Wednesday, March 07, 2001
Morning Pages
Last night I attended the first session of the Artist's Way workshops being held at Inner Directions. Very different sort of group than the others I've been to, but I like the fact that all of the people there share the same goal -- to become more creative in their daily lives. I remember after doing check-in and giving my spiel on my artistic background (stint doing radio comedy, late father an amateur painter, teaching a course in Web Design and Functionality at the U. of T., written three books on HTML, etc etc etc), and then the co-facilitator out-of-the blue asking me if I knew the definition of the word "abstruse". I didn't (at the time), and neither did she. She then commented that I struck her as being "like a dictionary". At first I thought this something of an insult, but when I though of it later, in trying to put a positive spin on it instead of just leaping to the negavtive, I realized that dictionaries are essentially books of connections. Words only mean something by their references (i.e. connections) to other words. A very deconstructionist thought (and I took enough Lit Crit to know what that actually means ;-) I checked my feelings about that with her later, and she confirmed my latter thinking -- that I knew lots of connections and have the ability to be playful and yet recognize the underlying structures quickly. Me like. ;-) So this morning I began my first set of "morning pages". Haven't written several pages of long hand for a while, and was surprised at how long it took me to write them. Took at least 1/2 an hour to finish writing my allotted number of pages. Interesting exercise though. Am looking forward to reading more of the book and doing some of the exercises.
Last night I attended the first session of the Artist's Way workshops being held at Inner Directions. Very different sort of group than the others I've been to, but I like the fact that all of the people there share the same goal -- to become more creative in their daily lives. I remember after doing check-in and giving my spiel on my artistic background (stint doing radio comedy, late father an amateur painter, teaching a course in Web Design and Functionality at the U. of T., written three books on HTML, etc etc etc), and then the co-facilitator out-of-the blue asking me if I knew the definition of the word "abstruse". I didn't (at the time), and neither did she. She then commented that I struck her as being "like a dictionary". At first I thought this something of an insult, but when I though of it later, in trying to put a positive spin on it instead of just leaping to the negavtive, I realized that dictionaries are essentially books of connections. Words only mean something by their references (i.e. connections) to other words. A very deconstructionist thought (and I took enough Lit Crit to know what that actually means ;-) I checked my feelings about that with her later, and she confirmed my latter thinking -- that I knew lots of connections and have the ability to be playful and yet recognize the underlying structures quickly. Me like. ;-) So this morning I began my first set of "morning pages". Haven't written several pages of long hand for a while, and was surprised at how long it took me to write them. Took at least 1/2 an hour to finish writing my allotted number of pages. Interesting exercise though. Am looking forward to reading more of the book and doing some of the exercises.
# posted by Keith : 10:14 AM
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
