When clients tell me they are stumped creatively, I send them a book. Here, read this. It will open your eyes. It will get you to remember the fun of words. Reading awakens a part of your imagination that tends to shut off when you aren’t required to actively engage. Even when watching an inspiring TV show or film, I often find that my brain is coasting. Rarely do we stumble upon a piece of art that makes us pause or think beyond what we are programmed to see. I suppose fiction can be this way, too. There are “junk” books, consumed purely for pleasure or to appease boredom.
A good story hits all of these marks, though: it stirs your mind, entices you through both the fantasy and realism, and makes you think far beyond what’s written on the page.
Here are excerpts from my literary go-to’s for when I need a creative boost:
Diane Ackerman
“It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”
―A Natural History of the Senses
--
Mary Oliver
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
--
Amy Hempel
“Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.”
― The Collected Stories
--
e.e. cummings
I Will Wade Out
i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will i complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
--
Carl Sagan
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” —Pale Blue Dot.
Happy reading, steemers!