Status Updates From Walking in This World: The ...

We must become creative about being creative.

By not reading this book on schedule, I think I might have missed something. I returned to it—specifically the chapter on encouragement—after finishing another book and found that it got me off the couch.

Doing creative work, “we need before, during and after friends” (190).

Ueland advocates for my liberation: “if you have a kind of cultured know-it-all in yourself who takes pleasure in pointing out what is not good, in discriminating, reasoning, and comparing, you are bound under a knave. I wish you could be delivered.” I have sniped.

Sandwich call: call a friend and tell of an artistic step that needs taking; call back to say’ “I did it,” or “mission accomplished.”

Assignment: for restlessness, visit a church, wilderness or Louis Vuitton store. The friction between identity and place may be what “home” in the Odysseus sense is about (187).

“Fear becomes a cue for prayer” (183). As my worst fears become reality, I sent out a poem about it: “Seating Charts.” If a poem is like a prayer because it “confesses” the truth, we surrender to consequences, to justice. As a pine once told me, “we are both blessed/to have made it this far/with anything to lose.”

Ll