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Innehåll tillhandahållet av Randy Cantrell. Allt poddinnehåll inklusive avsnitt, grafik och podcastbeskrivningar laddas upp och tillhandahålls direkt av Randy Cantrell eller deras podcastplattformspartner. Om du tror att någon använder ditt upphovsrättsskyddade verk utan din tillåtelse kan du följa processen som beskrivs här https://sv.player.fm/legal.
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Are Your Muses Too Unreliable?

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Manage episode 349142352 series 2155250
Innehåll tillhandahållet av Randy Cantrell. Allt poddinnehåll inklusive avsnitt, grafik och podcastbeskrivningar laddas upp och tillhandahålls direkt av Randy Cantrell eller deras podcastplattformspartner. Om du tror att någon använder ditt upphovsrättsskyddade verk utan din tillåtelse kan du följa processen som beskrivs här https://sv.player.fm/legal.
“Inspiration is the windfall from hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll.” ― Helen Hanson A muse is a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist. I'd modify that definition slightly by saying a muse is any source of inspiration for creativity. Do you have a muse? Have you ever? Through the years of Leaning Toward Wisdom, I've talked about two that have occupied The Yellow Studio from the beginning - for over 22 years. Books. A guitar. Back in July, I started The Great Purge. Around 1,500 books exited The Yellow Studio, donated to the local library where I suspect the majority were sold in an annual sale to raise money for said library. The few I decided to keep - well under 100 titles - were boxed up and safely stored away for the next chapter of The Yellow Studio. By mid-August, whatever muse the books served was gone. Or was it? The books were gone, but any muse - source of inspiration - was far from gone. Sleep and the books were gone, but the inspiration was running wide open. I began to get on an unprecedented recording roll prompted by hours of writing. Feelings, phrases, words, quotes, lyrics, and photographs prompted the chasing of many ideas. I'm not saying any of them are good. You're clicking PLAY so you can decide that. I only know that I had more episode ideas brewing than ever. Usually, I'm working on 4-6 show ideas, half of which never see daylight. About half of them languish and never get fully developed. Suddenly, in the span of about a month I looked and realized I had about twenty drafts going - show ideas that had a title and at least a couple of paragraphs of notes. I began to look at the totality of them to figure out the ones I most wanted to push across the finish line. One idea begets another. It's always worked that way for me. There was no attempt to keep that habit in play though since I already had so many episode ideas to pursue. But it happened anyway. I'd sit here inside The Yellow Studio, headphones on listening to the BoDeans, or Dawes, or The Heavy Heavy, and start noodling on one idea - one draft. And a phrase or lyric would hit me, prompting me to open a new draft where I'd create a title. Just a title. Maybe one sentence to make note of what I was thinking of at the time. Then I'd go back to my original work. "Great! Now instead of finishing one idea, I've created yet another one," I'd think. Never mind. I'd trudge forward trying to finish at least one episode. I leaned into the process. Until I got COVID. My first foray with the virus. I'll forever blame my contracting it on my poor sleep habits, provoked mainly by all the changes I was planning. Changes I desired and changes I was looking forward to - but changes that were putting my mind on a higher octane than it had experienced in some time. My mind wasn't racing so much as it was doing cartwheels. I'm usually a bit more settled than that. But as we both know, we've never been HERE before. We've never been this age, in this place, in these circumstances, trying to do whatever it is we're trying to do. We're all in unchartered water as we enter a new day. Or night. I thought about the muse and my references to my two most-mentioned muses. The biggest muse - the one that required the most space and was the most obvious - was gone. I was no longer surrounded by all the book spines that had surrounded me for years. And I was happy about it. I never experienced the sadness or difficulty that I predicted. Before The Great Purge, I had dreaded it, fearing I'd struggle to decide which books to keep and which would go. However, on the first day of sorting, I found myself fully engaged to see how few I could keep and how many I could part with. I piled the books in the hallway just outside The Yellow Studio. At one end of the hall were the keepers. At the other end were the goers. It quickly became a game to see how small I could make...
  continue reading

100 episoder

Artwork
iconDela
 
Manage episode 349142352 series 2155250
Innehåll tillhandahållet av Randy Cantrell. Allt poddinnehåll inklusive avsnitt, grafik och podcastbeskrivningar laddas upp och tillhandahålls direkt av Randy Cantrell eller deras podcastplattformspartner. Om du tror att någon använder ditt upphovsrättsskyddade verk utan din tillåtelse kan du följa processen som beskrivs här https://sv.player.fm/legal.
“Inspiration is the windfall from hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll.” ― Helen Hanson A muse is a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist. I'd modify that definition slightly by saying a muse is any source of inspiration for creativity. Do you have a muse? Have you ever? Through the years of Leaning Toward Wisdom, I've talked about two that have occupied The Yellow Studio from the beginning - for over 22 years. Books. A guitar. Back in July, I started The Great Purge. Around 1,500 books exited The Yellow Studio, donated to the local library where I suspect the majority were sold in an annual sale to raise money for said library. The few I decided to keep - well under 100 titles - were boxed up and safely stored away for the next chapter of The Yellow Studio. By mid-August, whatever muse the books served was gone. Or was it? The books were gone, but any muse - source of inspiration - was far from gone. Sleep and the books were gone, but the inspiration was running wide open. I began to get on an unprecedented recording roll prompted by hours of writing. Feelings, phrases, words, quotes, lyrics, and photographs prompted the chasing of many ideas. I'm not saying any of them are good. You're clicking PLAY so you can decide that. I only know that I had more episode ideas brewing than ever. Usually, I'm working on 4-6 show ideas, half of which never see daylight. About half of them languish and never get fully developed. Suddenly, in the span of about a month I looked and realized I had about twenty drafts going - show ideas that had a title and at least a couple of paragraphs of notes. I began to look at the totality of them to figure out the ones I most wanted to push across the finish line. One idea begets another. It's always worked that way for me. There was no attempt to keep that habit in play though since I already had so many episode ideas to pursue. But it happened anyway. I'd sit here inside The Yellow Studio, headphones on listening to the BoDeans, or Dawes, or The Heavy Heavy, and start noodling on one idea - one draft. And a phrase or lyric would hit me, prompting me to open a new draft where I'd create a title. Just a title. Maybe one sentence to make note of what I was thinking of at the time. Then I'd go back to my original work. "Great! Now instead of finishing one idea, I've created yet another one," I'd think. Never mind. I'd trudge forward trying to finish at least one episode. I leaned into the process. Until I got COVID. My first foray with the virus. I'll forever blame my contracting it on my poor sleep habits, provoked mainly by all the changes I was planning. Changes I desired and changes I was looking forward to - but changes that were putting my mind on a higher octane than it had experienced in some time. My mind wasn't racing so much as it was doing cartwheels. I'm usually a bit more settled than that. But as we both know, we've never been HERE before. We've never been this age, in this place, in these circumstances, trying to do whatever it is we're trying to do. We're all in unchartered water as we enter a new day. Or night. I thought about the muse and my references to my two most-mentioned muses. The biggest muse - the one that required the most space and was the most obvious - was gone. I was no longer surrounded by all the book spines that had surrounded me for years. And I was happy about it. I never experienced the sadness or difficulty that I predicted. Before The Great Purge, I had dreaded it, fearing I'd struggle to decide which books to keep and which would go. However, on the first day of sorting, I found myself fully engaged to see how few I could keep and how many I could part with. I piled the books in the hallway just outside The Yellow Studio. At one end of the hall were the keepers. At the other end were the goers. It quickly became a game to see how small I could make...
  continue reading

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