CreativeCoaching

My Dinner Party "Guests"

My training in psychodrama taught me everything I need to jump start my creative process and live the creative life of my dreams:  inspiration, when needed, is always a moment away.

In reality, it's impossible for me to invite these five guests to a dinner party of my dreams - three of them are no longer living, for one thing, and I don't personally know the other two.  But here they are on my list of guiding lights.  Their names spring to mind instantly and intuitively.  These are the artists I would choose today to place around me at a special dinner in their honor because I admire their work - they stimulate my creative imagination and touch deep pools of feeling in me. 

My imagination seats them, well, why not here - the Menemsha Cafe on Martha's Vineyard?  For the purposes of this creative exercise, the table we choose is round and not so small that it's crowded and not so large that we couldn't all hold hands and pray or something if the spirit moves us. . .

Ann Morrow Lindbergh, diarist, poet, mother, wife, memoirist, essayist, international traveler and early aviation pioneer.

 

Thornton Wilder, playwright who wrote about my native New England and "ordinary" life, and death in a fictional town I know well.

 

 

Meryl Streep, actor, the kind of actor who takes huge emotional risks and dives deeply into a role; the kind of actor I want to write plays for.

 

 

 

Mary Oliver, nature poet of New England who feeds the soul with the spirit of renewal, survival, truth and beauty.

 

Eugene O'Neil, playwright, who carves out the emotional reality of the wounded and wounding family dynamics we struggle to survive and heal.

 

 

We are here.

Now I have the beginnings of some kind of map to some imagined place I have yet to visit,

but will.

These Guiding Lights

~ On Rising   My husband Frank and I have a practice of waking early.  He rises for a daily spiritual meeting.  I, to write.  But first, we sit with coffee and each other to process dreams we've just woken from. . . plan the day, share encouragement, honest feedback, inspiration, and humor.  It's a time of day when we share our sharpest thinking, to analyze problems, and on a good day, solve some.  It's our time to offer each other a sense of hope when we most need it.

~ Renewal   Recently, our talks have centered on the problem of lost inspiration.  How do we renew creative energy after it has all been spent?  How do we recover and move forward with our goals and dreams when we're in the middle of a "dry spell"?  How do we bounce back from disapointment or failure or frustration?

~ A Dinner Party of My Dreams    I remember an exercise we did in psychodrama training group many years ago where we were asked to imagine who we would invite to the dinner party of our dreams.  If we could invite any guiding lights, living or dead, real or imagined, to fill the ten seats at our table, who would we ask, and why, and then we were invited to explore our dinner party in a powerful sociodramatic enactment.

~ Our Guiding Lights    The memory prompts me to suggest to my husband that we call in our current guiding lights.  We can only invite five this time, so who will we each put on our list?  We're driving to a wedding a few hours away on Saturday.  We must have our dinner party planned to discuss by then.

Yesterday, I made some tough choices, and I have my list of Guiding Lights ready to share with him.

Kelly

One Creative Act

Creativity is a survival skill and untapped resource for happiness, vitality, and waking up every day feeling energized and positive.  

Creativity is an energy we all have as human beings - some of us use it more than others, and it took me awhile to connect with mine as a young adult.  And even though I use my creative energy a lot, it goes through its dormancy cycle, and I have to jump-start it after periods where it feels like it has dried up. 

I Must Warm-Up to My Creativity

Warm-up is a natural part of the cycle of creativity.

I find that if I do one creative thing, even a small thing, my creative energy grows and I'm quickly revitalized.

Almost any creative act will do - writing in my journal, planting a plant, baking cookies, hand-designing a letter or greeting card to a loved one, submitting a play to a producer - it's the process of bringing something un-born into the world, expressing a thought or feeling that is uniquely mine.

Not every creative act results in complete satisfaction. 

Sometimes creativity results in a mess - the new plant is trampled, the cookies burn, a rejection letter arrives - I have to be willing to make a mess, and try again.

Kelly