As Austin Kleon puts it in Keep Going --
Creativity is about connection -- you must be connected to others in order to be inspired and share your own work -- but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others . . . Silence and solitude are crucial . . . But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen . . . not just a where, but also a when. Not just a sacred space, but also a sacred time.
What’s clear is that it’s healthiest if we make a daily appointment to disconnect from the world so that we can connect with ourselves. Kids, jobs, sleep, and a thousand other things will get in the way, but we have to find our own sacred space, our own sacred time.
Seriously -- Y'all need to buy his books!
As I mentioned recently on this blog (25 September 2020), I have been doing some serious cleaning and reorganizing around our house since late August. It is clearly related to the pandemic and the ongoing quarantine we are maintaining in our family. I’ve just been spending a lot of time in and around our house, much more than unusual, and things seem to be calling out to me to care for them. On Friday, I spent 7.5 hours painting the deck in back of our house to finish the first coat of the waterproofing it so desperately needs. And yesterday I spent roughly 10 hours de-cluttering, just putting things where they belong, washing and folding laundry, taking things to the dump and Goodwill, and vacuuming.
Today, I worked through the infamous rat’s nest of wires and cables that is the third drawer down in our filing cabinet, the purgatory/limbo where old electronics go to die, including 3 old flip phones, 6 iPods of various vintages, and a countless number of adapters that don’t connect to a single port on any device we currently own. After that, I cleaned out what we literally call *the junk drawer*, the small drawer in the kitchen next to our refrigerator overflowing with scattered rubber bands, scattered paper clips, scattered thumb tacks, dozens of pens that don’t work, a dozen pencils with no erasers, almost three dozen Sharpies, four nearly identical foot long wooden rulers, three somewhat used rolls of Scotch tape, two rolls of electrical tape, and two pen knives which no one can remember buying. And then I pulled down one of my father’s clarinets from its perch on top of a bookcase, nearly screaming when I opened the case to find this very valuable instrument was covered in mildew! Just horrifying! So I set to work with some soft cloths and white vinegar -- and an unusual degree of patience for me -- and rescued it. Next step is bringing it to a professional repair shop.
I now understand that all of this "nesting" is my effort toward creating the kind of space that Kleon is discussing here. Kleon says we need to find these spaces. I am thinking they are something we need to *make* instead, construct, forge from whatever useful bits we have lying around. My office/studio is in the basement, across from our laundry room. It consists of the Formica-covered dining room table of my childhood; a heavy-duty dorm room chair made of oak we bought at an auction of surplus Virginia Tech furniture (covered with a leopard-print cushion?!); an ancient blue architect’s lamp I got from a retiring faculty member who was cleaning out his office; a ridiculous, cheap-ass Hydra of a lamp that somehow became part of our lives (but that we don't want showing anywhere else in the house); the latest book of pragmatic Buddhist wisdom by Pema Chödrön I am studying; an old-school Epson scanner that is getting a lot of work these days; our last surviving cassette tape player; my notebooks/journals; my microphone stand and mic; a digital in/out box to connect my mic and guitar to my computer; and my laptop, which very appropriately sits at the center of this strange but comforting constellation.
This physical space in our house is where I have recorded all of my music over the years, regardless of what technology I was using at the time. The dogs are not allowed down here. I can close the door that leads upstairs. My family knows not to bother me when I come down here, not to come in when the door is closed, or at least to wait for a quiet moment when I am not playing or singing to knock or call my name. More importantly, though, my life shifts when I walk down those stairs. Coming to this space means I am going to work, consciously choosing to disconnect from the world upstairs and beyond, to focus my attention, and to invest my time.
But I raised the stakes back on August 20th when I started this blog and committed to focusing solely on my own music. This space and the work I want to do here has taken on a whole new meaning and expression and size in my life. And maybe that’s the reason why I have been so focused on cleaning and organizing of late -- I have been trying to create what Kleon calls a *sacred* place -- or at least preparing to: circling in, spiraling in to a critical new understanding of this place, its newly elevated meaning in my life, and who I need to be to enter it.