I think of myself as a creative person though my pace seems woefully slow. I am lucky in that I have a wonderfully large room where I can putter and try out this or that combination and set things aside and still have some room to work on my current project. Anyone can come here. I have a space dedicated to creating, but this is not where I create.
There are other places, dearer places, places where I freely wander and every one of them is inaccessible to anyone other than myself. I have a place that looks like an Old English shop, Dickensian in fact, with large glass cases, a bit dusty, housing my creations. The paint is dark green, but very old and faded. The coffee is always on and there are cookies on a china plate. There is a lettered sign over the door, Nicholas & Marley, and a tinkling bell that rings when I push open the door to come inside and be inspired. When I’m in here, I might physically be sitting in my large room at home, but I’m really far away in both space and time.
There is another place I go and, I must admit, it can be quite a long hike to get there. It’s a library, my own library, a story and a half high with recessed pine paneling and built-in bookcases all around, a desk near a large fireplace with a fire that is always burning, a comfortable chair and ottoman in gray velvet and a couple of quilts in case I feel the need to nap. There are floor to ceiling windows with heavy fringed drapes that always frame a night scene of falling snow. This is the space I use when I write fiction and I find great difficulty staying on the path that wanders and loops through every other place in my mind before I can get here. I’m too easily side-tracked.
I need to practice getting to my library and my shop more often, finding a shortcut, perhaps. My creative spaces somehow comfort me, though I don’t believe comfort is the right word. Insulate is more like it. They act as a buffer that allows me to create complete crap knowing no one else will see it and judge all of my meager talent by it. The freedom to create crap that can be tweaked and trimmed and highlighted and possibly turned into something I’m not horrified to bring out into the light. The freedom to fail, fail, fail, fail and still try again.
I have the best creative spaces. Someday, I post a blog about the gardens around them.
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3 comments:
The places in my mind are very much like the one's in your mind. Except for the noise, the din. All the sound from the car engines, the guns, the motorcycles and the airplanes. Hmmm, now that I think about it, they aren't all that similar at all. It's nice we've got our own places to go on a winter's evening.
Mine is a coffee shop- some hybrid of different ones I've loved along the way. Various rooms, each with their own carafe's of different blends, so you can/should meander around looking for your favorite (Hartford, CT), lots of light and great folky music in the background (Saugatuck, MI), beautiful and welcoming leather sofas, chairs and ottoman's (Kalamazoo, MI) - with quirky people who easily fit into any story plot you've been hacking away at (New York, NY)and the world's most perfect Cafe Mocha (just like the one's I'd make at the cafe in the little basement theater. It sounds like a nice place to begin my next story...
I'm so glad we all have our own places.
Em, I can hardly wait to read the the story that starts out with the perfect Cafe Mocha being made in the little basement theater.
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