Theme Thursday #14: 8.27.09

It’s Theme Thursday, and this time the Theme is Illumination–growth through inspiration.

Illuminated manuscript from bornemania.com

Illuminated Mind is a thoughtful blog that’s well-written, and longer than most. Rare to find both to today’s culture of microblogging. Jonathan is an iconoclast, but his blog on the commitment needed to start our own revolution is a good read.

There is something about infrared photography that is compelling and other-worldly. You can see a collection of 50 infrared photos here.

Polyvore is a site that lets you make an instant collage or a visual dream board. While at first blush, it looks like it’s all about clothing, start with the background and words and you’ll discover you can create quite a statement that’s not about fashion. If you are a fashionista, you will also have fun.

If you’d rather make your own vision board with photographs and alter them, you can find free photos and textures at Image*After.

The moon has a powerful call to us. It was the original timekeeper, and it still sets our tides. If you want to check on the phase of the moon, or put the information on your website or blog, you can do so at Moon-Phases Calendars.

You can join in on Theme Thursday: post three links to sites you love or blogs you follow. You can do it on your site or in comments here.

Five Most Recent  Theme Thursdays:   * * * Creative Play 8/20/09 * * *  Creative Play 8/15/09 * * *   Creative Play 8/6/09 * * * Creative Play 7/30/09 ***Creative Play 7/23/09 * * *

—Quinn McDonald is a life- and certified creativity coach. She teaches people how to write and give presentations. She also  manages four journals that travel the world.

A (tiny) space of your own

This gallery contains 1 photos.

No matter how small and cramped your living quarters, you need a space to call all your own. It’s a sacred space you keep for your dreams, your hopes, the tending of your creativity. That space becomes your spiritual and … Continue reading →

Showing Up on TV With Dreams

On this Thursday, July 10, I’ve been invited to appear on Arizona Midday, a show on the local NBC Affiliate. The smart thing would be to watch it once or twice, but I don’t have a television, and I’m working on most days at 1 p.m. when the show runs.

The reason I was invited is that I’m teaching a course at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on Dream Journaling. The course came from some research that started as an interest and developed into a keynote speech, “Daydreams, Nightmares and the Power of the Imagination.” I’m a professional speaker, and most speakers choose a topic and specialize. Most smart speakers choose big topics like communication or life/work balance, something they can tailor to many situations.

I chose something I was interested in, something I could feed on intellectually, spiritually and artistically. Something that would change as I learned more, and push in front of me in wonder. Dreams. What they mean, they symbols they bring, how to interpret them. How popular it will be as a speaking topic remains to be seen. Personally, I think more corporations ought to spend time daydreaming (there’s a link at the bottom so you can learn how) because daydreaming and night dreaming are both respect ways to solve problems.

The jar of stars

What I like most is that interpretation is individual. No sense looking up dream symbols in books and curving your thoughts around what your dreams are “supposed” to mean. You don’t get your life explained to you in symbols. Life is not Bingo, where picking the right number lines up a win. Dreams are personal, deep symbols that can be interpreted in different ways. You have to figure it out. You might be wrong, but won’t know it. You might be right, and still not know it. That’s the mystery of symbols. And life.

Back to the TV appearance. It’s a 3 to 5 minute segment, and I have to stuff it full of content. Not only because that’s what I do–as a writer, content is my life–but because I am neither blond, attractive, slender or young enough to have the camera focus on me. I have to bring visuals. It’s hard to bring in a dream.

So now I’m honing down the material to three interesting minutes. What do I focus on? How Hannibal dreamed that the way to attack Rome was to use elephants and bring them across the Alps? That would have been a really hard symbol to accept. How the Hebrew word for “dream” is a homonym for “health”? Should I demo–without practice–how the same symbol could be totally different for different people?

It’s only three minutes, and yet, it is a whole three minutes. Time for a dream to develop.

–Image: “Jar of Stars,” collage by Quinn McDonald

–Read “10 Steps to Creative Daydreaming”

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach who has never dreamed of being on TV, but is about to do it anyway. See her work at QuinnCreative.com