the stimuli all around them. They notice the unusual and make connections. For instance, while I was on the phone with Emmy-nominated actress and jewelry designer C. C. H. Pounder, she commented, “I'm talking to you right now and three hummingbirds zoomed by the window, and it was almost like they stood there in mid-motion, posed, and said, ‘Hello.’ As that vision comes, I think, ‘Wouldn't they be great in the back of a painting or on a piece of jewelry?’ So it's just a little flash, but I'll remember it.”
When I interviewed harpist, musician, composer, and singer Deborah Henson-Conant, she had been up all night composing. I asked her how she could do that, and she explained, “When I'm not in the ‘all night’ mode, I can't even imagine doing it. But the minute I need to work that way, I can suddenly do it. Sometimes I do it because I'm on a deadline, like when I wrote my first scores to debut with the Boston Pops, and the adrenaline gets me through. Other times I feel like a scientist working all night in my laboratory. At those times, it's not ‘work,’ it's exploration and discovery, and it's nearly impossible to stop once I catch the scent of what I'm trying to express. Composing, for me, is putting the sounds together so they have meaning, so they speak for my heart. My mind speaks to me in stories, but my heart speaks in music, and it's music that adds the dimensions of color, emotion, sensation, mood, and movement to the stories.”
Deborah recalls a life-changing experience that occurred at age ten, when she first heard a piece by Claude Debussy: “It can't have been the first piece of classical music I ever listened to, but when I heard La Mer playing on the radio one day, I was so overwhelmed emotionally that I was really incapacitated. I remember I could not get close enough to the stereo. When my parents came home, I had actually crawled underneath it, under its little feet, and was lying there sobbing. I remember feeling like a craven animal; it was like needing drugs or something.” In this moment, Deborah discovered the power of music to move her profoundly both emotionally and physically. Her life ever since has been the pursuit of this rapture.
Stress management consultant and humorist Loretta LaRoche uses strategies to create and stimulate new routines. Loretta is not just funny. Her humor teaches people to stop “awfulizing” and “catastrophizing” the unimportant things in their lives and to quit stressing themselves needlessly. As a result, she finds an endless array of material in the everyday: “I'll tell you what really gets me going. I walk a lot. I find that when I'm taking a walk, sometimes I'll burst out laughing because something will just hit me. I also get a lot of new stuff when I'm actually doing a talk, and I do what I call my ‘Oprah’ portion, where I ask people to tell me their stressors. And that gives me a whole new arsenal of material. I'll do a little repartee with people and feed them back what they're saying, and then we'll add to it. Because the whole idea of what I'm trying to promote is to exaggerate the very thing that disturbs you. Also, being out in nature certainly stimulates my creative bent. And then I try to be alone as much as I can. I really feel that's sacred time for me. I get up early, I sit in my chair in the morning, and have my coffee, reflecting on what stirs my creativity. And I read voraciously.”
This ability to be receptive through the five senses is fueled by passion and curiosity. Writer, photographer, and stone sculptor Maureen Murdock talks about this communication with the medium: “The way I work with photography is that I'm responding to the images I see in nature, isolating them, and then pulling out what I see. I may see a feature in a stone that you might not notice until it's printed in my photograph. So, it's always a kind of looking—maybe a way of saying it is that I am looking for the nature spirits. As a stone sculptor, too, I'm trying to find the face in the rock, or what the stone has to offer. A lot of my ideas come in dreams, but what inspires me most is looking at other people's art and nature.”
The natural world is often a source of inspiration for creative women. Multitalented designer Diane Ericson describes her own alliance with the power of nature: “I've been making things since I was a tiny kid. I pretty much lived in the canyon behind my house. I feel like the best thing that happened to me in my childhood was that I got left alone—not left alone physically, but left alone to be who I was and explore what was important to me. So I really got to be in my own rhythm most of my childhood. I would sit for hours and watch this tiny plant struggling to come around the edge of a rock and make its way into the world. I feel like I learned everything I ever needed to know living in that canyon.”
Nature has been for me, for as long as I can remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.
—LORRAINE ANDERSON, AUTHOR
Nature has always been an inspiration for me too. I was lucky to grow up near an “enchanted forest” with a web of streams under the pine trees, as well as a nearby polliwog pond set among miles of rocks with caves to climb into—perfect settings for the imaginative escapades of a young girl and her neighborhood playmates. While we occasionally puffed a cigarette in one of those caves, mostly we acted out dramas. Alone, I relished the wonders of the seasons and felt connected to the Earth. I spent many joyful hours being calmed by the utter stillness and beauty of my pine forest and celebrating spring with the birth of the baby frogs. These places were essential anchors for me back then, just as painting on a deserted Nauset Beach on Cape Cod has become one more recently.
Many of the women I interviewed for this book remarked on the importance of daily walks and gardening. Fashion designer Sigrid Olsen says, “I can't separate the grounding of creativity from that of the person. And what I do to stay centered is pretty much connected to the outdoors. I've gotten away from it because I've been traveling a lot, but I do a power walk outside every morning. Nature is the most grounding influence in my life. In good weather, I try to be outside as much as possible. I live in a beautiful area and I travel to lovely places. I spend a lot of time in California by the ocean and in the hills. If I lived in New York City all the time, I don't think I'd be able to be as balanced as I am.”
Tranformational guide and coach Marilyn Veltrop says that being in the garden, walking in the woods, or walking on the beach profoundly influences her creative process. In her dissertation on the transformational journeys of business leaders, Marilyn says, “I had numerous instances where I would go out on a meditative walk in nature and sit with a question that I was not clear about. And I would get wonderful responses in short order.”
A big stone on a deserted beach is a motionless thing, but it sets loose great movements in my mind.
—JOAN MIRÓ, PAINTER
For example, when I was pondering how many people I wanted to interview for my study, I found myself drawn intuitively to pick up this little branch on the path with eight side branches on it. Eight has always been a significant number for me, and this was further evidence that I had the right number. I also find myself out in the garden weeding and realizing that it is a metaphor for what needs to happen in my work.”
This ability to sense and be receptive to our environments stokes the creative process. “You have to be sponge-like,” says Carmella Yager, artist and teacher at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, “so you cultivate a rich inner life—because you are going to transmit things through yourself with your own vision, or at least try to. Having the interior freedom to be clear about what is going through your filter takes a lot of sorting, examination, reflection, and time, time, time. It seems to me that there has to be room for puttering—time for just feeling and inhaling what comes in. And that's different than ‘wasting time,’ and it's important for us to recognize the difference and not be in such a hurry with our grand scheme.”
Taking Time to Capture Your Ideas
If you are out of touch with your inspired self, making a date to connect opens the window. In the wise words of acclaimed writing teacher Brenda Ueland, in her 1938 book, If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit: “Inspiration comes very slowly and quietly. Say that you want
