Creativity

A Rainy Thursday Peptalk.

/ Erin Kirk / 4 Comments

It’s raining hard at my house today. Thunder and lightning. Cold and I’m paying bills. Not a great time to give up coffee.

But SoulPancake made me giggle. It’s a project started by Dwight Schrute (aka Rainn Wilson), whose intent is to make discussions about Spirituality, Creativity, and Philosophy cool again. I happen to be all for that.

If you could use a little encouragement this morning to get busy being who you are, spend three minutes with this kid. Like my friend Bob Goff says: Forget what you’re able to do, what were you made to do? And why not do more of that?

Elizabeth Gilbert Is Not Doomed

/ Erin Kirk / Leave a comment

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of, as she calls it, the freakishly successful Eat, Pray, Love grapples, in her 18 minute Ted talk, with “the maddening capriciousness of the creative process.”

Gilbert challenges five hundred years of rational humanism, as she “brushes up against that thing…that source that I can’t identify.” She quit being terrified of her post-Eat, Pray, Love career when she realized the artist is not the genius, but rather someone who captures external, divine genius from time to time.

By the way, the word inspiration, in the Hebrew, is neshāmāh ‏נְשָׁמָה‎ which also translates as a breath, a wind, a blast. Consider that as she talks about her meeting with American poet Ruth Stone.