Dream & delirium… constantly striving to stretch my perception, experience, understanding and point of view. These pages are some of my alternate takes to the routines of making-a-go of it as mom, imperfect domestic goddess, and worker bee.
In my former life (pre-Austin), I was a special collections/rare book librarian. In graduate school at Columbia U. I studied about books & printing history under Terry Belanger, the doyen of American rare book librarianship. I am drawn to books & printing as cultural force and as manifestations of the surge of ideas and ingenuity, creative/expressive impulses, and the building and morphing of knowledge that characterize our humanness, and as records of human experience and perception across time.
I was not a particularly confident rare book librarian. It is field for specialists, and I am hopelessly generalist in my vast fancies.
But I stay drawn to the thought that curiosity, creative expression, and a brain lust for “knowing” are fundamental to the “meaning” of our species’ existence.
Technology is just one way of answering the impluses to express, to learn, to know. Technologies spark, flourish, die. But these impluses remain.
So now, I have completed our three assigned projects, Make-a-thon and Project Numbers 1 (Book of Dreams) and 2 (Weight of Dreams). In all instances I developed a strong project idea in short time. I have never had a shortage of creative impulses — but acting upon those ideas, the follow through, has never been easy and, indeed, most go unrealized. The reason, by and large, is that I am externally driven (regrettably, sigh) and require the push of external deadlines and a structure as a motivation to action. But there are other factors: fear of failure and, not insignificantly, lack of access to resources (esp. technology resources like hardware, software… eg, good fast computer and digital toys.)
Actlab has provided an incredible push. The act of creating, the process of attempting to create (even when not fully reaching the idea as imagined) has been exhilarating. And unbelievably liberating — I have stretched in ways I have never stretched before. I am grateful, inspired, and freed — free to try new things, play with new ideas, in new ways, freed from perceived limitations, freed from fear of creative shortcomings.
Not that what I created was big or earthshattering… it was the ACT of creating, the process, not necessarily the end result. The ACT… actlab… I get it.
I am filled with gratitude and awe for Sandy and the talented cast of energetic students and actlabbies that make actlab a “sacred” space for creative experimentation.