Seeding Our Imagination

  

SEED PODS LiDoña Wagner 2022

Terry Bergdall

Three songs on my playlist are about being awake on life's journey and taking an affirmative relationship to the realities one encounters. 

 

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

Kurt Elling

Album: The Questions

 

In the final verse, after describing many troubling encounters, his crucial point is to notice and pay self-conscious attention to it all:  "I'll know my song well before I start singin'."

 

I Can See Clearly Now

Holly Cole

Album: Don't Smoke in Bed

 

It is as if she's proclaiming, "this is precisely where I should be, and I am extremely grateful for it." It strikes me as courageous. I find her delivery of this song to be profoundly inspirational.

 

Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen

Album: Live in London

 

There are no rose-colored glasses in this song. "Our love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken 'Hallelujah'." But "hallelujah" none-the-less and all the more powerful because of its clear lucidity with wide open eyes. 

Reawakening the Muse Within

TIFFANY SHLAIN is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, animation, video, and performance. Her advice for those looking to make a career in the arts is relevant for all of us.

 

Shlain’s feminist history tree ring, Dendrofemonology
is at the center of her new solo exhibition, 
Human Nature, at SHACK15 in San Francisco. 

See as much as you can. You are a sponge to absorb every idea and thought you can then build on and reference as you create something that only you can bring to life. And like anything, you must focus and home in on your craft. I believe everyone is creative and just needs an environment to foster that creativity and focus. So see and create as much as you can!

 

And one other key piece of advice that I think is the special sauce to all of this: One day a week, turn off your phone and all your screens and look instead to what is around and inside you. I have been doing this practice for 13 years, and my day without screens is literally the day all the best creative ideas come to me.

 

 

From Winter 2022 volume of CLIO
The Magazine of the National Women’s History Museum
with photos courtesy Tiffany Shlain. Tiffanyshlain.com/art