Moving right along! A week a day, it’s like one of those stop-motion nature vids with a plant growing before your eyes!
Anyhow: this week’s chapter is called Summoning the Muses. It’s about showing up, being faithful to your creative practice, like Woody Allen advised. And the main task for the week, is to ‘invent a creativity ritual’, to get you in the right state of mind for your project, for creative endeavour.
Well. Thinking about it, I guess I already have one. Because every day, I get up, and I watch a little Frasier (because Frasier is of the immortals, never gets old, is never not funny.) Then I put the kettle on, I make a cuppa, I eat biscuits.
I watch an inspirational video: a Ted Talk, or Joel Osteen, or Steve Pavlina. (Love Steve Pavlina!)
And I write. It seems to work. I’m grateful to the writers and speakers who put me in the right frame of mind, who act as my trainers and call up the Muse for me, a long-distance connection.
So that’s my ritual. Tea, biscuits, and a little positive thinking. Pour a second cup, put a bourbon cream on the saucer, invite the Muse.
image – Betta Living https://www.flickr.com/photos/bettalivinguk/licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
Cute MCs, in a straight-to-gay type romance that isn’t clearly flagged up as such from the beginning. Friends to lovers which is something I always appreciate, and they were sweet together. The real star of the show was the cake, though, positively edible descriptions of it bordering on food porn. The hottest most delicious thing in the story! Do not read while hungry!
I was obliged to take a walk into town today, due to transport issues – GOSH-DARN INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES, WHY WERE THEY EVER INVENTED? But there were compensations along the way, abundant compensations. Primary amongst these were the vetches in the hedgerows and the woods – multi-headed purple vetches, and purple vetches are almost my favourite vetches. (Apart from birdsfoot trefoil, and that’s an unfair competition, because birdsfoot trefoil is also colloquially called eggs-and-bacon in the UK, AND HOW CAN ANY DECENT WILDFLOWER BE EXPECTED TO COMPETE WITH THAT?)
Vetches are the prettiest things. The internal combustion engine is the annoyingest thing, but vetches are the derndest prettiest things.
Also the blackberries are not quite yet finished off – or pissed on by Satan and rendered inedible, as the folklore has it. (It’s the maggits in wild brambles that bother me more than Satan’s theoretical outdoor hedgerow slashes while out on the piss. Copious amounts of salted water, to deal with the wildlife, can render them uneatable anyway.)
There were even some unripe blackberries still hanging high, fruit and flower everywhere, nature in profusion and gloriously fertile.
It rained a little, and I’d forgotten my brolly. But I didn’t feel I had too much to complain about, all told. I came back with biscuits, after all – and biscuits are the comfortingest things.
ETA: uuurgh. written before I knew what a nasty cock-cheese brained shitlump Pavlina actually is.
I have a tremendous respect and admiration and liking for Steve Pavlina, in a slightly sad way since I’ve never met him. He’s honest and smart and a little wacky, and I don’t agree with him on everything, but I respect his opinions and his upright character and ethical choices completely.
This month he’s doing a series of daily vlogs – the 30 Days Of Video meme. Some of the vids so far have been really great – the one below, here, is especially good.
As an intro to each of the daily vlogs, he’s also talking about his 30-day water fast. That he’s doing at the same time! My God!
I guess that he’s a grown man and he knows what he’s doing. For myself, I have grave doubts – I’m deeply sceptical – about the efficacy and benefits of any kind of fasting. Juice fasting, water fasts, minifasts, maxifasts, you name it. If you believe that it’s going to leave you glowing and with your body generally and your liver in particular all cleaned out and raring to go, then more power to you. People should do what makes them glow, what makes them happy, if they can.
Whether I believe in it or not doesn’t have a speck of relevance, here. Although I don’t. Why would you want to give your liver a rest, after all? It’s not a nurse, a police officer, a fire-fighter, a public servant entitled to weekends off and an employer’s pension contribution. Where would you be if your heart or your lungs demanded danger money and Christmas and Thanksgiving off work? The entire concept leaves me boggled. My liver had better count itself lucky, and regard the bottle of Grey Goose awaiting my next weekend off with some apprehension.
But that’s just me. And I’ve come to accept that people you admire, respect, and might even want to emulate in some respects, have the same rights as any other person. That includes the right to be a little nutty in some areas, to espouse activities and causes you might gaze at askance, whistling gently and wondering about calling in the nice men with the van and the straitjacket. Teal Swan on the subject of vaccinations, for instance. (Well, Teal Swan on quite a lot of subjects, to be honest. I LOVE TEAL!) Ralph Smart, when he makes like he’s being punched in slow-motion, and his head snaps, and what the heck is that all about, Ralph, what’s it all about? Steve Pavlina’s ex, Erin, when she gets just a little too out-there even for me, on other lives and reincarnation and the universe. In general. What could be more general than the universe?
God bless Pavlina, though, and all the rest of them. I guess he’ll be okay – I hope he’ll be fine, although God knows he looks as if he could use a Gregg’s pasty in these vids. I want to order him takeout and send it round as an emergency care package. Nonetheless, the vids are terrific, totally recommended. And I plan to watch all of them with a sandwich, a cuppa and a pack of biscuits on hand.
Next up, we have some blueberry cheesecake as I continue to practice my food illustration while also following our prompts for the April challenge this month. When it comes to “puddles” and spring food my first thought went to another form of art known as plating. That wondrous ability that chef’s have to transform a plate […]
This image of Russian leader and purported Donald Trump kingmaker Vladimir Putin as a gay clown is now illegal in Russia. Whatever you do, do not share this far and wide so that everyone sees it. (more…)
This is just like yesterday – I went to the supermarket and a packet of chocolate Hob-Nobs fell into my basket. I don’t know how that happened, either.
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