This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.
A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.
I’m here as a kind of halfway house—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.
All of the things are blooming. Have you noticed? June is here. The Cecil Brunner rosebush is magnificent this year--an explosion of flowers so heavy that its top has fallen away from the white wall of the little city cottage where Lucia is made, and is spilling toward the alleyway. There is a lesson here for me, in expectation and fruition...
Sunday, April 9, 2017 - Daily Notes, From the Editor (550 words). Whoa, April is intense. Burgeoning. This thing we call Spring is aptly named. To the untrained eye, new growth appears suddenly, but if you have been paying attention you know: this all started long ago.
Happy New Year! Oh, the plans I had for ending 2016 with a neat bow, a perfect email, and an announcement of a new offering I've been working on for early 2017. Out the window they flew sometime in the last week while I struggled to balance heart work with paid work, dreams with reality. Instead, I woke this morning unfinished. Like I always do...
Twenty minutes into our ride into San Basilio, and I could already feel myself fluffing up, a subtle but unmistakable feeling of the senses reawakening after a long dormancy. I love this place down to the yellow dust that covers my shoes. Work can be thrilling and fulfilling, but it also makes me one-dimensional...
January 5, 2016
"Our daily lives are wondrous. It's the small things."
I heard this on the radio last night as I stood in my kitchen slicing juicy red beets into a cast iron pan and wishing for more hours in the day.
This new year already has a cadence much like the old one. I had a feeling it would. Forty years of experience have taught me that change happens in a heartbeat but transition takes longer. Transformation, well, that takes even longer still.
I had hoped by some magic, though, I would find longer hours in 2016 days. They still feel short.
Today is Tuesday and my daily work is laid out before me...spreadsheets, messaging, AP Stylebook, a bursting email box, my phone. A list of things done and yet-to-do, an accounting of my time since 9 a.m. It is now nearly 3 o'clock.
Maybe, like my friend Amanda Ford suggested last year, I can learn to become a creative ninja. A ninja jumps in and out, finds opportunity in small moments, moves swiftly, with agility, passion, and seeming nonchalance. She is alert, awake, aware, patient, ready, and she acts. Boldly. In tiny minutes she does big things.
This 15 minute break to photograph the light in my office and write a short note to share with you...it's ninja practice. I want to do more. I thought about photographing the mud on my sidewalk this morning because it moved my heart...it reminded me of how all of us are down here in the brown mess of early January together, trying to feel new again and quietly wondering if we might be stuck.
My camera was not with me. It sparked a thought:
"I want to carry my camera everywhere this year. Everywhere."
So now I have a New Year's Resolution. To be a camera-carrying creative ninja. Every single day.
You?
xo
laura
