Thursday, August 18, 2022

Little Joys

Here I am  a  month out from my surgery but still pretty limited in what I can do. However, I have been able to extend how far I can walk outside and am thrilled it is not causing pain like it did before surgery. Thanks for all the encouragement from those of you who have left comments on previous posts. I think of my readers as a wonderful cheerleading squad! Also cheering me on and up is my little deck garden. That picture above may not look like much but I have been trying to get sweet peas to climb up that wire grid for several years now with no luck but third time must be the charm.

When you're hurting and struggling and working to just make it through each day, something as small as a simple bloom can bring ridiculous joy as these sweet pea blooms have. And the tiny zinnia bloom below as well. After the initial beautiful blooms died off, the next tight buds simply dried up before opening. I feared that was going to be it for this plant. But here is a subsequent bud that has opened with a few more sure to come and again, it makes for a deep joy that under other circumstances might not be so strong.

I've been looking through some articles bookmarked for reading "when I have more time" which happens to be now and found this one I know I saved to share on the blog. I hope you'll pop over and read it as it touches on several topics related to creativity that get rehashed endlessly among artists: Nick Cage on Creativity, the Myth of Originality and How To Find Your Voice. Here's one sample that I particularly liked because I've always felt it is what I do:

Ada Lovelace postulated in a letter that creativity is the art of discovering and combining — the work of an alert imagination that “seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition.” 

And this about original work:

There is no blank slate upon which works of true originality are composed, no void out of which total novelty is created. Nothing is original because everything is an influence; everything is original because no influence makes its way into our art untransmuted by our imagination. We bring to everything we make everything we have lived and loved and tessellated into the mosaic of our being. To be an artist in the largest sense is to be fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it, porous to it and absorbent of it, moved by it and moved to translate those inner quickenings into what we make.  

Reading this left me remembering that truly, we just need to get busy, do the work, and stop worrying about where it is coming from.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They say (whoever 'they' are!) it's the little things in life. Happy to see your garden growing & I'm heading over to read that article. It sounds like you're making great progress healing! Keep up the good work!
Jan in WY

Sherrie Spangler said...

I'm so happy to hear that you can walk without the old pain! This is progress indeed. And I hope the flowers keep cheering you on.

The Inside Stori said...

Yeah….give it time…….it will be worth it to gain back the activities you’ve had to forego!! Hang in there….