CREATIVITY AND OTHER LIFE QUALITIES: Planning Your Next Artist's/Writer's Retreat -- From the Dancefloor to the Balcony

Monday

Planning Your Next Artist's/Writer's Retreat -- From the Dancefloor to the Balcony

I like to study the faces of my beloveds when they're interacting with each other, or looking at me.

I don't like the way some digital cameras, even the good ones, distort or limit what's really there.

I like to see not just what the camera sees...but what's happening...and what it means...and not just what it means to me.

For your Journal/Creative Writing: Take pictures of one day...one entire day, weekend, or week. If you have a camera and want to use it to accompany your journal entries, do.

With the camera or just with your mind, frame each picture like a camera's lense. Describe the details, everything, just as a camera would see it. Be objective.

Then, go beyond the frame and deeper than. Tell about each picture...from your heart. Now you're being subjective as you want to be...or as you can.

I call this going from the dancefloor to the balcony. One moment, you're part of what's happening. The next, you're apart from it, taking it in from a much wider perspective, with a great panoramic lense...telling not just what you see, but seeing beyond it, and seeing what it means.

With practice, you can do both at the same time. It's like driving in traffic...and being a tiny hummingbird hovering, or a great blue heron flying above your own car...what's going on in your mind and heart, in the noise and the smoke, and far beyond it.

The trick or key is, never to stay just on the dancefloor...and never to stay just up in the balcony. For a full life of learning, growth, and creativity that is both meaningful and rich in the textures of your relationships (with God or Creation, Self, and Others) and experiences (here, within, beyond), you want to be able to have a balance of both, you want to be able to go back and forth from the dancefloor...to the balcony...to the dancefloor...to the balcony. So, in due time, you can experience everything, not just in one dimension, or two, or even three...but in four...going wide and deep, all at the same time...all the time. This practice gives you the seasoned painter's perspective of the orchard...you take a photo that is at once so pure and complex, that the viewer sees the tendrils of the vines, the pearls of dew collecting there, and inhales the fragances of the grapes, the richness of the earth, the transcendence of the mist, and wealth beyond and within every grape and hillside.

The gift of this retreat, this practice of moment to moment precision and fullness...is the transformation you experience and may facilitate for others along the way.

Onward?

Diane Solis

The poetry of Diane Solis has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, excerpted in Expressive Writing: Classroom and Community, and has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals and magazines, including, America, Big Muddy, The Healing Muse, Hobo Camp Review, The Lost Country, Psychological Perspectives, Sinister Wisdom, Slink Chunk Press and elsewhere. Her chapbook ART SPIRITS, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A science writer and technical editor by trade, Solis practices contemplative and Zen forms of meditation and travels to remote places to photograph and write about the "wild" she encounters there. She resides on the Central Pacific Coast with her partner.

www.dmsolis.blogspot.com

The Latest Quotes for Contemplation:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. --Annie Dillard

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, age after age, forever. ~ Tagore

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.... ~ Frank O'Hara

Of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one. ~Pablo Neruda

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long. ~Joan Chittister

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. ~ Osho

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? ~ Mary Oliver

Without warning, as a whirlwind swoops on an oak, Love shakes my heart. ~ Sappho

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"

Love many things, for therein lies your true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well... ~ Vincent van Gogh

I have found that to love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions. ~ Jane Goodall

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. ~Thomas Merton

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
~John F. Kennedy

I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. ~Darrell Bourque, Poet Laureate of Louisiana

In the lover's heart is a lute which plays the melody of longing. ~Rumi

But perhaps the most important thing about my father was that he taught us the simplest things -- Navajo things -- like how to just sit and be quiet, to blend in and watch, or to move so silently we'd become a part of the forest. My father taught us how to live the concepts of our culture, especially the importance of communicating with the natural world. ~Lori Arviso Alvord, M.D.