An Appetite for Creativity. And Fun.

Are there times when you feel restless? Like there’s something there and if you just put your hand out, you’d catch it. But you don’t know what it is? Instead there’s a space like that feeling you get before you know you’re hungry. But you don’t want food for your body, you want food for your spirit. 

Creating feeds my spirit in many satisfying ways. It’s play. It’s work. It’s problem solving and it’s mystery. Even as I complete something new, I find a new sound, smell, color, shape, texture to puzzle and entice me. I wonder if I’ll ever really be finished?

Then an answer popped up my inbox:

“You created something amazing, and now you get to do it again.

And you get to do it again and again and again and again your whole life long. It is natural to feel a creative hunger for the next thing when we have completed the arc of creating the thing before. It is healthy. It is for the good. In fact, it is how life keeps us in the flow of life. We need to give ourselves permission around this. Permission for creative appetite.” Author, Tara Mohr

Completion and beginning again. 

Two sculptures I’ve been working on are ready for the last phase: glazing. Instead of feeling that satisfied feeling, I got restless. Instead of glazing these two sculptures, I started looking at two different sculptures on my top shelf. 

I took them down, held them in my hands and wondered. What to do? What colors did these pieces want? How to reveal the textures? Where was the story? 

I knew I needed to finish the other pieces and yet, I yearned to work these two, too. Instead of forcing myself to completion, I let them show me their colors as I painted. I let my creative appetite lead me. 

The result? Now instead of 2 sculptures glazed and fired, I’ll have 4. 

Fun in the sun.  

It was hot, hot, hot here. Although Darby came to us from California, he was hot too. Instead of hiding out with my R2D2 room air conditioner, I decided Darby and I needed to do something different. Like a Dr. Seuss book: it was too hot to play and too cold to stay, so Darby and I decided to go out and play. 

He was not sure what to do with this plastic pond. He sniffed it. He circled it. He ran around it. When I threw his ball in it, he delicately put one foot in to reach his ball. Finally, I used his favorite thing, the hose and got him in the pool.