It’s volatile out there. There are eruptions and creative blocks and pain stories. There are impasses and detours. Bloggers only as good as their last post. Artists only remembered by their latest body of work. Writers after a successful debut who get a bad case of second-book syndrome.
The challenges out there are enough to make a girl want a nice, long nap, which I did yesterday on my faded-to-pink red couch. I hide the pinkish hue with a beautiful red suzani that I acquired in exchange for design work for Bazaar Bayar. My daughter in the other room watching Green Eggs and Ham fell asleep, too. Did she pick up on my energy?
My husband tells me that my mood – up, down, sad, happy, angry, blissed out, zen, tired, excited – affects everyone else in our nest. I undid years of stressed out evenings by training myself to greet my husband with a smile at the door. It only took five and a half years and Gretchen Rubin’s 12 Personal Commandments, “Act the way I want to feel,” to get there.
In 2004, I painted volcanos and explosions. A painting in my living room that I made three years ago looks like aerial flooding. It would make things easier to say creativity should take a backseat to natural disasters and political revoltuion and gender inequality and pain than to write through it. Or draw through it. Or puncture fabric with thread, if that’s your creative inclination. Then we would have an excuse for our creative blocks. If mood dictates, I think nothing would get made, though. Interesting, and restorative, things seem to happen when we carry on.