<aside> 💠Prompt: Being boxed up and bored is the perfect breeding ground for creativity. Across the internet, on balconies, and in windows people are sharing oddball creations born of stir crazy inspiration.
Write about some of the ways you've seen creativity show up for you recently. A resurrected practice of doodling, a flair for the dramatic in your journaling, a risky meatball recipe.
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By Dave Gorum
Meticulously sloppy drawings of rainbows have been showing up in the windows of our neighborhood. There's a good variety in the forms. Standard graphical models — the colored arch punctuated by fluffy clouds, a bay window filled with paper cutout hearts arranged by color, and the longtail of creative oddball forms — squares, blobs, scribbles.
It took me longer than worth admitting to realize that these are kid's school projects. Some industrious teacher or parent giving the little energic gorblins a creative outlet and a stage. It'd be nice if this open air gallery experiment continues, swapping out pieces for new collective works.
In my immediate circle I've seen all sorts of creative projects pop off. My brother is fashioning masks from odds and ends, my dad is planting an elaborate garden, my sister is inventing all sorts of activities for her young twins (chalking the driveway, learning yoga, interpretive dance parties, etc etc), my mom is finding creative ways of digging up bonkers information (did you know the Audubon society has activities for young children interested in birds? What tike doesn't love sandpipers).
My friends have been making all sorts of inventive and helpful things. Tossing together sites with information on how not to lose your shit. Creating donation and volunteer programs. Illustrating, writing, cobbling together, refashioning, storytelling. It's enough to swell a full-grown man's heart to bursting.
Personally, my creative practices haven't been this stimulated in years. I've taken to spontaneously doodling, trying to find a form a bit more elaborate than sketching faces onto blobs. I'm writing in three-ish journals. On top of the design and code work I'm doing for Ponder. And Kristen and I are doing a lot of brainstorming on incredibly stupid collaborative ideas.
This latter is the most fun right now. The game: figure out a series of community-driven, extraordinarily-pointless media ideas. Finding simple and fun ways to have our friends participate in stone-faced idiocy. It's beefing up our collaborative muscles and pulling much needed laughter from the background drear.
An interesting byproduct of all this is a noticeable reduction in creative fear (or using Pressfield's term: Resistance). It's still there, but it seems a whole shitload less important. If things are gonna go sideways, might as well get creative about it.
By Gustavo Gallegos
Cooking used to be a multi-day affair in life before quarantine. Ideas would circle my head for days, sparked by things I'd seen elsewhere or memories of days past. As if I was writing a novel I would carefully plan an outline and a plan for execution. Unencumbered by rules and restrictions I would revel in the opportunity to go to an off-the-beaten path specialty grocer to acquire some exotic ingredient to give an old dish a new breath of fresh air. Whether the meal ended up being the next great American novel or a racy beach novel, it would leave me feeling at peace, having taken part in a more complete human experience
...
Isolation began for me before most, supplies for months I bought at cost before the crowds cleaned the shelves and left this town like a ghost so they could save themselves my meals became poetry for this is no time to boast.