“You can’t get to wonderful without passing through alright”
How do we mobilize creative thinking?
The following attitudes and activities have been found in creative people regardless of their profession
1) Training and practice of activities that uses the right brain function
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS (feeling, imagination, symbols, fantasy, risk taking) VS LEFT BRAIN that is more rational, analytical, orderly
2) Suspension of judgment
3) Openness to new ideas, new attitudes, new approaches
4) Willingness to take risks, making “leaps of faith, lessening inhibitions
5) Freedom of subjective thinking, expression of emotions and personal realities
6) Intuitiveness, playing hunches to generate spontaneous ideas
7) Freedom to make outlandish responses, rejecting fear of being wrong or unconventional
8) Rejecting destructive criticism, prejudices
9) A childlike attitude of creative play, tinkering with ideas, materials, structures, a “fun” attitude toward experimentation.
10) Freedom to fantasize, unconventional imagining
11) Divergent thinking
12) Acceptance of non-ordinary realities, contradictions, ability to tolerate ambiguities
-Write in your journal every morning
-Photograph the same object (something that attracts you) every couple of hours,
observing the change in the light
-Photograph without looking thru the lens
-Take one photograph and make 3 images out of it
-Take a photograph of something you are attracted to them sit in quiet meditation for
15minutes - re photograph the same object after meditation and see if it changes
-Photograph thru the bottom of a clear glass, or plastic, or eyeglasses…see what happens
-Take a self portrait every day
Things to consider
Photography as metaphor, poetry
Photography as a practice of subtraction
Photography as an act of surrender rather than an act of acquisition
Composition_Lighting_Vantage Point_Detail_Time_Editing
Excerpt from Wislawa Szymborska’s Nobel Lecture December 7, 1996
I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself. When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know." ….. This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.
(the rest of the lecture can be found at http://www.janefultonalt.com/index.php?id=musings&PageID=32)
Excerpt from The Zen of Creativity by John Loori
In no mind there is no intent. The activity, whatever it may be, is not forced or strained. The art just slips through the intellectual filters, without conscious effort and without planning. In the instant there is intent there is expectation. Expectation is deadly because it disconnects us from reality. When we get ahead of ourselves, we leave the moment. No mind is living in the moment, without preoccupation or projection….hesitancy or deliberation will show in our art when we leave the moment.