I almost let the events of the day keep me from my daily habit. On a new campus for a day-long event, I could have skipped my daily walk and used my lunchbreak to catch up on emails. The fortunate decision to stroll through the… Read More »Walking toward Creativity and Stumbling on the Divine
I first became interested in creativity as a topic of research and writing in 2015, the same year that the best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert published her treatise on creativity. That book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, was not the type of book that initially… Read More »Difference and Delight with Gilbert’s Big Magic
Many highly imaginative people hold Romantic ideas about creative work. They delight in the image of the artistic genius laboring manically for days at a time without eating or sleeping. At the completion of their masterpiece, they collapse in exhaustion and spend weeks if not… Read More »Daily Bits: A Plan for Sustainable Creativity
I tend to overcomplicate things, and that carries over into the ways I try to jumpstart my creativity. As an antidote, I am trying a new technique: going back to the basics. Many ancient societies developed theories about the basic components of the universe. All… Read More »Just Add Water: Elemental Creativity
Like many children of my generation, I learned about the world through books and educational programming on public television. Long before internet access, we had the public library and PBS and to satisfy our childhood curiosity. You may have never heard of my favorite show… Read More »The Creativity Machine Before the Internet
The weather where I live is having wild mood swings: one moment there’s a snowstorm and the next moment it’s warm and sunny. After a cold snap, the temperatures rose yesterday to the mid-sixties, but it wasn’t just the weather that changed. It was a… Read More »Other Light: Illuminating Creativity
Rachel, the talented teen protagonist of the musical comedy Glee, chose the gold star as her personal symbol. Whenever she wrote her name, she attached a gold foil star beside it. She was going to be a Broadway star, and she wanted everyone to know… Read More »Gold-Star Imagination: Tracking Creativity
The magic of snow days is one of my fondest memories of childhood. The Minnesota winters of my youth provided many snow-related cancellations and resulting free time. For me, snow-day creativity usually manifested itself in building snow forts outside or doing craft projects inside. As… Read More »Snow-Day Magic and Unexpected Creativity
“Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from the poem Elegiac Verse Many processes in life have very definite beginnings, but endings are often more ambiguous. People frequently suffer from not getting closure, but far less… Read More »The Joy of Closure: Lessons from La Candelaria
For the last several years, instead of making a New Year’s resolution, I’ve chosen a year-long theme. The idea is to select a word or short phrase as a guiding principle for moving through the year. The concept is now a popular one, but I… Read More »A Year of Play