This is about You, and allowing yourself to be creative in life.
Creativity is the spice of life.
Wait a minute.
Isn’t that supposed to be, Variety is the spice of life?
No, creativity is the spice of life because without it, variety has no flavor.
Creative living responds to the tantalizing environment and brings various views to situations, so you have more choices when making decisions. You don’t need to be an artist in the traditional sense. You just need to be a person who wants to see, and enjoy this world as it is behind the obvious.
Life is not boring. I write from childhood recollections of a family who practiced creative living. I invite you to glimpse LittleBrother’s imagination and BigBrother’s curiosity, and discover a way to see without glasses. Opportunity is generously served, ideas multiply, and the variety of explorations are but a few of glimmers of creative living.
To take steps in Creative Living, you’ll need your most valuable possession: You.
1
the Problem
There’s a problem with being creative.
You think you’re not.
You’re stuck in a rut. You know there are options, you just can’t see them. Or you see alternative solutions to your dilemma, but don’t know how to put it together, to make it work. You’re afraid of failure so you never try.
Maybe you’ve fooled yourself into believing you cannot choose how you see things.
Creative Living to the rescue! Creativity is the white horse and you’re the rider, the knight in shining armor for your own solutions and opportunities. When you’re ready to learn a new perspective, then you can live your life creatively. You can choose which variety suits you best, or create one. You don’t need to be stuck with the same old variety everyone else tires of.
2
the Story
Sometimes, you just don’t see what something is until you can see it from behind, after it has passed. That’s rather what it is like to realize that the family I grew up in practiced living creatively. Oh, we talked about creative and artistic values and ideas, but we didn’t say, “this is creative”, I only look back and see that it was. We didn’t practice, actually, we just did it.
Both of my parents valued not worrying about not being like others, what you may call individuality, so I was fortunate to have been born to them. Different, to us, didn’t suggest a value of good or bad, right or wrong. Different meant just that: different.
Between my mother and father, I didn’t have a chance to see the world the way other children did. My mother was quite particular about things like the composition of photographs, and my father was fussy when it came to developing and cropping the images in his darkroom. Dad was, among other things at various times, a professional photographer. Mama was, all the time, a steady guide for our family as my father’s newest interest would become a profession, then morph into another. Both of my parents were creative, Mama in though and my father in form: mostly.
Growing up, my brothers and I were welcomed at my father’s side as he did whatever was his current interest. When he was home, I should inject, for he was in the Army and would be gone for months at a time, before he retired (twice). Learning to typeset for my father’s printing press was something I enjoyed more than BigBrother, as I could do it for fun but that was his summer job, which he was not happy about. All of us liked the darkroom, careful of the chemicals, watching the images develop, deciding which parts would print. Both of my parents had meticulous vocabularies, they liked the taste of words, and those words joined Brothers vocabularies, and mine. We travelled a lot, visiting all sorts of places most kids don’t get to go. We moved a lot, too, my father often transferred.
Mind you, my family was financially challenged, but my parents generously provided Brothers and me with quite the creative living environment! I’ve lived in a carriage house and explored its dozen bedroom mansion, and examined the jars of animal parts soaking in formaldehyde on the shelves of a late veternarian’s workshop, housed in one of the many buildings on the estate. After my father retired from the Army the first time, both he and my mother wondered if we’d have to stop traveling to and exploring new places. Nope! My father let his imagination, which had attracted my mother in the first place, take the five of us up, out and away from the shore at Miss Liberty. He didn’t just tell a story, he gave us the makings to create another experience, an opportunity accepted.
I’ll share some of the wonderful creative living experience with you.
3
A New Way To See
The best hiding place is in plain sight
Have you ever looked for something that’s right in front of you, and need several moments to see it, before you wonder how you could have missed it? Interesting, isn’t it, how what you’re wanting to see will become mysteriously invisible, lost in plain sight. Next time that happens, stop, and give a bit of thought to the things in your frame of vision. Actually, you don’t need to wait, you can do it now.
Depending on where you are, there can be thousands of things you see, but you’re not likely to be aware of them all because you’ve not learned to really see them. If you’re inside, you may see letters on a box or a smile in a picture, or loops in a carpet and whisker on the dog. When you’re outside, you may see the shades of blue in the sky and the shapes of the clouds, but miss the ant on a leaf, or melted snowflake. Your conscious brain won’t work fast enough to individually identify all the things you see. Stop to smell the roses, then you’ll see the thorns.
The family of my childhood went on frequent excursions. Whether it was the Grand Canyon or the gardens of Musee du Louvre (my father was in the Army), sketchbooks and pencils were a necessity, ported with us, along with the paints and brushes. We didn’t always have film, but we took cameras, too. We’d sketch, and when there are too many things to see just one, we used a framing trick.
With you thumb and index finger touching, look through the O your hand forms. (This is also helpful if you’re nearsighted, as I am.) It’s okay to close an eye. Bring your O closer to your face, and further away, and watch the change. Make your O smaller, or use both hands to make it larger. Or, put your index fingertips and thumbtips together, forming a rectangle. Move it around, shrink and grow the opening, and see your surroundings in a new way.
Even if you don’t sketch or draw or paint or sculpt or whatever you consider art and say you can’t, try it, anyway. You’ll see new things to think about, if not draw. You’ll find different things to wonder about. And once you begin to think about what you see, you’ll begin to apply your new way of seeing things outside of the art room.
Stop a minute, look around, and focus on something you see frequently.
Now, what about it have you not noted before?
Look at your desk, or out the window. How many different things can you name?
Go outside, and look in a familiar direction. Now, make frame with your fingers, move it around, and see something new.
4
Say Yes to Opportunity
Be a gracious host when Opportunity knocks
While in elementary school I had my personal Little Library, mostly books of fairy tales and rhymes. There was one rhyme in particular that influenced my fancy:
Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, where have you been?
I’ve been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under the chair.
I have yet to understand why anyone, even a cat, would travel so far to do something he can do every day at home. While so far away with so much to explore, did PussyCat not visit Big Ben because London Bridge went to Arizona?
As a young teenager when my family traveled Europe before settling in Paris, where my father pursued his art interest, I’d think of Pussy Cat. My mother must have thought of him, too, for we did not do things the way we’d do at home. School, for me, was living with a French family four days a week, helping a nun with children who chattered things I could not understand, and frequent tours the Musee du Luvre, the Notre Dame Cathedral and other wonderful places around the River Seine. Sadly, I was denied the opportunity to be out on the Parisian street on my own as I was often mistaken as much older than my 13 years.
Opportunities come in all shapes and sizes. When the family of my childhood had an opportunity to fly on one of the presidential airplanes, Air Force Two, my father did not decline. (Never mind that others had told my parents we wouldn’t be able to fly from Paris to Washington on a plane so important, so don’t bother to try.) I may tell you about that plane, one day.
Later, back in the US, Brothers and I did not miss the opportunity to explore a three floor mansion, with a dozen bedrooms and two staircases, when my family lived in the carriage house next door. The deceased veterinarian had jars of animal parts in formaldehyde in the basement as well as a few of the various buildings on the estate. (My father was the resident artist for the art center housed in the carriage house.)
The family of my childhood didn’t have much money to spend, and none to waste. Opportunity was, therefore, always courteously received. We lived a richer life than many live who have lots of money. Opportunity my be undervalued, so invest when it arrives!
Opportunity is eclectic. It shifts so fast you may not recognize it before it flitters, or zips away, but there’s always one opportunity, or another, knocking.
5
Curiosity at Play
Satisfaction killed the cat, curiosity brought him back
When transistor radios first came out, they were quite expensive, much more than they cost today. My father splurged the first or second year they were available, and bought a bright red one for Mama’s birthday. Now, BigBrother was curious in ways I wasn’t. So when he asked Mama if he could use her radio, no one expected why he wanted it. Mama thought it was to listen to music.
BigBrother was into electronic things, so this new, bright red transistor radio, was an object for him to explore, to find out how it worked. When my mother asked him for it a week later, he was loathe to produce it. “One more week,” he said. After his one more week became two, then three, BigBrother finally, reluctantly, handed over the radio. It was in more pieces than he could stuff inside the radio case. Everything that had been inside, including capacitors and resistors and things I don’t know the names for, BigBrother had dismantled and separated and whatever else you can do to parts. He didn’t break them, he just unsoldered everything, then didn’t know where they all went. LittleBrother and I were anxiously waiting to watch him get in trouble, but Mama laughed! Instead of scolding him for taking apart her very expensive radio, she applauded his curiosity! Yes, BigBrother had learned something (pay attention to how you take something apart, called observation), and Mama valued both curiosity and learning, so that was that.
I think it was really Mama who was the curious one of the family. She didn’t spend much time with the things that occupy most women, like staying up with fashion (she used what she had) or gossip, and she mostly kept her opinions to herself. Mama was curious, often vicariously, through Brothers and me. Our good friend the Dictionary could answer many questions, unless we wanted more detail from the Encyclopedia Britannica. She loved books and people who could tell her things she didn’t know. While we lived in Paris, Mama took us to a flea market. She looked for the fleas every bit as fervently as did LittleBrother and I.
Mama’s mother, my grandmother Hep, told BigBrother that Mama was a bit fey. Dictionary came to the rescue for fey, and Brothers and I then understood Mama. Her perspective of life was from somewhere else, and she was curious to discover each facet of Earth. She lived life curiously, and we watched, and learned.
Curiosity is just for kids at heart. If you’re already old and stuffy inside, your mind made up about things not already fact, you’re not a kid and curiosity can’t live inside you.
Be curious with information, don’t assume. Take a look at what comes before u and me in the word, assume, then ask questions before allowing the animal. Forming conclusions with little information misguides creative living and can create a bad attitude.
The Information of Education creates curiosity. What have you learned that you can play curiously with?
6
Essential Imagination
Imagination found the cat
LittleBrother had the imagination gene. He would examine a tree, then observe it when dark. Added to his knowledge that big trees grow substantial roots, and that children were, generally, sound asleep by midnight, and some children went missing, he arrived at a reasonable conclusion. At midnight, each big tree would uproot itself and prowl its surroundings, looking for a child or three to scoop up in its arms, to absorb as another knot. The tree would, of course, replant its roots and stand still by the time of first light, so the absorbed children would not be found. Therefore, children should heed the caution, and be in bed, asleep before midnight, so the trees couldn’t reach them. (You’ve no idea how frequently I’d awaken after midnight, wondering if trees really could walk on their roots.)
LittleBrother had the kindest heart in the whole world. He never wanted anything to get hurt, even in his stories, nor even a mouse in reality. Kindness was a quality of attitude he carried in life. He added kindness to stories such as the trees. He may have thought they were real, which may be why they were so convincing; the stories I mean. While this type of imagination is the stuff books are made of, I won’t tell the many stories LittleBrother related. You’ve read some wonderful stories of imagination yourself, or have watched the movies.
But it isn’t the purpose of this story, to tell stories. It is, rather, to tickle your awareness of imagination and let your creativity not only create stories, but also find new adventures or solutions to a task at hand, or explore an opportunity you see in the nether.
Imagination becomes especially useful in our lives when we want to get out of, or avoid, a proverbial rut.
Now, an attitude forms the quality of imagination. I take full responsibility for my attitude, and so should you. While it makes me (and you) feel better to blame others when I (or you) choose a poor attitude (or other quality), I know as well as you that there is no one, other than me (you), who controls the mind inside my (your) brain.
Imagination has an attitude. Someone else may influence the attitude but cannot make the decision for you to wear one attitude or another. An attitude reflects the attitudee’s character. As LittleBrother was kind, BigBrother was mean. BigBrother, four years older than I, imagined me his personal punching bag and I wore emblems of it. Until we were both grown, that is, for by the time I had four children, BigBrother imagined me a princess, and his attitude changed. Imagination has an attitude.
Sit quietly for a moment, and recognize your present attitude. It’s likely something quite placid. Read the following sentence, then close your eyes and let your mind imagine. Let everything man-made dissolve, fade, disappearr: furniture, walls, clothing, roar of airplanes and roar of engines. No, you’re not focused on the naked bodies, you’re focused on the environs of our world as it is. If you were a person living without the man-produced stuff, fluff and things you just envisioned dissolved, faded and disappeared, your imagination would be running rampant. Your imagination is fuled by your cooperative attitude.
Find different ways to experiment with your imagination, aware of your attitude. If your attitude isn’t what you’d be pleased to admit, forego the Imagaination, for now. You don’t want your imagination to hurt another. Always, wear a good attitude when your imagination is running!
7
Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
To claim one phenominal idea, throw out 99.
Mama used say that, if I open my eyes too wide, I may miss seeing what I was looking for. Sometimes, she said, I’d need my ears to see right. She said that before I wore glasses (the only one in my family), so she was either psychic or wasn’t referring to my ears as holders for my glasses. Talk, in my family, didn’t sound the same as in other families.
Mama spoke in proverbs, mostly, or riddles, and used words that weren’t in my vocabulary books. Sometimes she’d come right out and say something straight, but not often. She didn’t know the technical terms for some of what she wanted to express, so she’d just borrow words. She liked words, and the boundaries a definition could challenge, so she would use words unexpectedly, which would sometimes cause me to think about what she was saying. Mostly, I spoke like her, anyway, so I didn’t need to think.
Mama had an eye for detail, for the relation of one thing to another. Mama was fey, as her mother said, so Mama liked to see things on paper or canvas a particular way. Part of the time my father was in the Army, he was assigned tasks that used some of his talent. He was an Army photographer for awhile, capturing images of things from all over which I wasn’t supposed to know about. He, too, had an eye for detail, and saw how one thing would interact with another, and with a snap would capture the scene.
My father took pictures everywhere. We went lots, and he took lots. He needed too many pictures, for rarely would a really good picture be in fewer than a hundred pictures. That’s something a photographer will know about: for one really good picture, throw out 99. People with their heads cropped at the crown go in the trash, as do the people pictured upright on decapitated feet. I’ll tell you a secret. While a particular photograph may not be good, it can be great if you crop it.
A picture, you may be thinking, is a picture. But, wait! This is about creative living, remember? If you use more than the definition of the word, you’ll have more than just a picture. You’ll have many pictures in one, if you use you cropping tool, which can be your fingers. Use your nose to wonder what perfume the pretty lady may be wearing, or picture the sound of the birds chirping the branches of the tree whose top you cropped.
Like pictures, the ideas of creative living have more than one view. An idea is not confined to the letters it forms. Within one picture, you have many, if you crop them right.
You’ll be surprised how many ideas can spring from one, if you set your senses to the task of cropping. Think about it.
8
Fearless Exploration
It’s more afraid of you than you are of it
When I was old enough to wonder about everything around me but too young for school, my father was stationed in an almost developed area of a base in Arizona. The yard around our house looked stark and dry, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover all kinds of critters hiding under rocks and between the folds of the prickly plants. My mother had already assured Brothers and me before our move that little animals and bugs and things were more afraid of us than we were of them, and she told us to go discover our world. If you pay too much attention to fear, it’ll get you. So, when you’ve set out to explore, there isn’t room in the knapsack for fear, so that needs to be left behind.
We were curious, Brothers and I, so naturally, we explored. LittleBrother and I would gather all the frightened creatures we could find, and of course, we’d want to know what they were. It was usually my mother who was home to say, “I think that’s a scorpion,” or some such. My parents added the Encyclopedia Britannica to our living room, and Mama showed us how to identify, by pictures, what the critters were. After those books came to our house, we didn’t need to disturb Mama so much when we found things. I could name most of the letters I saw, but neither LittleBrother (he was 15 months older than I, but younger than BigBrother) or I could read the words, but that was okay. I think we were always hoping to find a new critter, and curious if it’d bite, which didn’t hurt a lot when they did.
Mama used to say that we could make wonderful discoveries if we’d use everything God gave us. That includes our senses, and being curious. I think she counted seven senses, and considered learning a sense, too. But I’m only good at using five senses, but may have six if we’re counting intuition. And, I do like to learn. It’s not that my senses are better than any one else’s, I’m just aware of them.
As I grew older I would sometimes be amazed, watching a friend discover something new, but not have an interest to find out what it is. She would often be afraid. One time, out with a friend in a wooded area in New Jersey, we found what was obviously part of a jawbone, but with a double row of teeth. “I don’t have time for that,” was her response to the suggestion to find out what it was. She said it must be something eaten and discarded by the Jersey Devil, and left it at that. Unsatisfied, I took the jaw piece to a biology prof at the school I then attended. It turned out to belong to a fish. What it was doing in the wooded clearing, I don’t know. But, by exploring what it was, I learned what I didn’t know, and I could create more stories, if I wanted to, than just that the Jersey Devil did it. And I didn’t need to be afraid of the Jersey Devil, so it never bothered me.
After I was married and my children safe in school, I’d explore the pages of physics book, as I had been deprived of it in school. I didn’t think I could cut it when I began to cut glass, but I was successful at the task, encasing it in lead, creating all kinds of sparkling objects.
Even dark, dank, buggy places hid lots of things afraid of me. Spelunking, in the right cave, can be enlightening! The black is so thick in there, denser than the darkest night. With a flashlight, you can see little things in the puddles all around.
Put your senses to work. (Fear is a reaction, not a sense, so leave that one to things like being fearful of a roaring lion right in front of you, unless you know it’s trained.) Whether you have five senses or seven, or more, use them all. Take the time to find, recognize and identify the feel, sight, smell, sound and taste of things familiar to you, and things newly discovered. Go outside, stay inside. Let your senses explore. When you feel the finger of fear try to scratch its way in, tell it, and yourself, that it’s more afraid of you than you are of it.
9
Different Flavors of Variety
Variety is different
Creativity is the spice of life, it gives variety its flavor.
I’m a jane of all trades and master of none type of person. You probably think of that as bad, but to me, it’s just different. I have a few advantages over the person who lives her life with but one trade. I have more choices to explore, greater variety. That means I don’t get bored. I also have lots of areas needing improvement, and a world of information to explore. Without variety, and creative living to make use of it, Life would be boring. But there’s so much to Life, and I want to touch it all!
I’ve never been able to know everything, and I’ve been living all my life! The more I learn, the more I learn I don’t know. By the time I was five, as a child will, I had chosen several professions to match a variety of interests. I’d be a bug-ologist, or a fireman to do acrobatics atop a ladder. Maybe I was meant to be a sea captain, and ballerina, of course, to match my bedspread. I wanted to be a librarian, surrounded books, and an illustrator of children’s things.
Each profession I wanted to pursue those first years of my life before school, even for short periods of time, reflected the variety in my life. Brothers and I freely examined the nature around us. In Japan, Mama took us to see fireman acrobat, doing their acts one hundred feet in the air. (One hundred is a very large number to a three year old.) I had once been “a great big pirate girl, before I died and got born over”, until Mama told me it was time to live in this life and not pirate a ship. To keep me occupied before I was old enough for school, the base librarian let me stamp returned, borrowed books (we lived on an Army base). Then one day, she asked me to draw six inch paper dolls, maybe fifty of them, then color and dress them in clothing from their countries. These paper dolls were strung across the library as decoration, my first exhibit.
Because different wasn’t made to fuss over in our home, we just did things that were there to do, and made do with what we had. If we found that we didn’t have what was needed for a task, we’d use what we have.
The days my father was in the Army were days the military pay wasn’t much, barely enough for a family of five to live reasonably. There were more dustballs at the bottom of Mama’s pocketbook than money. Feeding the family came before new clothes, so we all wore mostly heirloom clothing. My family was financially challenged, but I thought we were rich. We had all we needed, after all, and all kinds of things around to keep us satisfied and busy.
For a week before paydays, our family meals would be interesting. Once, when my father was temporarily working at a dock, he brought home lots and lots of squid. He boiled some and battered some, baked some in tomato paste sauce and prepared others flame-broiled. That was the available meat, he said, but that was one thing I was glad Mama said I didn’t need more than a sample of. But mostly, my father would make interesting things when he’d cook, using whatever was available.
While substituting is a common event in the kitchen, there are lots of interesting combinations, and results, all over a day. After our garage was destroyed by wind, my father rebuilt it, and instead of buying glass, he made windows of bottles. And the exhaust of my first car (hey, I paid $100 for it!) was formed with empty oil cans, held together with duct tape.
How many ways to make a required art piece? I was awarded several ribbons for my high school art projects: not because they were so wonderful, but because I tended to do things that didn’t fit an established category. I made things that were different, varied even from my own work. My art instructor liked variety, so would enter my work in a category created specially for my piece. No competition, nothing beside it to make mine pale in comparison, just my finished project. I liked that, I’m not competitive. One benefit to being different: a class of my own.
Too often, I see people not do something because the don’t have the right thing, or miss seeing a substitute. Well, sometimes you need a specific thing, but most often, something else will do. Can’t keep the zipper on your luggage closed (now that we can’t use locks)? Try a twistie. Did your key ring break? Use a paper clip until you get a new one. Twisties and paper clips are handy little things for a quick fix. CDs hung in trees keep the birds away from maturing fruit. Tired of cutting crayons all one way? Slice them, and create an award winning piece.
Variety isn’t any good if you can’t find it, or are afraid to use it. Variety is as variety is allowed. Variety is different. It’s everywhere.
The next time you find yourself without a thing you need to remedy what you’re doing, look around the things you have, and wonder if it can be bent or stretched to suit your need. Maybe you can change your need to use what you have.
The next time you see something different, explore it. See how many flavors of variety you discover!
About this Author
that’s me!
Once upon a time, I was a little girl with a mother, father, and two older brothers. Our growing up years overflowed with opportunity and encouragement to explore everything. And we were instructed to to be creative with things that weren’t of immediate interest. Brothers and I explored more opportunities than most children know they could want, and my father’s wanderlust brought us to those far away places with strange sounding names. We’ve lived there, those far away places, and we sampled the cultures. My mother saw to it that we visited Paris on $7 a day, but money is not necessary for an experience of a lifetime, and we shared more than one.
My father was a whirlwind of vocabulary and imagination, and Brothers and I would have drowned in his waters of imagination without Mama. Mama had a steadying influence, as it were, and we survived to influence our children with what our neighbors can only call different.
As stated in one of the steps, I am not a master of anything, really. I’m still learning, and exploring new things to add the ever growing list of wonderful-tasting experiences. Because I want to know everything, I’m usually satisfied with one award, or achievement, for something, then I’ll go on to something else. Through the years I’ve received awards for some art projects created with leaded stained glass, crayon, needlepoint, wax and newspaper. One design, created on my first computer, my husband produced into a 8’x6′ 100-different-Hawaiian-grown-woods five-panel screen which received multiple awards. My very first public exhibit, in a library in Arizona before I began kindergarten, was opportunity born from a love of library life.
I have been an invited contributer to local magazines, and produce information for my websites. I once received an A for something I wrote in high school, but I don’t think you really want to know that. I write because my mind says to, and publish my rants privately. You can read about my wedding business at http://www.marriageinhawaii.com. You can read about my broken ankle at http://www.trimalleolarfracture.com, and join the resultant yahoo group, i-broke-my-ankle, created because I couldn’t keep up with the email.
Enjoy this glimpse of my family!
aloha!
linda butts 
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