As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I have not been applying myself to my songwriting very much this semester, and the hypocrisy of espousing “Do as I say, not as I do” to the students in my creativity class was getting pretty arch.
Then came my friend Karen’s incisive advice to these same students (and to me): “When things get difficult in our personal lives, that is *precisely* the time when should be leaning into our art.” I ended that class period by sharing that the way out of my slump/funk would seem to be in both the process and in the products of my efforts, “both in the making and the made.”
When I sat down with my guitar that evening, this became the first line of my first new song in quite a while.