5 Sept 2016

Welcome to my Narrow Shed


"Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind,
Into its narrow shed." - W.B.
Yeats 
 

 
I read this small stanza on a bus in County Cork, just three days after casting off my old English surname in place of a new and beautiful Irish one - O'Shea.

There is something delightfully honest about Yeats' poems.  They talk to us plainly.  You can almost smell the whiskey on the consonants, as if the old Irishman himself is leaning over and whispering it in your ear.

After reading these words, I actually laughed out loud.   It's such a very familiar sentiment.  And one I'm sure we all feel sometimes, when we are trying especially hard to create something.  It started me thinking about this struggle - namely what is the difference between Creating and Being Creative?  And which is more important?

What is Creating?  Making things is creating - drawing, singing, cooking...  Simply fabricating something that wasn't there before.

But what is Being Creative?   Being Creative is everything else we do when we are not making things.  That which feeds our imagination before we've even noticed.

Most of the time, only Creating is visible.  The physical process of making.  And so we tend to place all our value onto the end result.  Soon we feel like amateur magicians, trying to pull complete works out of a hat, without understanding how the trick works.

But art, just like everything else in the universe, does not come out of nothing.  It's Being Creative which is our galvanizing force.  The stuff of life.  That is where real magic happens.  That's what it takes to make something invisible come to life.


I found so much inspiration in ten blissful days of silence in the green rolling hills of Ireland with my new husband and my new name.  So - this blog is going to be me, not just me sharing my own projects, but sharing everything about the world that makes me want to create.  My passions, my interests and all the other important fripperies in life that delight, challenge and inspire in equal measures.

And in keeping with the spirit of the old poet, it's my mission to start from a place of honesty.  Or, as may be the case, restart from there.


To new beginnings! 
Katherine O'Shea.
 

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