Wednesday, December 16, 2015

It Is Really Hard To Be Creative. Really. I Mean it.



THIS IS KATHERINE TODAY.


I was at a work retirement party for my boss at his favorite Mexican place the other day and a colleague noticed I ordered pozole.  I like pozole.  She asked me what was in it and why I liked it and then she made a comment about my hair and then I braced myself for her next comment.

Sure enough, the financial leader of our educational department, drew back a little and said, "Katherine--you are just so creative."  At work it's a comment that often comes up when I share an idea that isn't a normal approach to the current educational trauma facing us.  Sometimes someone will smile and tell me that I think outside the box.  My ideas are generally not taken seriously.

There was a time comments about my creativity made me proud or happy or something different than they make me feel now.  The comments make me nervous now.  They make me worry that I am not working at being creative enough.  

There is a perception problem here.  From my side ordering pozole and having a noticeable haircut have nothing to do with my creativity.  I like pozole.  I think the financial leader of our department might like pozole if she tasted it too.  I like my haircut--obviously.  It doesn't mean I am creative though.  It just means that I am lazy.

The thing is--I am creative.  And it has nothing to do with my taste in food or what my haircut looks like.    I like that I am creative.  I spent years in graduate school learning to define creativity and to teach it and to nurture it in myself.  It was and it is hard work to be creative.  Part of being creative is having task commitment.  Task commitment is hard.  You have to keep trying to do stuff you suck at.  You have to create rituals for your creative outlets so they don't get sucked into the day-to-day vacuum of your life.  You have to learn content and skills and aim for production and try processes that scare you to death and take risks that people might decide you are creative.   It's just as hard, or maybe even harder, than filling an Excel spreadsheet.  Really.

That's the problem.  Others often see creativity differently.   Some see creativity as this little gift from the gods.   They think there are lucky creative souls who just go around creating stuff.  They think creativity is rather foolish and inefficient.  Being creative isn't cost effective.  Being creative is great if you create the company, but not so much if you are at the bottom of the heap.

Though I expend a huge amount of creative thought and energy coaching my teachers (I love that part of my job), most of my creative energy is devoted to knitting and these odd little drawings I do.  Both are mentally challenging, physically demanding, and spirtually mediative.  They keep me off the streets and a certain part of my soul sings better if I stick to my creative rituals.

Right now I am knitting happily and designing my next project.  Unless you know me pretty well, you might not realize that my knitting isn't the ugly Christmas sweater type.  Right now I am trying to "paint" by knitting lace.  I created a shawl meant to be an impressionistic painting of the opera house in Santa Fe that looked exactly what I imagined.  I'm pretty proud of that sucker.  It was hard work and took months of learning, and thinking, and knitting intricate stuff with intricate and tedious beading.  I did not just "whip it up."

Next up in the knitting world will be a Teton shawl filled with thunder and lightning.  It is my reaction to all the rain and storms we faced at Jenny Lake last summer.  I keep changing my mind about it's shape and lace design.  I wake up at night thinking about this.  There are hundreds of dollars in the yarn and beads.  There will be months and months of work.  I can't wait.

On the other hand, my little drawings are stalled right now.  They are simply ballpoint pen on small pieces of brochure weight matte paper.  Nothing fancy.  They are small haikus of my life or geometric efforts to settle my head.  They are what I do in the morning to become me again.

My little drawings are in the stuck stage.  I have spent close to two years with purposes in mind--an alphabet, numbers, the names of Samantha and Brooklyn--these drawings were for others and were going to be gifts someday.  For my soul, there were some drawings of Wyoming based on memories or photos.  For two years, for most mornings, I got up, drank coffee and drew for as long as my focus and time would allow.  And then, one day,  the alphabet and the numbers and the names were done.  And then there were no new purposes.  I stopped drawing.  I have been looking for new purposes ever since.

I am close to a new idea.  Jim helped by pointing me to a perfect poem.  We will see.  I have tried to draw this week.  That's a start.  I'm feeling a window opening.  It's just so hard to look for something to look at when I'm living in a visual world.  It is really hard to be creative.  Really.  I mean it.


Sunday, December 13, 2015

Mithridates, He Died Old

"There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
--I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old."

(The last stanza of "Terence This Is Stupid Stuff" by A.E. Housman)

This poem, like so many other things in my life, was introduced to me by Katherine when she gave me her copy of Sound and Sense to help me prepare for a poetry class.  It is still a little amazing my professors at Regis didn't introduce me to it as well.  I'm sure it would have made all the difference.

In a nutshell, Housman's poem gives us two speakers.  One is the title character who evidently writes downer poems.  The other is his bon vivant friend who asks him why, since he is obviously a good drinker and loves to eat and otherwise enjoy life, he insists on writing such depressing stuff.

Terence answers the guy in the second stanza (sorry I'm sounding like an English teacher) by suggesting that if it's fun and entertainment he's seeking there are better routes than poetry.  Terence himself has led a wild and crazy life as a youth.  He's looked "into the pewter pot/To see the world as the world's not."  And through all the drunken revelry of youth he details, he discovers that when sober the world "was the old world yet,/I was I, my things were wet. . ."  (one of my all time favorite lines of poetry).  Terence learned, as his questioner will no doubt learn, that the world basically sucks and the wise path is to prepare for it.  Thus the parable of Mithridates.

Let me explain.  You have to understand that I am a major worrier.  My worrying will probably end up being the most significant legacy I leave my three children.  Whenever I return home after some absence long like a vacation or short like a trip to the store, I can never turn the corner or crest the hill to my neighborhood without looking to see if my house has burned down or exploded in the interim.

If Kathie is late getting home from a day mentoring teachers in Castle Rock or some faraway place like that, I always panic and reconcile myself to the fact that her Infiniti has been hit by a truck somewhere on 85 (or whatever the number of that highway is).  I figure, like Mithridates, it pays to be prepared.

It follows that I would be something of a hypochondriac and I am.  I'm a lot like Yossarian who liked to make lists of diseases so he could worry about them.  My current focus is on Hodgkins Lymphoma.  The week before I was pretty convinced that this mole that is only visible when my hair is short was a sure sign that I had a brain tumor.  When my ears started ringing about a hundred years ago, I was afraid to tell anybody.  I figured if I didn't say anything about it the certain cancerous growth would just go away.

All this brings me to the point.  I had a physical two days ago.  Like always, I had to build up a little courage to make the appointment.  You know, when you're 67 you don't feel as good as you did when you were 30.  At least that's been my experience.  And the thing that's worrisome is that it's probably going to get worse rather than better.  I mean if things keep going at their current rate of decline,  I shudder to think how many times I will have to pee in a night.

Anyway, I made the appointment and showed up.  I was happy to note that Kaiser doesn't charge co-pays for Wellness appointments like physicals.  I sat in an almost deserted waiting room (I don't think Kaiser patients have discovered the office in Ken Caryl) and I didn't even have time to check Facebook before a nice nurse took my vitals and led me to the examination room.  Dr. Arroyo performed all the necessary tests (I'm especially happy to note that they no longer waste your time by giving you those awful prostrate tests) and assured me that I was the picture of health.  Go figure.  I've been paying through the nose for health insurance for almost fifty years and, just my luck, nothing has ever happened to me.

You know that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters where Woody Allen, convinced he has a brain tumor, goes to a doctor, takes all kinds of tests and finally hears that there is nothing wrong with him.  Where at first he slouched into the doctor's office, he now strides out joyfully, a smile on his face with "What a day this has been/What a rare mood I'm in. . ." lilting away in the background?  That was me walking out of Kaiser.  The sun was shining.  The temp was an invigorating 64.  I jumped in the car, put my elbow out the window and cruised home.

The problem is, I had this little cough when I woke up this morning.