Hello.
I write about ideas, hope,
and the creative process.

blainehogan [at] me

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GOOD WORLD CREATIVE
CREATIVE THEOLOGY


Creative Life Q&A

For the last couple of months, I’ve been exploring this idea of Creative Life Office Hours. It has been a great joy to sit on the phone or on skype with people all over the world and chat about the life of a creative professional. Oftentimes the conversation drifts into more personal realms, which I find deeply humbling. I consider it a great honor to be allowed into any part of a person’s story.

I plan to continue to hold office hours in a limited way this fall (there are still a couple groups still scheduled to meet), but I thought in the meantime we could get some work done right here on the blog. (Thanks Promise for the great idea.)

If you have a question about ANY ASPECT of the creative life (process, heartache, failure, hope, staying sane, tools, mars hill grad school, etc.) PLEASE LEAVE YOUR QUESTION IN THE COMMENTS BELOW. I’ll be answering them over the next couple of days. I’m not a one man band, so what might be fun is if you would answer each other’s questions as well!

Ask away.

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Ahh…fall

Labor Day rarely feels restful to me.

For me it isn’t a day to lay out by the beach, or sit around and watch reality t.v. (although I often do these things on my day off). No, for me, Labor Day marks the beginning of possibility. I’ve always thought of the fall in this way and the first Monday in September merely gives me something tangible to hang my romantic hat on.

Fall has arrived (at least in the suburbs of Chicago). The air is cooling, we made our first batch of chili, and I can’t stop baking these blueberry muffins from Smitten Kitchen. Fall, more than any other time of year, feels like a true beginning. More than Christmas or the New Year, fall says, “Hey, want to make something? Want to learn something new?”

It must be all the schooling. 19 years of education have trained me that this is when I get my syllabus. Fall is when boxes of books from my Amazon wish list arrive at my front door; boxes full of new ideas. Fall is a season devoted to learning, growing, starting fresh, imagining a new future.

Creatively, I tend to start new projects now. It’s hard not to with new fashion lines coming out, new music being released, the Pantone colors are refreshed, and my boots, along with the plaid shirts I wear year round, are finally back in style. I feel like a whole new man again even if I didn’t buy a new wardrobe. (Here’s my secret: I hold onto to one or two items and wear them year round. Then when the season where they’re actually in style arrives, I look like a total genius.)

Fall is the time to start something new; try something new; learn something new.

It is my favorite time of year.

If you’re interested…sometime this week I encourage you to have a crack at my little trick* to start the fall off right.

*Bake yourself a batch of those muffins I can’t stop talking about, brew a cup of coffee, open a window to let that crisp breeze in, and write:

This fall…what will I make? What will I change? What will I hope for?

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Happy Friday Dance Party

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Past / Future / Present

Over the course of the summer I wrote a lot about being present. These writings eventually turned into a multimedia/performance art/spiritual direction piece for the Leadership Summit, which I hope to show you soon.

The piece was highly personal given that I live a mostly fractured existence alternating between regret about the past and anxiety about the future. The problem with these two stances is that each pull me out of the awareness of the present. If I’m wishing I had done better in the past and live there, I can’t be present. If I’m anxious about what the future will bring and live there, I’m also not present.

Last week I assigned an article by Margaret Wheatley to our creative team. You can and should read the whole thing here. In it she writes:

“All fear (and hope) arises from looking backward or forward. The present moment is the only place of clear seeing unclouded by hope or fear. The nineteenth century Tibetan master Patrul Rinpoche stated this perfectly: ‘Don’t prolong the past, don’t invite the future, don’t be decieved by appearance, just dwell in the present awareness.’”

This quote got me thinking of my grad school professor, Dan Allender. As the waves of the Puget Sound crashed just outside our classroom, he gave us one of the most profound explanations of how to actually live in the present I had ever heard. Instead of thinking of time as linear - Past / Present / Future - he asked us to think of as cyclical and out of order - Past / Future / Present.

Stay with me. Here’s how he would break it down…

However you see the Past is how you will imagine the Future, and however you imagine the Future is how you will live in the Present.

Think about that.

If I believe the things that hurt me in the Past will always do so in the Future, chances are good that I will live in the Present with fear. On the other hand, if I believe that the future holds something better or different than what occurred in past, I’m suddenly free to truly live in the present. I’m aware. I’m in the moment. I’m no longer afraid. My fear turns into love.

Past / Future / Present

Try it.

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My Little Ease - a bit of transparency

In his book, Telling Secrets, Fredrick Buechner describes a white tower with two rooms.

The first is a chapel on the second floor. It is a place of peace and respite. A silent and still place where one can breathe. The other room he calls, the Little Ease. The Little Ease is underneath the tower. It a tiny space measuring only four feet by four feet high. It is a dungeon created to press you in; designed so that you cannot fully sit, stand, or lie down. There is little hope in the Little Ease.

“The Little Ease is a place of torment, but if you live there long enough, it eventually becomes home. If you manage to escape it, where do you go next, who do you become next? If after all those years you get well, what do you do with your wellness? The responsibility is staggering. The freedom is staggering.”

I’ve debated for sometime now about talking, really talking about my personal life on this blog. Stick to the basics - ideas, hope, and the creative process - I’ve thought. But the more I write, and read, and contemplate on the creative process, the less I believe it to be about becoming a good artist and rather much more about becoming a whole person.

In my opinion, part of becoming a whole person is sharing where you’ve been. Part of escaping the Little Ease is talking about it.

Mine began to take shape around this time roughly twenty years ago. Late summer’s in Minnesota are hot, sweaty things. You could practically swim through the musty air that would settle over our duplex dominated, latch-key filled, suburban neighborhood. Hanging in the heavy air that summer was something that has hung over me ever since.

That September a couple of older boys took turns showing me some things about sex they shouldn’t have. Those boys handed me the bricks and I then I slowly built the walls. By the time I was 18, the abuse had led to addiction. The entrance was sealed and I was trapped.

Over the course of the last 10 years, through much work and even more grace, the walls of my Little Ease are beginning to crumble, and everyday it seems I’m somehow escaping this tiny space with my life. My body is becoming whole again. I can feel my heart slowly beating itself back together. The dreadful cuts from years of pressing myself against the walls are starting to heal.

As I make my way out of my Little Ease, I’m struck by Buechner’s warning: wellness and freedom do not come without strings. The responsibility wellness carries truly is staggering. For now that you are free, what will you do with your freedom?

Near the beginning of the third act in the film Shawshank Redemption, two characters are released from prison - Brooks Hatlen and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding. Brooks, the older of the two men, has been behind the bars of Shawshank for most of his life, and when he is finally released he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Over the years the prison walls became his home. In the end, the freedom he feels outside these walls consumes him and he commits suicide.

Red, on the other hand, instead of being overcome with the massive weight of freedom, heads to a remote beach that his friend, and our hero, Andy DuFrane, had told him about earlier in the story. Andy had described for Red the beach, and the sun, and the salty air. Andy translated, in no uncertain certain terms, what freedom would feel like so that when Red was released he would have a compass to guide him. The difference between Brooks and Red is that when released from the Little Ease, Red had a picture of what freedom looked like, while sadly, Brooks did not.

All good art (and life, for that matter) should function much in the same way Andy’s words did for his friend. It should seek to tell the truth in dark places and help those who find themselves trapped in the Little Ease to imagine what freedom will feel like. The trick is, you can’t talk about either place until you’ve been there yourself.

This is why I do what I do.

I write, create, and imagine new things in an attempt to remind my friends and myself where we have been, and also to help us both imagine an better way to live. I will continue to share my Little Ease’s with you because I simply cannot help it. I can no longer disintegrate my personal and artistic life, for they are one in the same.

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Start with a Core

“So figure out your epicenter. Which part of your equation can’t be removed? If you can continue to get by without this thing or that thing, then those things aren’t the epicenter. When you find it you’ll know. Then focus all your energy on making it the best it can be. Everything else depends on that foundation.” - Rework, Jason Fried

I wrote about this some for my talk at ECHO and then yesterday when Adam Lehman commented, I thought I should dig a little deeper.

On Monday I wrote about how we should distill our work until we just have the core. But the question Adam was asking was, what if you never had a core to begin with?

Oftentimes our organizations move so fast we need to decide on the “what,” or the “how,” before we’ve taken the appropriate time to figure out the “why.”

I’m not naive enough to think that we should never take action until we fully know the direction we’re headed or all the “why’s” before beginning this venture or that. However, I do know the painful reality all too well of having to reverse engineer a core value only after the “what’s” and “how’s” are all in place.

The solution?

Whenever possible, begin at the center. Begin at the core. Find that thing that moves you deeply and work out from that place. Start with the essential bits first and you’ll save yourself a ton of head and heartache. Doing so will ensure that when you do begin the work of distilling you’ll actually reveal a lovely piece of work, instead of an empty table.

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Removing the Junk

Jumping back in after a few days off can be terrifying.

What did I miss? Was I missed at all? How many emails!?

Nevertheless, I’m back on the grid and excited to share some of the thoughts I gathered while I was away. I read a lot. I wrote some. I tried being quiet as much as I could stand.

An idea that kept resurfacing the past few days in my reading and writing is something I’m continually attempting do.

“It’s the stuff you leave out that matters. So constantly look for things to remove, simplify, and streamline. Be a curator. Stick to what’s truly essential. Pare down things until you’re left with only the most important stuff. Then do it again. You can always add stuff back in later if you need to.” - Rework, Jason Fried

We want our projects to speak to as many people as possible, so we add. Layer after layer, we add. Thinking that the more we do, the more attractive the project becomes. Let’s make it bigger, better, slicker. Let’s make it’s reach wide and broad. The more layers, the better, yes? The more people, the better, right?

This is where you should start, in fact.

When you’re beginning something, blue sky the hell out of it. There are no bad ideas. Spitball your heart out till the day is long gone.

Unfortunately, this also where most people end. A table full of “more,” suggesting to the untrained eye that the project is done.

I have never been a fan of such a process.

More, in my opinion, is simply more. More junks things up, more than it doesn’t. More doesn’t clarify, it just is. In fact, it’s possible that more may be getting in the way of saying exactly what it is you want to say.

Pairing down your projects (manuscripts, blogs, designs, songs, mission statements) to their absolute essential bits, is the mark of truly mature work.

Your assignment this year: Edit. Edit. Edit. Edit. Edit. Edit.

You must find what is essential or your amazing message will be lost under a pile of more.

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Going Off the Grid

I’m a little dry. I need to refresh. So…I’m going off the grid.

After a long few weeks preparing for the Summit and with new projects just about to take shape, I’m in desperate need of a late-summer retreat. Thankfully, M and I, along with some of our creative team, are heading to Cape Cod for a few days to breathe, connect, re-create, and celebrate our two year anniversary!

As such, I will be going off the grid until the middle of next week.

No email. Blog. Twitter.

I didn’t want to leave you stranded so I’ve complied a late summer list of books I’ve read/are reading and some music to tide you over until I return. Please add to this list what you’re reading and listening to as well!

In these closing days of summer I hope you will take time to turn off the tele, open a book, reflect, imagine, breathe, listen, and drink a final margarita (they simply don’t taste as good after Labor Day if you ask me).

I look forward to connecting soon.


BOOKS

MUSIC

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We are already the most overinformed, underreflective people in the history of civilization.   - Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey, Harvard psychologists
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