When we stumbled on this image by the great Christoph Niemann at #abstractsunday, we thought: OMG, look at that fabulous doorway. What a vision that guy has! Why aren’t we all painting our doors in cleverm charming and unexpected ways?  How can we get ourselves to imagine more expansively?

And that got us thinking about the creative vision and where ideas come from.

That sent us to this lovely video by Andrew Norton about just that. Where Do Ideas Come From? features vastly different answers to the question from some seriously creative people, from David Lynch, Susan Orlean and Chuck Close to a couple of kids and some very brilliant folks whose names we don’t know. Seeing so many views of the creative process is at once liberating and inspiring; it let’s us imagine other ways of finding ideas. But there is no one way.  It’s unique and personal to each one of us.

 

We find its essential message to be an wonderful orientation to start the week:

Ideas and inspiration are everywhere, in the world and inside of us. We just have to notice them.

And often we do that by just getting down to work.

 

Possibility thinking. That’s our daily practice. But Emily Dickinson had an even better idea…dwell in possibility…

 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

 

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