Last week you met Aha-phrodite, the Modern Day Muse of Paying Attention. The second Modern Day Muse was named after Albert Einstein. Read on this week to find out why.
Albert Einstein said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
I think there is hope for the following encounter.
Anais Nin, a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories once said, “He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”
So I am smoking reverie with Anais Nin.
Her full name is Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell..
She tells me to just call her Anais.
My full name is Jill Ann Baldwin Badonsky Brisebois
But she calls me the “writer.”
This strain of reverie we’re smoking is very good.
With it we ponder, deliberate, ruminate, reckon, believe, retrieve, recall, reckon, and suppose …
The high starts at the crack of surmise,
We land in a golden afterthought,
And in the space between the worlds,
We drift along a train of creativity …
Characters, storylines, poetry, images, and tunes emerge
-- and take us high
Above the dribble, the news, the bills on the kitchen table
A high we wouldn’t have … if we weren’t smoking reverie.
Anais writes erotica.
I write things like this.
Anais begins tell me of her “bicoastal trapeze.”
That’s what she calls being married to two men at the same time.
One in LA one in NY
“That’s absurd, Anais,” I say
“That’s the point, writer.
You’re absurd too,” she says,
“Why do you say so?” I ask.
“You’re talking to someone, who has been dead for over 40 years.” she says.
Talking is right. It makes the the stub of my daydream go out. The reverie vanishes in a puff of smoke.
I was just curious.
-
What if I could smoke “reverie”?
-
What if I wrote as if I were talking to Anais Nin.
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
~Albert Einstein
The question, “What if …?” is starter fluid of curiosity in the creative process.
It is a gateway to imagination, ideas, and inventions, even absurd ones. It is a precursor for intuition. And “what if …” can be asked anywhere: In a shower, on a walk, while scrolling, between commercials and cups of tea. It can be asked in the same amount of time it takes for a butterfly to light on a flower and move on to the next so it even works for short attention spans.
To ask it, is to feed your creativity. The creative subconscious loves questions.
To play with absurdity is to have run with it.
We will be exploring this week how you can use the words, “What if …” to unleash more of your creativity.
Albert Einstein operated outside of the fray, broke rules, and was passionately curious… important principles of creativity. Albert, the Modern DayMuse, is a dispatcher of those principles.
Dispatching Muses,
Jill
The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard) is in its fourth edition
The Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching Certification Training is based on this book.
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