The Saturday Morning Post: Compost and Creativity

Compost takes time to create, you pile in organic plant materials, control the level of water, let the bugs, and worms feed and garbage breaks down and creates rich and fertile compost. The raw materials of vegetable peels, lawn clippings, prunings, fallen leaves won't work as fertilizer until given time to compost. They have to have time to biologically and magically transform. You can speed the process of composting, but you can't skip it. 

The ideas that we use are artists and creatives also needs time to compost.  The inputs that we feed our creative beast with, morph in our brains into ideas we had no idea existed.  When we try to create based on what we just saw, read, heard, smelled or tasted, we create a copy of what we have experienced. Sometimes a very good copy, but still a duplicate of the works of others. When we give this input time to compost, to break down, and reconfigure in our creative spirits, we create our art, our work, our writing.  

Creating those copies may help us digest what we have experienced, practicing and developing our skills.  The wisdom of age, if there is such a thing, is really the product of long term input, composting in our minds to create our ideas. It takes time for our brains to find the connections between seemingly unrelated input, in the mash of composting we will find it. It takes time to make compost, the compost of creativity needs time. And creativity needs that compost. Keep adding to your compost pile this week.