Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Ghosts of past dishes!

As usual what started out as a simple blog update gets swirled around in the quagmire, that is my mind and comes out looking very different to my waking moment's thoughts.

My focus at the moment is my Brighton workshop. Even though I have run them many times I always want it to be better than the last. In truth I see myself as a fairly simple soul. One driving motivation I have (amongst others) is simply to leave people feeling better about themselves after we stumble into each other, hence my commitment to my creativity workshops. I really do believe that when people are creating works of art or writing or gardens or wonderful meals they are doing much more. In doing so, they are"creating a richer inner landscape" in which they themselves can wander. If you turn out to be a Pulitzer prize winning author or an Oscar winning director is, in my mind, irrelevant. What is relevant is that in creating your work you are driven to forage around in your basement and attic. You are forced to hunt around to find that thought that you "know" you once had but had locked away in one of those boxes until you needed it.

Take cooking for instance. I love pottering around in the kitchen creating new dishes. I can never can cook anything without being rubberbanded back to conversations with people in my past around food. I remember my mother, as she stirred the porridge in the morning or my "haute cuisine" sister who tried to instill in me the basics of preparation. "Cut the egg whites with a metal spoon, don't use a wooden spoon" she whispers in my ear as I make a mousse. Wasn't the way she created wonderful dishes a reflection of the way she had lived her life? With precision, love, careful measurements and attention to presentation, she created. These were her hallmarks in life. Even now, when I cut a tomato I remember the first meal my ex husband prepared for me over 30 years ago. Oh my, as nice as he is I should have been alert to the messages then and there. I wasn't very grateful then..but why? Who was I , ask myself. The list is endless and growing each task, each ingredient or each dish may be a trigger for a wonderful life memory.... my mother in law, my good friend's husband.....all prompt a plethora of thoughts and invite people now gone to float around the kitchen while I "create".

Gardening , weaving, writing....wherever we stop a minute to think about how something might be, everytime we surrender to just "doing", to being in the now..the past floats around us like the hair of the underwater swimmer. When we stop it is there...right in our eyes..in our face. How can anyone plan a garden or weed a newly turned bed without exploring? The smells, the colours, the way the garden curves around the perimeter..they all build on where we have come from and where we want to go.


But then I stop for a while in Nick Smith's blog which leads me to Wades postings which lead me to Lessig's lecture and this has me rethinking the whole concept of creativity. Oh my! Therein begins the planting of a jungle in my own inner landscape.

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