The Garden of the Mind ~ Part One

• July 25, 2008
  6 Comments // Creativity

In the garden of the mind, creativity is something that needs to be tended to with constant love and care. The ability to come up with an idea out of thin air is a myth — it just never happens. The ideas come from somewhere in our minds as a mix of past experiences, opinions and all that which is creative that has been planted in the soil of our memories, dance and play and mix together. In the first part of this two part piece, we’ll explore intuition and where it stems from.

The development of your intuition can be broken down into two parts:

1. A constant longing to absorb knowledge, be it visual, audible or written. The first, for me and I’m willing to bet most of you, being the most important.
2. Asking questions and making as many marks as you can. Of these marks, it is the wrong ones you’ll learn from the most, so we can’t be afraid of doing wrong over and over – as long as we do not make the same mistake twice.

Let’s visualise our creativity and intuition as something akin to a garden or landscape. The earth is our minds and all that lays upon it are our memories. Before this land is worth roaming, we need to fill it with as much life as possible, otherwise it’ll be a rather fruitless trip. Luckily, the seeds we need are easy to find and plant.

Seeds of Creative Thinking

These seeds hide in everything around us, so make sure you see as much as possible, not letting anything get by without a second glance, under a different light and from another angle. From a poster that stops you dead in your tracks to the pattern on the sweater of the person in front of you, the seeds to your garden are every where. Try to find that something special in everything and you’ll have a beautiful garden of the mind to venture within. Every song, every book, every movie. Every vain on a leaf, every spot on an animal and every swirl of dust dancing in the wind holds something special for someone.

Every swirl of dust dancing in the wind
holds something special for someone