The Balcony – my positive space

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
Miles Davis

For me, all places and spaces in my home can feel both negative and positive. For example, my favorite chair is now full of clean clothes that I have to fold into the wardrobe in the bedroom. The fact that I can sit there, read and drink coffee in the light (positive) is gone since it’s now a place I don’t want to see (negative), because I’ve got better things to do today than to fold my clothes! I can’t even sit down there right now. And that is how negative and positive in every home changes and varies (is changeable) all the time… Just like it’s with almost everything in life. When you are really sad even the sunshine can irritate you, right?

So instead of sitting inside I go out, where I don’t have to look at the clean clothes that begs me to fold them. I go to the balcony:

The piles that I move around inside the house is almost un-existent on the balcony. It’s not a big beautiful porch, but it’s a quiet place where I sit down, maybe not to create but to eat, think, read and be still for a while when the sun is out. And the being still is for me as important as meeting people and letting them inspire me. To meditate, which I do to seldom, or just to be still and browse through a magazine or look at the trees can get the creative juices flowing in a great way. I’ve been thinking about this the past week, since I’m on week four of The Artist’s Way, and Cameron says:

For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. To much of it and we feel, yes, fried.

I don’t know about the frying part, but I’ve tried for a whole week to not read. I just wanted to see what would happen. I included bloglines and random surfing in this reading deprivation too, which is something that really gets in the way of my creative life sometimes. It was difficult, but doable. And the balcony is the perfect place to sit for a while, listen to the wind (and cars driving by), breathing and trying to focus on yourself. What do I want to do next in life?

And by the way, there is a lot of books about creativity out there! Marcia have read The Artist’s Way by Cameron and she is not thrilled – instead she recommends the book Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, which is now added to my wish-I-ownd-booklist. I have read a book in Swedish by Osho (in English it is called Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within), a book that I cam truly recommend too.

Osho says:

The really alive person is a here-now person. He does not live out of the past, he does not live for the future, he lives only in the moment, for the moment. The moment is all.

Find your own favorite books! More books about creativity here!

Posted as a contribution for Studio Friday this week: Positive spaces.