Ideas, sketches, drafts, notions, hints, and creative niggles are the butterflies of our artistic lives. They flutter into view and thrill us with their color and promise. Suddenly, the world is alight and shimmering with beauty.
But how quickly those delicate wings can flutter away!
How many times have I, bone tired, lain in bed reciting the words of a poem that has just visited me like a night spirit, telling myself that it’s safe to surrender to sleep and that I will remember it in the morning?
Goodbye, new poem.
Because of the many butterflies I’ve let slip away, I’m more passionate than ever about our tools and systems to capture them. Unlike a traditional butterfly net, though, these tools and systems actually keep them alive where they can be fed and flourish. Here are the ones I rely on:
1. A battalion of notebooks, large and small. I don’t go anywhere without a pen and notebook. I always carry a small notebook in my pocketbook, and I often add an oversized, soft-covered Italian notebook where I can let loose, draw, doodle, mindmap, and write to my heart’s content (EcoQua by Fabriano in the 8.25 X 11.7 size: http://www.dickblick.com/products/fabriano-ecoqua-notebooks/). I carry my journal, too. And I’m wild about Levenger’s Circa line and keep several Circa notebooks going for different projects.
2. The voice recorder on my iPhone. With this one tool, I can work anywhere. I use it to capture ideas for whatever I’m writing. I use it to capture melodies and lyrics. I use it to keep me sane when there is no musical instrument available but my own voice and an empty stairwell. Even if for some reason I am caught without a notebook, I can still move forwards with my projects as long as the voice recorder is handy.
3. GarageBand on my iPad. This tool has changed my life. I am not a tech-savvy person by a long shot, but this tool is so easy to use that it has made me bolder, freer, and more wildly productive than I would be without it. I’ve recorded a couple hundred songs, drafts, well-wishing songs, and student songs on it. I get an idea and just hit record. I revise the idea and record it again. Here’s an example, warts and all, of a little song-ling that hit me one morning while I was whipping up my morning smoothie:
You can hear me rather laboriously figuring out the melody on the piano (just to be sure I captured it right) and then finding a sequence of chords to arrange around it. You can hear me change beech tree to birch tree. You can hear me try out the sequence a few times until I sort of found its groove.
I hear so much life and happiness in it – an artist in flow. No, it’s not a completed song by a long-shot, but here it is – a butterfly in the hand, as it were. Now I can see what it wants to become next.
A dragon? Maybe!
I feel such affection for these tools. They are my collaborators, my trusted scribes and creative Sherpas. And favorite of the metaphors: butterfly sanctuaries.
How about you? Have you built welcoming resting places for your butterflies to alight?
Here’s the best reason to do so:
The more we attend to our butterfly sanctuaries, the more we fill them with nectar and light and safe places to land, the more butterflies flutter into our lives!
