DON'T LOOK NOW: I'm writing

You might have noticed that I haven't been posting on my blogs lately.

For the first time in several years, I've been writing.

Writing regularly. Writing productively. Writing books. Or at least things that vaguely look like books, and will look more like books, I hope, as the year goes on.

I didn't post this earlier for two reasons.

First, like almost all creative people, I'm a worrier. I worried that to say that I'm writing my books again is to court writers' block.

Second, like almost all creative people, I'm grandiose. (Yup, grandiosity plus paranoia: the magical blend that makes us creatives special.) I thought that I could write on two of my own books, plus teach and consult, plus do that all daily stuff like pay bills ands wash dishes, plus blog.

Look at the gap between the date of this post and the date of my last one and you'll see how well that fantasy worked out.

And so today I'm bucking up, paring down, getting real, and becoming the true decluttering creative servant leader I should be.

Lovingly and with gratitude, I'm decluttering this blog until further notice. I may come back here; I may start a whole new blog based on my new work. Either way, I'll let you know.

Wish me luck...and when in doubt, clear everything you can off your own plate except the very juiciest morsels. Let nothing that is not both nutritious and delicious stay.

I'll be there in spirit with you. In the meantime, yours in the creative sisterhood,

Suz

TELL THE TRUTH: don't we all love clutter?

My last few posts have been musing on the invisible phases of creativity, the times when we are consciously or unconsciously doing deep inner work even though we seem quiet or even dormant superficially.

During these fallow off-seasons, we have to do some very hard work.

And the hardest work of all, maybe, is not doing the wrong work.

Because doing some work, any work, can feel very tempting at such times. We're conditioned to be busy 24/7. To be productive. To get things done. To make progress. To move forward. To push on. Not just to "task," to multitask.

The mere fact that these phrases are so familiar speaks to how powerful these impulses are in our culture.

That's why I say that if we tell the truth, we all secretly love clutter. Not physical clutter, but time clutter, work clutter, creativity clutter, social clutter, media clutter. On some level, most of us love filling up our to-do lists, cramming our lives and time full to bursting. We love it because it makes us feel normal. Worthwhile.Needed.  Safe.

Or maybe that's just me. Either way, I see a lot of that kind of that "busywork" as I look back on my life. In my defense, I didn't know it was "filler" at the time. I had lots of "good reasons" for doing it. And I'm proud to say that I did some of it, even lots of it, very well.

But doing the not-quite-right work well doesn't make it any less wrong.

I think it takes an odd kind of courage, in modern America, to refuse the clutter, to wait for clarity or the "real thing," to sit with our own emptiness.

To embrace the space, not give in to the clutter.

To trust that the creative well will fill up again, that the path will appear, that the daffodils will bloom.

I'm not very good at it yet. But I'm trying.

THE LONG SILENCE: rilke and creative hiatus

Writing about deep hidden creativity yesterday brought to mind the life and work of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet I often find challenging and sometimes find miraculous. I had vaguely remembered that ten years or so of silence passed between the beginnings of one of his poem cycles and its completion. I didn't remember that the poems were the Duino Elegies or that the decade it took to write them—most of it spent not writing them—was that from 1912 to 1922, but those are indeed the facts.

I don't bring up Rilke to compare my process or practice in any way to his immeasurably greater one. My point, in fact, is the opposite. This brilliant and accomplished writer, living in an extraordinarily beautiful place (the Duino Elegies are named after Duino Castle, pictured above right) as the guest of a titled family, had to try for ten years to finish a series of only ten poems. Admittedly, Rilke's silent decade happened to include World War I, which happened to involve Rilke's native Germany. And equally importantly, Rilke was too soulful and too shrewd to turn out mediocre poems while his Muse, well, a-muse-d herself elsewhere. But still, what can us mere mortals expect of ourselves if greats like Rilke have to wait a decade for their real work to emerge?

The poem below is not one of the Elegies, but it seems apposite to this post in some way. Absence and presence, life and lack, sight and insight are its themes, and as a bonus it has what may be one of the greatest last lines in all of poetry. The poem is called Archaic Torso of Apollo, or just Archaic Torso. Rilke wrote in German; this is one of Stephen Mitchell's always deft translations, which also include excellent versions of classic spiritual texts such as the Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Job, among others. You can find out more about Mitchell's work on his excellent website, though if you like me are creatively quiet at the moment his aray of wonderful books may be just a tad depressing for a moment.


Archaic TorsoRainer Maria Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

UNDERGROUND: the fertility of deep withdrawal

I love blogging, as I was reminded when I worked to prep my Saturday Blogging the Arts class at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. I love the writing and the thinking, the connecting and the sharing, the fresh perspectives and the plethora of facets.

Yet I've been entirely silent this past month, at least in my little personal blogosphere.

Some of that silence came from practical challenges. More of it came from creative fire. It was one of those months when ideas came fast and confusions became clear. The inner work I did with joy and fervor didn't produce much in the way of external results. At least, not yet. But I'm confident that it will, and in a variety of ways.

There are times—many times—in creative lives that are dedicated to actual work. There are also times for creative re-visioning of the sort that is work, but doesn't produce work. I tend to feel a little nervous about the latter. There's too much traditional work ethic in me to trust them easily. Yet such times have been among the most powerful, the most transformative, of my life. One of them, in fact, made me a writer.

The mid-March date today reminds me of the daffodil bulbs of my Northern childhood. Invisible all year, the vivid green shoots would suddenly appear, in greater profusion than the year before and often in places we didn't remember ever planting a bulb.

At the point when the yard or the hill were dotted with yellow flutes, they seemed as unearned and mysterious as magic. That's how long ago and far away the boring, back-bending work of bulb planting seemed.

But at that time of planting, the eventual appearance of flowers seemed just as unreal, just as unlikely. How could it be, that hiding these rustling little brown onions into the earth would produce those bursts of life so many months and seasons later?

BRILLIANT BITS: insights from the DeClutter Your Creativity Group

The monthly Bookstrategy DeClutter Your Creativity group is a part of my life I've come to enjoy deeply--a chance to dialogue with other creative women about the challenges and opportunities that affect us all.


Luckily, that's true even at times like this past Tuesday's meeting, when my own energy is either flagging or "off." Get a group of deeply creative women together, and some or all of them will be brilliant on any given night!

Two comments offered in the course of Tuesday's discussion stood out for me as especially valuable.

The first was to live in your truth...now.
It was the "now" part of that statement that hit me with renewed force. It reminded me that our truth in this present moment isn't necessarily the same as a truth that was authentic for us a decade, a year, even a month ago.

A piece, or size, of clothing. A particular art or craft. A habit. A relationship. A belief. A collection. Are there any of these in your life that were part of the truth of your past, but may not remain equally authentic in your present? If so, it is a great place to start decluttering.

The second bit of wisdom that really spoke to me was that one of the disabling forms of emotional clutter any of us carry is the belief that we are somehow different than others, and different in negative ways.

We might think that compared to "everyone else" we're more distracted. Less confident. More disorganized. Less creative. More confused. Less knowlegeable.

When we believe in these kinds of difference, we keep tend to ourselves isolated...ashamed...stuck. Needless to say, these are not feelings that lend themselves to creativity.

When we face and test them, we shed a limiting part of emotional clutter and free ourselves up both to connect and create. And that's a much more powerful kind of decluttering than even the most vigorous physical clearing-out.

If you're in the Vero Beach, FL area, consider joining us for this donation-only monthly group. You can find more information on my BookStrategy website.

DECLUTTERING OUR MONEY: have you made a home for yours?

As I began to look at the way money "clutter" affects my creativity, I immediately discovered something interesting.

Despite the large and lovely spaces in my house, my money-related stuff has no single home here. I keep checks in one place, stamps and envelopes in another, records in still another. Some of my bills arrive via email, some via snail mail, which I pick up from the post office, put on the breakfast bar, and get to in some moment when I'm not busy at other things. I sit down and pay bills, or handle other financial matters, in a variety of places--the breakfast bar, my bed, my dining room table. No problem, except that I almost always leave a trail of stuff that then has to be put away in what seems like twenty different places.

As I said in my previous post, I'm quite good at getting things handled on time despite this hit-or-miss, here-or-there methodology. Yet I know that the price I pay for it is high in other ways. I may seem organized to the folks at FPL or FICO or American Express, but I don't feel it. Low-level money fogginess invades my mind often, sometimes when there's actually nothing wrong. I work much harder on trivial financial tasks than I have to, and spend less time than I'd like thinking about bigger money issues.

On a symbolic level, I think, not giving our money a true home in our space speaks volumes about how much we honor it and the role it plays in sustaining our lives in general and our creative work in particular. If I don't respect this aspect of my life enough to carve out a little physical space for it, how good can my stewardship of it truly be? If I begrudge my money a couple of square feet and a little organization, can I really complain if it doesn't work for me with optimal results? To my mind, the answers are "not very" and "hell no." I don't say this in judgment of myself or anyone else. I've never yet met a woman whose family trained her in financial management or encouraged her to make space or time for her money. And when we enter the world of the creative arts, money dis-ease becomes a badge of honor. It's not surprising that so many of us avoid money matters when we can, hurry through them when we must, and leave them homeless in gorgeous, thoughtful residences that have room for everything else.

I'm currently in the process of giving my money its own functional and appealing space in my home. I've made a space under the giant vision board some of you have seen in my home office and given financial records a whole file drawer. (Whoo-hoo!) I've gathered envelopes, stamps, pens I like, a letter opener, a scissors. I've dedicated a simple monthly planner to recording what bills are due, when they're due, and what and when I've paid. I've put a chair near that area to remind me to work on it there and some wonderful images right above it to remind me why it's worth my time.

I have to admit that this feels childish at times, like I'm setting up an Easy Bake Oven in the living room and pretending to be a chef. That feeling disconcerted me at first, but I realized pretty quickly that it's perfectly appropriate.

At fifty-five, a novelist and a poet and a memoirist and a teacher, an owner of my own business and a veteran of management roles in financial organizations and the former owner of a New York apartment, with a house that has an art room and a writing room and a reading room and a lounge, I'm just now taking baby steps on decluttering my money issues.

So setting up an Easy Bake Oven equivalent—let's call it Shaky Suzy's Marvelous Mini Money Mart—is probably right on target.

Wanna come over and play?

DECLUTTERING OUR MONEY: a first step

This month, my Vero Beach DeClutter Your Creativity Group will begin exploring the issue of money as it creates physical and emotional clutter and/or impedes our creativity. I'm excited to begin addressing an issue that affects almost all of us "creatives," yet is relatively rarely talked about in searching ways. In conjunction with the Group meetings, I'll be posting some thoughts on these issues here on this blog.

(If you're in the Treasure Coast area and this topic interests you, consider joining us at our next Group meeting on Tuesday, January 18 at 6:00. Rather than charge a fee, I ask for donations of whatever you wish to give--five bucks is fine. There is no official signup or membership; just email me for location and directions and to let me know to expect you!)

Let me kick off this new topic with a bit of personal confession, if you will. One of the things I've done, and done best, for others during my career is organizing complex systems: the admissions system of a graduate arts school, the editing and signoff system for a major New York City Mayor's Office biannual report. Yet my own money systems remain pretty disorganized year after year. I don't really have a place that bills or the financial process "lives," I don't consistently keep up with filing and paperwork, I often don't know exactly what's there. I don't even have a set time to handle bill paying, much less other financial work.

My memory of deposits, payment dates, and so on are good enough to keep my money management basically on track despite this. But as I began to realize late last year, I still pay a price for this inattention. I live with more physical clutter than I have to in terms of bills and papers. And, far more important, I live with more anxiety than necessary thanks to this approach. Feeling vague or foggy about my money isn't truly comfortable. I know, deep inside, that I'm not on top of this, and also that I'm not spending enough time on my money to get optimal results.

It's surprised how hard it was to write those words, and to contemplate posting them on the blog. Struggles with money just don't feel "normal" to talk about. That sense of fearfulness is one of the things I want to talk about at the Group. The biggest kind of clutter that money produces for me and most creatives, I suspect, is this feeling of secrecy and shame. I hope that entering into a dialogue about the fraught issue of finances will help many of us clear up some of the blockages those feelings create.

THE STUFF WE LEAVE BEHIND: "Important Artifacts" by Leanne Shapton

Leanne Shapton's Important Artifacts is not officially about decluttering, but it's still of interest to those of us striving to release all that no longer works from our lives. It's also a wonderful work of creative imagination.

Fully titled Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, the book is a fictional auction catalog of items remaining from a love affair that has now failed. Though the owners and story are invented, the catalog contains actual pictures of objects from the ridiculous to the sublime. Together, they chronicle the story of a relationship in a way that is sometimes wry, sometimes sad, and always telling. It's not easy to tell a love story in a new way, but Shapton does it beautifully. You can't but look at this book without wondering how your own objects would tell your life stories if they were organized and disposed of some day. Or, at least, I couldn't.

Shapton's first book, Was She Pretty?, also mixes images and text to talk about love in a fresh and nuanced way. Browse the books and her illustrations, art, and ideas on her whimsical and inspiring website.

CLUTTER UP YOUR CREATIVITY: cravable stuff we TOTALLY don't need

A visit to the Nanda Home website inspired this first in a new category of posts on this blog that will acknowledge stuff that is totally and utterly unnecessary, and yet somehow work celebrating.

I have long craved a Clocky, the alarm clock on wheels that jumps off your nighttable and runs around your room beeping if you hit "snooze" too often. Clocky was invented by Gauri Nanda, apparently in response to her frequent tardiness at her MIT graduate classes. I don't need it as a clock, as I rarely have trouble getting up; instead, it seemed just like an adorable cross between a mechanical toy and a very easy-to-care for pet.

But now, sadly, poor Clocky has been upstaged in my crazy-object wish list by what Nanda calls "Clocky's tech-savvy younger brother," Tocky. Tocky is a little round fellow who not only jumps and rolls around on the floor but also plays both MP3s and your own recorded sounds. I have given you the YouTube video of him here. (It's from the thinkgeek YouTube channel but is the same video you'll see on the official Nanda site.) I must confess that I sometimes go to the Nanda website just to get a smile from the little guy. Yes, I know, that's really pathetic...but then, true love often is.

What are your secret totally unnecessary object cravings?

CULLING MY BOOKS: on reading, reveling, and releasing

Part of my silent time over the past two months has been occupied with the process of sorting through my possessions. "Sorting through" sounds simple and rather serene, but in reality the process is tedious and messy. I gave away or otherwise disposed of the stuff that was easy years ago. What is left is there for a reason. Usually, even, a good one.

Still, something in my soul said that it was time for much of it to go.

Culling my collection of books was one of the more interesting, and oddly enough for a writer the easiest, parts of the process. Perhaps because my work requires me to acquire new books regularly, I've never been especially reluctant to let the older ones go. It's easy to imagine someone else, in say our local library's Used Book Depot, enjoying the volume I've just donated—to imagine, that is to say, the cycle of ownership and reading continuing pleasantly and productively on before and beyond the point in time I happen to own a book. And it's always been clear to me that if I don't empty the shelves out fairly regularly, the house will all too quickly become overrun.

My test for keeping books is generally simple, consisting of only three questions. Do I truly love the book? Do I return to it regularly? Is it out of print, and likely to remain out of print for the foreseeable future? Of the three questions the last is the most practical and sometimes the most compelling. Living in a small town rather than my old home ground of New York City, the lesser works of, say, W.H. Auden or Virginia Woolf are not easy to obtain; even online old-book resources such as Alibris can be spotty in terms of book availability and price. Some of the paperback editions of so-called "literary" authors I bought back in the seventies are thus real treasures to me, in contrast to recent and/or mainstream novels and nonfiction that the library is likely to own and that Amazon and other retailers are equally likely to stock.

So I let go of several shelf-fulls of contemporary novels and nonfiction with only the slightest qualm. More difficult were a group of books on writing I like, but which don't meet the test of my first or second questions. Even more difficult were some of the books from my father's personal library (the subject for a later blog post). Like most objects once owned by someone loved and lost, so to speak, these volumes were not valuable as books so much as what author Seth Godin calls "souvenirs." My three practical questions didn't apply to them well; instead, a whole other kind of scrutiny had to take place.

As always seems to be the case in the aftermath of one of these book clearing-outs, I have found myself reading more widely than usual in my own collection of books. I am inspired to revisit authors I had forgotten, discovering that I like so-and-so more than I used to and so-and-so less, being surprised that I never finished one book or that I made the notes I did in another. In this way my little library comes alive again right at the times some of it is passing on, as though the very process of loss have intensified its pleasure and value...not unlike, say, life itself.