OK I admit it, this is more than just a weekend read but you need a place to start.
Subtitled as: ‘A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self’ we’re obviously back in tree hugging territory here, a place of which I’m very fond. I enjoy the nitty gritty of spreadsheets, cash flows and management structures or even (occasionally) the cavity shapes, physical properties and biological responses of dentistry. On the other hand, I feel that unless we acknowledge and harness our own creativity there will be dissonance in our thoughts and actions.
This book provides a 12-week step-by-step course in recovering your creative self. Fundamental to this are two tools. Firstly the ‘Morning Pages’ comprising three pages of longhand writing stream-of-consciousness which are not meant to be art or even ‘writing’ as such but merely provide a means of reconnecting with ourselves they lead us along a pathway out of despair and into solutions.
Second tool is the ‘Artist’s Date’, this is a block of time put aside and committed to nurturing your creative side, this might be as simple as acknowledging nature and enjoying a sunset or a dawn or perhaps enjoying a work or collection of art in a commercial set up. There’s a great line in the book about making this date and then watching the killjoy side trying to wriggle out of it as if there is a fear of self-intimacy.
My review doesn’t do this book justice. I have to admit to doubts from my most cynical depths but I was committed to a ‘try any and everything’ period of my life, my coach had asked that I give it a go so I did and never looked back. When I lapse from the exercises I dry up and then have to rediscover them.
The book is available from my Amazon page.
Have a great weekend.
The Incisal Edge 