Your daily creative prompt
How are you? We are over half way through these Advent Calendar emails. I hope you are getting something out of them.
“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart…”
A special welcome to today’s Advent Calendar offering because, today, I am offering something that is very close to my heart.
Today’s prompt is a call for reflection about your creative identity and practice.
WB Yeats wrote a poem called The Circus Animals’ Desertion and I am quoting the first lines (above) and the last two lines below. It’s a beautiful poem and I recommend that you read the whole thing.
As creatives, we have all sought for that theme and sought for it in vain. We have all studied and read and practised and workshopped our material and our technique only to reach a place where we wondered what good it all was?
“I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
The advice that this poem contains, and one that I have turned to whenever I felt that I had nothing to give, was to climb back down the ladder to the rag and bone shop of my heart. It is among the detritus of our lives – the discarded or trashed stuff that we initially overlook – that we can find inspiration, and where we find the themes that can connect authentically to other humans.
So today’s point of reflection is:
As a creative person, what is in your rag and bone shop of the heart?
What can you find down there, after all of the shiny and flashy stuff has fallen away, that you can work with?
Sort of related, I think, to today’s reflection is this terrific column written by writer and dog-sledder Blair Braverman to another writer who thinks she has nothing to say. Highly recommended.
Meredith
If you like what I do, maybe put a little something in my Christmas stocking by leaving me a tip at Ko-Fi.