Creative work is unlike any other kind of work. It’s intensity can be disconcerting, until you learn to manage the fluctuations of energy, to expect them, and work with them not against them.

I’m tired of the word “rhythm”. "

“Creative rhythms”. The phrase has been overused for several years now. Granted, it is hard to find a suitable better phrase - but we have to try. My contribution to that effort is to call that closed circuit of creativity “disciplines of delight”. And it is a circuit - one thing leads to another, there needs to be a grounding, a conduit, and a source of power.

Disciplines of Delight.

I hope you have many.

Inspiration is this deeply spiritual, highly subjective, beautifully undulating thing to me - like the school of fish in my above painting, or the murmuration of birds.

Problem is, true, gritty, gorgeous artistic inspiration…well, it is about as explainable as a murmuration. To even attempt to teach it might be to pull the magic right out of it, but I always find myself trying to teach it because I always find myself being asked about it.

Two years ago, I taught a class where I went into some depth about what I called creative “rituals and receptacles”. As artists, we need to anchor our practice in rituals: sustainable disciplines of delight - and then we need receptacles: quality, dependable places to put all the ideas that spring out of those disciplines.

Reading is one of my daily rituals. My journal is my receptacle. One of my favorite things to do, is to pull out several books I am currently in the middle of, and then have my journal beside me, and spend a solid hour just “grazing”. Going from book to book, and writing down quotes that stand out. More than the quotes, though, I will write down cross-applications that come to me.

Lord, I feel like I just gave away the farm.

All the good juju is right there, in what I just told you. Ritual and receptacle. For example, “see and sketch”, or “hike and design”, or “clean the studio and paint”.

Here’s my favorite: “read and write”. Be inspired by the very best, put yourself in front of the very best, and find something true about marriage in a book about praying with the liturgical, monastic “hours”.

Oh, trust me, it can be done.

Day 16 of Lent - Rituals and Receptacles