Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed

This is my cat (she has passed on to the great cat heaven), true, but it's the only picture I have (without buying one) of a cat and they are on my mind.

Did you watch PLANET EARTH on Discovery channel last night? I loved the cats: snow leopard, puma, spotted leopard. Fantastic show. I highly recommend. It's on again next Sunday and you've got to see it. Next up, I've got to find a blue whale picture. There would be no room for words if I did, however.

We had a semi-relaxing weekend. I worked more than I should have and I feel it today. Very weary, but that's okay. I'll take it easy after some of this stuff gets done. I hope that attitude does me good when I head back to school next year.

I am rereading Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit and slowly beginning the process of teaching myself to study again. After 15 years, this will be interesting.

I really appreciate her point about habit, but more importantly, I sat and thought about her example of Mozart. Leopold Mozart was accomplished, not only in music, but in religion and politics and philosophy. He saw that his son Wolfgang was drawn to music (uh, if a 3-year-old begins to play his sister's harpsichord, I would say so!), and made sure that his son was taught and learned from the best musicians he could find. Really, Mozart's genius was because his father helped him, but after that, when Mozart was in his teens and twenties and wrote 27 symphonies that flopped, it was creative habit that gave him the 28th.

Tharp also includes example of Beethoven on his morning walks, a master chef who goes out to his herb garden and enjoys the varying scents and then in a rush of inspiration flies to his restaurant to create a dish, or a writer who gets up, ignores email (me!), and writes for an hour or two, no matter the quality. It's habit.

What's a habit you need to develop this week for your creative pursuits? It does not have to be big, or cost any money. Whether it be drawing a sketch, practicing one piece on an instrument, or digging up one flowerbed and planting seeds, it is within your grasp.

Go to it!

Have a good week.