Creativity must have a place.
It might be a private place such as your desk or even a pillow on the floor of your home. It might be a third place, away from home and office--perhaps, a coffee house or a bookstore. It might even be on a road trip "with no particular place to go," or on a kayak on a primitive Southern bayou.
For me, a sense of escape often fosters creativity.
I grew up in Lynwood, once an idyllic suburb of Los Angeles. We lived in a modest Spanish-style home, built in 1930. It was the kind of home you'd associate with early twentieth-century Southern California. It had thick walls and arched windows and stenciled beams and spacious rooms and clay roofing tiles and a beautiful, enclosed porch with a small garden courtyard that led to the heavy wooden front door.
And it had a sideyard.
The sideyard, I understand in hindsight, was my first real creative place of escape.
The sideyard was protected by gates in the front and in the back. It was a narrow, landscaped area between our house and the house of our neighbor, the reclusive and mysterious widow, Mrs. Birdsall.
Word among the kids in the neighborhood was that she kept her husband's ashes in a bottle on her mantle, penance we assumed, for we were fairly certain she had killed him. She would occasionally--when not reprimanding us for stepping on her lawn--give my playmates and me candy. We accepted it graciously, but without hesitation carried it home and disposed of it, confident it was rife with poison.
There was an empty and underused, tiled and covered patio in the sideyard about halfway back that opened to our dining room. The patio had thick stucco walls about chest high. The patio often served as a ship's bridge and I, of course, the captain. Only later did I learn I could have been an admiral and still pilot the ship.
Past the patio, the foliage grew more dense and precipitous as the lawn morphed into a narrow, partially-buried stone path that led to the back gate. Among the lush vegetation were two hibiscus trees with beautiful pink and yellow flowers. The trees shaded this make-believe, South Pacific island where G.I. Joe and me would patrol the damp, dark jungle. Sometimes, when I felt daring, I'd reach up and pluck a flower from the hibiscus trees. I'd tenderly remove it from its protective calyx, and plunder the sweet nectar of the bees at the bottom of the flower.
It was in the sideyard that I first recall discovering my imagination. It was my first creative place. The first of many where, to this day, I have found inspiration.
Where's yours?
What criteria do you seek in a place of creativity?
Have you set apart a place that is exclusively for creativity? What measures do you take to sanctify and maintain that space?
Do you have a creative toolbox you can take with you on escapes? What is, or what would be, in your creative toolbox?
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