The Gap

I found this video Ira Glass (of This American Life fame) via the blog of Danny Gregory (an artist and inspirer extraordinaire).

In this podcast, Ira Glass talks about "the gap" between the "good taste" you have in your field of creative passion and the kind of work that is produced when you're a beginner at the craft.  His solution to close the gap: "Do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.…It's only through producing a large volume work that you will be able to close the gap." It's awesome advice.

I know that I sometimes get impatient with wanting my work to match the vision I have for it.

Yet I also know that I do get better with practice — be it my writing, my art, or being the best person I can be. And I know that I help my practice along when I have a regular practice in which to, well, practice. 

Part of the reason I love Julia Cameron's morning pages (three longhand pages of whatever you want to write, written first thing in the morning) is that it develops the muscle for practice, for producing pages no matter how you feel and in all kinds of weather.

I love that in a month of doing morning pages you fill a notebook. It's a visual reminder how a small but steady practice can produce a volume of work. One page at a time. One day at a time.

Tell me, what practice could you put in place to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be?

P.S. Here are the links to the other parts (part 3 is above) of this storytelling podcast by Ira Glass:

part 1

part 2

part 4

Flowers in Motion

Thanks to my fascination today with the Titan Arum, I starting looking for other time lapse photography of flowers. Watching a flower bloom in time lapse is pure poetry to me. I loved the shots in Planet Earth. I rewinded and replayed again and again just to take it all in. (I couldn't find a direct clip but this trailer has a few examples from the series.)

And I just found a whole collection of other flower blooming time lapses here. This one (embedded below) is a bit long (almost 10 minutes) but stunningly breathtaking.

I am reminded of Slyvia Plath's poem Tulips: 

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

and

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat

Her tone is suspicious and malicious. I don't share that view, but I get that flowers have their own life to them — and it is their aliveness that speaks to me in these videos.

Tell me, what do you see that connects you with the poetry and beauty of life?

Flowering Fridays: Titan Arum

All day I've been watching the live video feed from the Milwaukee Public Museum, eagerly awaiting the blooming of its Titan Arum.

Yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story on the front of its metro page about this notable feat, which was (in truth) the first time I had ever heard of a Titan Arum.

It wouldn't seem that the blooming of a flower is that newsworthy, but the Titan Arum is no ordinary flower.

Creative Commons Image of another Titan Arum by Imma_Thai@MORGUEFILE.COM

It's a rare plant (only 140 known worldwide). (Natively, it's found on the edges of rainforests in Sumatra.) It only blooms once every six years. And when it does finally flower, its blooms are the largest in the world — up  to eight feet tall. 

The Titan Arum — also called "corpse flower" — is also noteworthy for its awful stench (the Journal Sentinel article described the scent as somewhere between "poop" and "rotting flesh, roadkill.") It needs to project such a smell in order to attract the carrion-eating beetles and flesh flies that pollinate it.

It looks like Milwaukee's plant will bloom sometime in the next day. The hope is that the bloom will be the world's largest. It has been growing an inch an hour the past few days; museum officials are hoping for a 10-foot-tall flower, which would be a world-record.

I love that the botanist who has been caring for this plant the past six years has talked to the plant. (I'm convinced the reason my orchids bloom so well for me is that I talk lovingly to them.) "I'm not telling you what I said to it, other than I encouraged it to grow," said Milwaukee Public Museum curator of botany Neil Luebke in the Journal-Sentinel story.

In the Titan Arum, I see the power of blooming big…the power of boldy putting out your intention for what you want to attract…the power of encouraging words…and (this is a big one for me) the power of patience and timing. 

While I don't want to smell like the Titan Arum, I do want to bloom big in my life. I also want to cultivate the patience and trust that the seedlings I'm planting now will grow tall and proud in time — even if it takes many years to see the full fruit.

And I thank this story about the Titan Arum for the reminder that while I'm waiting for the flowering, I'll keep reminding myself to "grow, grow."

Tell me, where in your life do you need to practice patience with the process of growth?

P.S. If you are interested in more on the Titan Arum, check this time lapse video of a recent blooming or these photos of the life cycle of the Titan from bloom to fruit. 

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they have to teach us about flowering fully in our life.

Update on Friday, October 31, 2008 at 8:15PM by Shannon Jackson Arnold

I actually think this is the better choice if you want to watch the time lapse video of a titan arum blooming. (See next post for more floral time lapse-goodness.)