Commonplace:

A personal library for quotes, anecdotes, book excerpts, poems and ideas.

The Consciousness of Creativity

From the Telepathy Tapes, S2 E3 -

Elizabeth Gilbert: "Ideas are conscious entities outside of ourselves that do not come from us but to us. Artists are sort of antennae who absorb ideas, that ideas swirl around the world looking for human collaborators, knocking on our doors and tapping on our shoulders and coming to us in the form of inspiration."

Gilbert's writing discipline: sit at the desk for 60 minutes, no standing up, no internet, no rule about producing anything. "You are not allowed to stand up from this desk for 60 minutes... Like, were you available so that if ideas came, they could find you at your desk?" The point isn't to write. The point is to be findable.

Ideas pick collaborators who are available. If you can't host them, they move on.

Rick Rubin: "The best artists seem to have an antenna open to whatever the universe wants to happen now in this moment. The information comes in and it's magic. And then we - the rest of us - we're the craftsman."

Rubin again: two artists can channel the same idea and make completely different things. The download is the seed; the labor is the manifestation.

Tom Waits to a melody muse on the LA freeway: "Can't you see I'm driving? Do I look like I have a piano here?... If you're serious about wanting to be a song, you know that I spend eight hours a day in the studio. The next time you see me in the studio, come and see me then. Otherwise, stop bothering me and go bother Leonard Cohen." Relationship, not transaction.

My name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

That’s when I learned that the work gets done if you simply do it. 

—

You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. [So] don’t even worry about story. You will have only one. 

Note to self

It’s not what you’ve accomplished. It’s how you’ve loved your people.

I am willing

to be the villain in someone else’s story.

Stephen Heintz

If life is a question, love is the answer. 

What to do today?

How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard

Good words:

ephemera, nourish, murmuration

Time, a few centuries here are there,

means very little in the world of poems. - Mary Oliver

How to do anything

In order to fall asleep, you must first pretend to be asleep. That’s how everything works. 

Feeling like

I’m somewhere between no longer and not yet.

The greatest gift

Attention is the rarest and purist form of generosity. - Simone Weil

David Lynch

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. If you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Ram Dass

You can do it like it’s a great weight on you or you can do it like its part of the dance.

Viktor Frankl

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Grief Astronomer by Andrea Gibson

A difficult life is not less

worth living than a gentle one.

Joy is simply easier to carry

than sorrow. And your heart

could lift a city from how long

you’ve spent holding what’s been 

nearly impossible to hold

This world needs those 

who know how to do that. 

Those who can find a tunnel 

that has no light at the end of it 

and hold it up like a telescope 

to know the darkness 

also contains truths that could 

bring the light into its knees.

Grief astronomer, adjust the lens,

Look close, tell us what you see.

Cartography for Beginners

by Emily Hasler (an excerpt) -

Take a little license with rivers, especially their curves and estuaries. Add an oxbow lake if at all possible. If the area you are mapping has no seas/lakes/rivers/streams, I have to question why you are bothering. 

I who have never known men - Jacqueline Harpmen

As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. 

Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes to Me

I sold a ring, the only piece of jewellery I owned to a man at a fruit juice stall. He gave me a few hundred rupees and a banana shake. Enough for my passage to Delhi. 

—

I think I had a cool seraphy watching over me. Especially each time I was at a crossroads and had to make a decision. My education, the class I came from, and, above all, the fact that I spoke English protected me and gave me options that millions of others did not have. 

—

It was not any great strength of character or steely artistic ambition that saved me from prison or serious harm. It was just happenstance, and a series of small impulsive decisions, taken on the fly. 

A joke from the old country

A joke from the old country:

Two men are sitting at a bar. The first asks, "Where are you from?"

"I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire," says the second, "educated in Czechoslovakia, started my working life in Hungary, did a stint in Nazi Germany, then got married, had kids and raised my family in the Soviet Union."

The first man shakes his head. "You must have travelled a great deal."

"In fact," says the second. "I never left my village."