," "writer's block," and our other old friends. The fear is profoundly related to fear of foolishness, which has two parts: fear of being thought a fool (loss of reputation) and fear of actually being a fool (fear of unusual states of mind).

Let's add fear of ghosts. One of the blocking bugaboos is being overwhelmed by teachers, authorities, parents, or the great masters. Deviation from the true self often arises from comparison with or envy of the idealized other (parent, lover, teacher, past master, hero). Geniuses or stars are set up as unattainable goals we cannot possibly match. These personalities are so much more spectacular than you that you might as well keep your mouth shut to begin with. Brahms couldn't finish his first symphony for twenty-two years because he had a monkey on his back called Beethoven.

So we meet perfectionism and its ugly twin, procrastination. We need to do everything, have everything, be everything. Perfectionism arrests us perhaps more effectively than any other block. It brings us face to face with our judging spectre, and since we can't possibly measure up, we sit in a funk of procrastination. We generate an unproductive antidote to these feelings of envy: fantasies of omnipotence or fabulous success, or else their inverse, victim or bad-luck fantasies.

No matter how advanced we may become, we fear that people will find us out as fakes. There were so many times, when I was involved in the teaching profession, that I would have a room full of students sitting round a table, each one feeling that he or she was the only one who didn't get it, and therefore ashamed to speak up. Fear of foolishness and fear of mistakes tap into that very primal feeling we all learned as children: shame. Then the moment would come when someone did speak up, after which a second person felt safe and also spoke up, with a "I thought I was the only one who felt that way"; then everyone would reveal similar feelings (including myself!).'

posted by bluematrix at 01/07/06 00:27 | link | comments (1)

I'm really digging this Free Play book. I have found it hard to be creative (outside of my job) lately and this guy really seems to get it.

"When the creative processes grind to a halt, we have that unbearable feeling of being totally clogged. Instead of experiencing relaxed, energetic concentration, we jump avidly toward any distraction, no matter how trivial or ridiculous; we become easily tired; when we look back at our work nothing seems good enough.

The creative person can be seen as embodying or acting as two inner characters, a muse and an editor. The muse proposes, the editor disposes. The editor criticizes, shapes, and organizes the raw material that the free play of the muse has generated. If, however, the editor precedes rather than follows the muse, we have trouble. The artist judges his work before there is yet anything to judge, and this produces a blockage or paralysis. The muse gets edited right out of existence.

If he gets out of control, the inner critic can be experienced as a harsh and punishing father figure. This is the inhibiting spectre who haunts the lives of many artists.

As our artwork flows out from its mysterious source, it becomes objective, something that can be heard, evaluated, explored, experimented upon. In art we are continually judging our work, continually tracking the patterns we create and letting our judgments feed back into the ongoing development. The music is self-monitoring, self-regulating, self-judging. That's how we produce art rather than chaos; that's how evolution produces an organism rather than a heap of randomized carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, sodium, and other atoms.

But there are two kinds of judgment: constructive and obstructive. Constructive judgment moves right along with the time of creation as a continuous feedback. Obstructive judgment runs, as it were, perpendicular to the line of action, interposing itself before creation (writer's block) or after creation (rejection or indifference).

To either like or dislike our work for more than a moment can be dangerous. The judging voice asks, "Is this good enough?" But even if we create something really stupendous, sooner or later we have to perform again, and that inner judging voice is back again, saying, "It had better be better than the last time." Thus one's very talent can be a factor in blocking creativity.

The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it."

posted by bluematrix at 01/02/06 22:10 | link | comments (6)