11.08.25 - ‘Blue Apples’
I love looking at the clouds, and many songs have had their start by this cloud-gazing. So that’s where this project is starting!
The creative process is one that needs to be stewarded well, continually refined, and exercised daily. I’ve given myself a month-long challenge of accomplishing the same creative task every day. My goal was three-fold: write something, record something, share something.
Each day, I’ll take a picture of the clouds that day. Visually, I think this will be a rewarding outcome in the end!
I’ll also write something. I’m keeping the bar achievable, so it doesn’t need to be an entire song. It doesn’t even need to be a great start. But it must be something.
And then I’ll combine the visual with the auditory and have a creative piece to post. My calendar will be populated by these ‘cloud comps.’ Some song might come from it, it might be nothing more than getting all the bad ideas out. But the end result will be the continual honing of the creative discipline. And a cool calendar with clouds to look at!
THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY:
As I continued my thoughts from two days ago about ‘the glorious ordinary,’ I have determined play to be one of those things. It is a regular part of a child’s life, tragically absence from an adult’s life, and profoundly significant to both.
The more I play, the more I ought to praise. This is the heart of one of my favorite sections of literature. I really love the chapter of G.K. Chesterton’s book ‘Orthodoxy’ that’s called ‘Elfland.’ It about the beauty and significance of imagination and the complete reason of fantasy. I can’t say it better than G.K., so here’s some of his formative thoughts:
“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”
This is why I love playing with my nieces, who so effortlessly delight in repetition, because all it produces is more wonder with every pass. And as adults, we need to enter Fairyland to be reminded of what once struck us with wonder. To paraphrase G.K., when I play, I can pretend that apples are blue. And then when I return to the real world, I will marvel that God has made them red.
I wrote this song for my nieces, because they can’t read Chesterton yet, but they’ll listen to their aunt sing.
