In the raw moment of creative play something comes out that seems satisfying to the senses. And often surprising too. A result that you weren’t planning, something falls together that is wonderful. You just need to put yourself in that mental/physical/creative place and not listen to the critical voice in your head that might be telling you to stop for whatever reason it’s using.

And that voice has origins in any number of places. It could simply be a harsh/thoughtless once off from a parent or teacher or friend. It could be years of telling oneself that: “I am not creative.” That’s my favourite.

The internal voice once noticed can actually be shifted a little into self-awareness anyway. It’s just a monologue. It isn’t even you…really…Eckhart Tolle says so anyway and it’s a fun idea to play with. And you can shift it to be seeing and commenting on the good happening right there. And then you can shift it to be amazed and grateful that the tool of the mind can be directed by you to a great end. Even if that end is “only” to be amazed and grateful. So the internal voice moves off into a nice quietness replaced with a gentle awareness of gratitude and appreciation.

Being creative – what a gift we have in our possession.

And did you know that when we act creatively in harmony with nature we can accelerate nature’s processes ie planting, gardening, nourishing, nurturing and regenerating the land/garden.

So be aware of what you are planting in your mind and what you are nurturing and what you are allowing in without your consent. What needs weeding out? What needs watering?

Be aware of the words you say to yourself – if bad and you catch it then right after you can balance that negative with a positive. Even better say/think lots of good things as often as possible. Say lots of good things about all sorts of things. You can be creative about that…isn’t it a lovely morning, that blokes suit looks good on him, I’m so grateful I had a safe, warm and loving home when I was growing up…the list is literally endless. And science has proven that we can forge new neural networks with this sort of reinforcement of thinking. That’s a sweet looking neural network you’ve got going on there.

Positive thinking is getting its back-lash it seems. But “realism” is just a socially acceptable form of pessimism. It’s only an opinion about an as yet unknown event that isn’t here. Even if seemingly massively probable it’s still just statistics. And then when it happens you can have different versions of events with people remembering different things in different ways. How amazing is that?

So where does that leave us?

Well ok, most of the time this isn’t an issue but if we allow for the fact that this happens then we gain a lot of freedom to choose how we “see” the world and events. Or let’s call it your world and my world and his world and her world. And we do share many parts of these worlds with each other. But we have our own unique perspective. And as discussed it’s within your control. Just look up Viktor Frankl: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Restorey – to write a new story. The picture above which inspired this outpouring is simply glass found on the beach. Having been manipulated and made safe by the sea I like the rounded edges. I did see a fish in the collection of pieces before I put these on the sand – but then played around to see what else came out. I certainly didn’t anticipate the angle of the photo and even when designing the page found it worked better rotated 90 degrees. The “play” of flow gave me that outcome. I didn’t “do” it but I was doing it, being in the moment and watching. Simple. But actually quite hard for me to allow myself to do it rather than say sitting at a computer looking for a salaried job. And even more difficult to share here in case it’s seen by someone as rubbish. Which is fine because it is rubbish…well it was until the sea made it look cool.