The Art of Dramatic Living

I had a wonderful time visiting my family in the beautiful New Jersey countryside. And I enjoyed stomping around New York City visiting with friends, catching up on their lives in coffee shops and prowling bookstores with my kiddo.

And, finally, after 2.5 days of driving it’s good to be home.

I’ve been thinking about “home”. This is the first time in the 5 years since I left New York that the place where I live has felt like “home”. I’ve thought of myself as a displaced New Yorker for the past 5 years. I love New York City with all its raw opportunity and its creative force. (The food is good too.)

I am going to take a little vacation beginning tomorrow. I’ll be back on April 1. In the meantime I want to leave you with an Imagination in Action Exercise. It’s simple and fun. I hope it will put a big smile on your face and fuel lots of creative action while I am away.

Simply read and visualize the action in your imagination as if you are starring in a movie about your life.  You can write your responses in your journal as you go or take some time after the exercise to record what you saw, felt and heard. 

When you are done with the exercise, you will have: 

• clarified your goals, intentions and creative aspirations
• identified a mentor, personal hero and leader in your field
• renewed your understanding of the legacy you want to leave
• created an animated and detailed visualization of your success

One of my favorite things in cyberspace is the Google define feature. Go to www.google.com and type the following in the search bar:

define: fallow

Here is some of what Google came up with:

• Left unplowed and unseeded during a growing season; “fallow farmland”
• The practice of leaving a field for one year (out of three) uncropped to recover its natural fertility.
• Land is considered fallow if it is kept free of growing plants during the growing season (March to October) using cultivation. The process is called “fallowing.”

For our purposes fallowing is a skill that artists must cultivate in order to maintain their creative fertility. But for many of us this is easier said than done.

The show will be over this weekend. So it’s brainstorming day. Time to think about what comes next. This isn’t a process of decision making. It’s a process of opening to the possibilities. And it’s not a process intended to find the “next project”. It’s more of an internal temperature reading. A sensing of what form or forms of expression will move into forefront of my life.

I’m thinking – poetry, poetry, poetry.

I’m a bookstore prowler and a book lover. One of my favorite techniques for sparking ideas is to practice bibliomancy. Here’s how I do it:

Tonight is opening night for Picasso at the Lapin Agile and I thought I would calm my nerves by putting this collection together for you and for me.

I believe creative audacity is a lifelong journey that begins with our relationship to ourselves. We have to give ourslves permission to create before we can begin. The permission granted can only come from within and the internal gatekeeper is the inner critic.

How much easier would creating and performing be if our inner critic became our ally – or just kept her mouth shut for awhile?

My head is under water and I have to stop fighting the current and go with the flow. Final Tech, Final Dress and Opening Night are inevitable. The illusion of comfort I had in thinking the show is still a month away has crashed. We are riding the rapids to the end.

A Poem is the same. Eventually they start rolling along on their own and I have to go with it or be drowned.

I’ve spent a lot of time under water. That’s what it feels like when you don’t want to let things take on their own life and you struggle and fight to wrestle the thing back into your comfort zone. Guess what? If you try to fight it, it – whatever it is: painting, poem, or song – will simply pull you under and pass you by.

In this post I am going to encourage you to make a mess of things, make messy things and write bad poems.

Here we go:

I am in rehearsal for a show called Picasso at the Lapin Agile – written by Steve Martin. We open the show six days from today. We’ve reached that point in the rehearsal schedule where we do run-throughs every night. A run-through means you start at the beginning and go to the end. It’s basically a performance minus the audience. It’s repetition. Last night all the peices finally came together and we took flight for the first time. That’s the beauty of repetition – it eventually sets you free.

Creative living requires decision making. We have to choose between watching T.V. and learning lines. Should I sleep or write? Should I buy another book on how to paint or should I buy paint? In black and white the “right” choices seem obvious. But in the midst of the daily grind choice-making can become fuzzy. How do we remain persistent? How do we channel our determination and settle in to the act of art-making? How do we drag our rear-ends out of the warm bed and force oursleves to face-off with the blank sheet of paper?

I have one simple trick. It works for seemingly tiny choices and great big ones too. It isn’t mystical and it doesn’t require will power, but it works.