a habit of seeing

This week, I’ve been reading The Gentle Art of Domesticity, a book I purchased in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It’s a book about the “gentle arts” of baking, knitting, quilting, and other comforting home-based pursuits. Now I don’t practice these gentle arts, but I am most definitely a homebody. I was drawn to the book with its hardbound weight, rich printed scent, and inspired photography. I was curious about the title, curious about how it might speak to the way I am trying to live these days. Bonus, it was on sale! It was just the souvenir I wanted from our happy day in Rehoboth Beach.

I’m still in the early chapters, but I am totally enjoying the structure of the book. It’s made up of little essays on the various joys of the author’s life, particularly those that arise out of living an inspired home life. The structure made complete sense after I read that the author, Jane Brocket, is a blogger. So that’s why each page feels like a blog entry, with thoughtful words and intimate photographs working side by side.

In the essay “A habit of seeing,” Brocket talks about collecting inspiration, being receptive to it, such that it becomes a way of seeing. I’d like to think that’s how I see the world; or at least, I strive to. I write down sentences and passages that make me think or move me; read poetry I can hardly understand but find simply wrenching; bookmark pages and photographs that are particularly arresting; and take photographs—of signs, nature, children, my own two feet, all sorts of things—in ways that express my own estimation of the subject. Sometimes I just take photographs to remember a particular feeling or color, or to see how the light affects the subject. I’m a hoarder, I suppose, of inspiring designs and thoughts and patterns and words and moments. And I’ve never really known what to do with this collection, if I am supposed to make something of it to be able to call myself truly creative. I know it feeds my work—in fact, this habit was also cultivated by the work I do, trained as we are to keep an eye for ideas and pegs that can spur fresh ways of styling and writing and designing pages—but beyond that, is it useful for anything else? Will it, say, lead me to produce a novel or a book of photographs? Something tangibly creative?

Brocket is reminding me that inspiration is inspiration. “We shouldn’t diminish our creativity,” she writes, “by despising the results of our inspiration, but instead celebrate and exploit the wonderful feeling of elevated energy and enthusiasm we experience when we feel inspired.” She continues, “For the more willing you are to let yourself be inspired, the more you can store away in your creative resources. This way, you can call on them when you have the time and inclination to turn the personal stash of colors, details, patterns, textures into something tangible. And it will be all the richer in meaning as a result of this habitual and highly individual accumulation.”

So there’s my answer. Relax. Enjoy the inspirations!

---