An Ordinary Life

In this hyped age of superlative lifestyles flaunted online by so-called “influencers,” people are duped into thinking it is normal to live such ostentatious lives. But as successful artist and bestselling author Austin Kleon suggests, “You do not need to have an extraordinary life to make extraordinary work. Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life.”

And whether or not we aspire to live “creative” lives, we all can find meaning in the dailiness of life, including our routines, hobbies, and relationships. Former monk Thomas Moore admits, “I imagine life not as an ambitious quest, but as an anti-quest, a search for the ordinary and unexceptional.” None of which is to suggest we are to simply coast through life with no aspirations, but our contentment never comes from comparison with others.  

As I wrote in an earlier post titled A Quiet Life, one scriptural admonition actually is to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” While “quiet” is not necessarily synonymous with “ordinary,” both often contribute toward a meaningful life “because worldly ambition is grossly overrated, not to mention misdirected.” So, one means to personally experience an ordinary life is to examine what constitutes a meaningful life in one’s estimation.

“I lead by what older standards might well be considered an ordinary life, and yet by the movement of our times this life has become extraordinary,” writes W.D. Wetherell in North of Now: A Celebration of Country and the Soon to Be Gone. “A walker in a sedentary age; a lover of quiet in a century that has the volume turned up full blast; a reader in a visual age; a writer in one that is increasingly aliterate.” Sounds good to me.

One Thousand Words

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that is so then I’ve captured a library’s worth of images in the past several years, namely with one or the other of my iPhones, as that is the camera that I typically carry on my person. Regular readers may be interested to learn that I am in the process of selling the vintage Canon A-1 film camera that I used to take black and white photos, as I am concentrating on digital images. 

And this past summer I compiled a collection of several favorites into the book pictured above aptly titled Maine Coast. The photos were captured up and down the coast of Maine during the past half dozen years we’ve lived here. And it features a mixture of ships, lighthouses, and other nautical sites naturally associated with life here in coastal Maine. Living so close to the ocean has been creatively inspiring and one of the results is this book.

One of the byproducts of minimalist living is that it helps to prune away the detritus of life and thus frees one to pursue such creative passions. I for one have become known as the family archivist over the years due to my practice of photographing and/or videoing various family functions. And while folks are not always enthused when asked to pose for a photo, I am naturally the one turned to at weddings, funerals, and other events. 

I am in the process of putting the finishing touches on my new photography website so stay tuned for more about that. And I will be sharing more soon about our upcoming move from the keeper’s cottage here at the Marshall Point lighthouse. It is said that all good things must come to an end and with a proposed rate hike of about fifty percent at the upcoming expiration of our three year lease Linda and I are moving onto the next spot on our journey. 

Why Beauty Matters

Linda and I recently attended the lecture of a former philosophy professor addressing our group of fellow artists of faith with the thesis “Why Beauty Matters.” It was a thought-provoking message about the meaning of beauty and its intrinsic value in our increasingly fraught times. 

One of the more salient points that resonated with me was the statement that “nature introduces us to beauty” for we are surrounded by it here. Of course, as was stressed at our gathering, the original author of beauty is God, without whom there would be no creativity.  

The above photo is from our front porch but intentionally omits the usual focal point of the lighthouse here. I snapped it during our first snow of this new year and it captures for me the beauty of the place apart from the iconic light itself. 

As photographer and author Murad Sayen writes in Maine: The Home Place, “There have been times, standing behind a camera and tripod, or driving to a place of promise, when the sudden recognition of the beauty of the scene before me has brought tears of joy and gratitude to my eyes.” 

And Michael K. Komanecky states in At First Light: Two Centuries of Maine Artists, Their Homes and Studios, “Attracted to its rugged beauty, artists have found in Maine a place to connect more directly with the natural world. For many, the wildness that…Henry David Thoreau described in The Maine Woods…was and continues to be a significant reason for relocating to this place, at least temporarily.” 

It is definitely one of the main features that drew Linda and I here a half-dozen years ago and it continues to feed our souls to this day. It also is partly what I try to impart on this blog with my photography in the hopes of sharing some natural beauty to buoy the spirits of others. And to continue the nautical theme, I strive to shine some light via my writing about the virtues of simplicity and experiencing more life with less stuff.  

According to career coach Ken Coleman, loving creations accomplish three things: equipping, encouraging, and entertaining. “Your creations should entertain people enough that they want to experience more. They should also encourage people to take some sort of action. And they should equip people with knowledge or experience.” So here is hoping you realize why beauty matters and experience it for yourself! 

The Beauty of Creativity

The other day I was doing some online research when I stumbled upon the listing of our neighborhood as a national historic district on the National Park Service website. The article said, “Land’s End Historic District…is a summer cottage colony developed by Russell W. Porter…[who] divided much of his property into lots and pursued a vision of an enclave of seasonal residents dedicated to experiencing nature, living a simplified existence and nurturing artistic talents (emphasis mine). At Land’s End Porter built cottages and created a summer community with lasting cohesion.”

As regular readers may recall, I wrote about Land’s End earlier here but this particular description of why Porter sought to develop the neighborhood stood out to me for all the reasons articulated above in italics. The very attributes that drew Linda and I here originally are the exact ones with which our corner of the world was intentionally designed. For us and our like-minded neighbors, nature, simplicity, and art represent the creativity of beauty.

And on that note, my mother recently shared with me this gem from fellow writer and photographer Vicki Kuyper: “Photography is one of the pursuits I’ve found where I can worship with childlike abandon. As I play with light and shadow, pattern and perspective, color and contrast, I’ve developed a habit of whispering a word of thanks, praising God for His handiwork right along with every photo I take…I can worship God through my lens as well as I can on my knees.” 

Landscape watercolorist David Dewey, whose painting of Marshall Point (pictured above) we encountered long before moving here, adds this to the conversation: “God’s invisible qualities and divine nature. I think this is what has always come through my work. I was raised by parents with a deep faith in God, and they raised me to honor him with my life and my work, but it was never a religious decision to paint this way. Instead, it was the realization that I really am God’s creation living and working in his creation; nature for me has become the fundamental evidence of his handiwork.” 

As writes Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life: “Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore an intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful.” If there is one thing that stands out to me about living here literally at Land’s End, it is the transcendence of our natural surroundings and how reflective of our Creator it all is. And it moves me to make art through my writing and photography that also communicates the beauty of creativity. 

Creativity and Critique

I don’t know about you all but in between weekly trips to queue at the grocery store I am trying to use this time to explore some neglected creative outlets. And one thing that has helped me is settling into my new office space (pictured above), which consists of a borrowed desk from the downstairs museum and is located in our walk-in closet, of all places. 

Linda needed our proper desk for all her corporate equipment and I desired a quieter space than the kitchen table. This setup affords me the silence I crave and the views out to Monhegan Island supply all the inspiration I could ever need. But the biggest benefit I have discovered is simply a space to call home that I frequent faithfully.     

Another contributor to my breakthrough in creativity has been living this past year without cable television or Twitter. Linda and I decided before moving out here to Marshall Point that we wanted to embrace as much of the unique experience of living here as possible, and that meant cutting the cord and logging off social media. 

The result has been renewed perspective and greater creative output, not the least of which has been the launch of an online ministry we are calling The Beacon, named intentionally after our home here at the lighthouse. You can check it out at www.thebeaconministry.com or www.vimeo.com/thebeaconministry.

As it turns out, we were ahead of the curve when it comes to distance learning, as we launched on 02/02/2020, before the virus hit the fan, so to speak. We presently are sharing brief videos designed to help folks with queries about faith and related issues. As a couple of friends were questioning our unconventional methods, I was reminded of a great quote from Teddy Roosevelt:      

“It is not the critic who counts…the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause…so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” So, amen to that!

For the record I recently rejoined Twitter, namely to share about The Beacon, so you can catch up with me there at www.twitter.com/seanfowlds. I also am making good progress on my latest book project, so stay tuned for more exciting news about that. And last but not least, allow me to encourage you to pursue whatever your passion may be and regardless of what the naysayers might suggest! 

The Contemplative Life

One of the chief draws of living here at a remote lighthouse is the time and space to pursue what I like to call the contemplative life. And as you might suspect, the winter is especially conducive to curling up with a good book, a hot drink, and some relaxing music to get the creative juices flowing. What is more, cutting the cable television from our lives has made a radical contribution toward a more contemplative atmosphere.

Not long ago I read a moving book titled We Were an Island: The Maine Life of Art and Nan Kellam by Peter P. Blanchard III. It is the amazing story of a couple who bought an island off the coast of Maine last century to retreat from society and live the contemplative life on their own terms. As Blanchard writes, “Art and Nan were in open rebellion against the practices and priorities of their media-dominated century. They knew that, on the mainland, cherished moments of undistracted, mutual enjoyment in reading, writing, and listening had become a rarity.” 

And another book I recently read is titled In Praise of Wasting Time, based on a TED talk by renowned scientist Alan Lightman, who describes a couple different types of time: “The ancient Romans also distinguished between two different kinds of time: negotium and otium. Negotium was time spent at work and duty. Business time. Otium was leisure time, time spent away from the job. Otium was time for reflection, reading, writing, thinking, philosophizing, self-examination.” 

Yet lest anyone confuse contemplation with complacency, author Robert Walser defends us creative types by clarifying:“In a word, by thinking, pondering, drilling, digging, speculating, writing, investigating, researching, and walking, I earn my daily bread with as much sweat on my brow as anybody.” It is this very type of cerebral lifestyle that originally motivated me to become more of a minimalist in order to experience it on a daily basis. 

As Linda and I are both big readers, one of our favorite activities is reading together during what we call “library evenings.” If we come upon a passage that we feel might interest the other we share from our reading and thus double our pleasure. And sometimes we even put down our books and pursue another pleasurable pastime together!    

The Gift of Authenticity

I have a confession to make: I am a writer. That may appear self-evident as you read this blog but it is a hard-won truth that I have not always been willing to acknowledge. You see, especially in this day and age of contraction in publishing and other creative fields people often look askance at people who are willing to admit they are such peculiar beings, or artists of any stripe, for that matter. 

But a writer I am, and proud of it. I used to take for granted being able to string words together well until I realized that it is actually a gift that not everyone is given. Of course, that is the very nature of gifts: we are graced to do something different from others. Our gifts may seem like they come to us naturally but they are actually given to us supernaturally by our Creator to bless the rest of creation. 

As you all may have noticed I like to share inspirational quotations and here are some of my favorites dealing with authenticity and creativity. It was C.S. Lewis who said, “Be who you are because you never know who would love the person you try to hide.” Henry Beston wrote, “If you can write and do not, something within you withers and dies, and with its death poisons the soul.” And Mary Oliver stated, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work and gave to it neither power nor time.”

So, what does all this have to do with the practice of minimalism and living more simply, you may ask? Well, much of the motivation for Linda and I to embark on our own minimalist journey was designing our lifestyle to enable more creative pursuits. For example, now that I do not have a house to maintain I have much more time to write. In a nutshell, I was able to put down my paintbrush and pick up my pen.  

And allow me to encourage each of you to make time for whatever it is that makes your heart sing. Whether it is writing, photography, drawing, or some other activity, “it is never too late to be who you might have been,” as George Eliot suggested. And it does not necessarily matter if your gift is the source of your livelihood as much as an outlet for you to exercise your creativity and express yourself to others. So, go ahead and sing in the shower, and dance like no one is watching (but draw the shades:)

Life Jottings

I don’t know about you, but the older I get the more I realize the benefit of documenting my life through various means, not the least of which is via this blog here. I also update a couple of document files that chronicle family highlights and menus of my media consumption. And I enjoy compiling an annual album of favorite photos from our life here in Maine.  

While I like to jot periodic notes in a small notebook I try to carry with me I am contemplating a more daily practice of capturing thoughts using a larger journal like the one pictured above. Coupled with some drawing pencils we got recently, Linda and I are looking forward to further indulging our creative sides upon an upcoming move that I shall write about here once it happens. 

As a friend once said, journals are journeys inward and as we age the more our interior lives take center stage. After all, a journal is how memory and meaning finally meet in our minds. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who pontificated: “The unrecorded life is not worth examining.” And his contemporary Henry David Thoreau said, “I…require of every writer…a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives.” 

Speaking of Thoreau, it is largely through his journals that we know so much about his personal life, given that most of his philosophical books were published posthumously and the few that were not were self-published and sold poorly during his lifetime.

Contrast that with the similarly brief life of Jane Austen—whose books were also self-published and sold modestly during her lifetime—whom we know very little about since she directed her sister to destroy all her correspondence after her death.  

In closing, I am currently reading a contemporary classic titled Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer, who writes, “We need to listen to what our lives are saying and take notes on it, lest we forget our own truth or deny that we ever heard it.” So, I encourage you to start your own life jottings if you do not already practice the art of journaling. You may find your life speaks in whispers worth writing down. 

The Path of Least Persistence

It has been said that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. And I know from personal experience as well as observing the lives of others that the same can be said of the creative process. Whether or not we are willing to admit it, “the best laid plans of mice and men” often come to naught if we are not willing to press past the resistance to creativity. So I have identified at least three characteristics that pave the path of least persistence: perfectionism, procrastination and people pleasing.

Of the three, I think the most insidious one is people pleasing, because it masquerades as a positive attribute but corrodes our relationships and contributes to the other two issues. Chances are that if we strive to please people it also will lead to procrastination and perfectionism, which feed off each other as well. All three are part of a negative feedback loop that threaten to mire all of us—but especially creative types—in the paralysis of analysis, and result in a state of inertia.

In an effort to create art, whether through writing, photography, music or another medium, it can be tempting to procrastinate in the form of “waiting for the muse,” but that is a recipe for regrets. And insisting on perfection before releasing our art into the wild is likewise not helpful. We may fancy ourselves geniuses but unless we reach our audiences we are simply legends in our own minds. As the saying goes, if no one is following our leading, then we are simply out for a stroll.

So what are the antidotes to people pleasing, procrastination and perfectionism? I have found that affirmation, action and acceptance help to counter each of these enemies to the creative process. Affirmation from loved ones inoculates us from the need to please other people. Our action by very definition neutralizes the power of procrastination. And the acceptance of progress rather than perfection saves us from striving after an impossible ideal. Only by defining success on our terms can we truly succeed.

Happy Wife, Happy Life

I had an epiphany that I thought I’d share here in the hope that it’ll help others. I was thinking earlier about this year drawing to a close and how I hadn’t yet finished the book I am writing. While I am proud of what I’ve written of the book and the articles I wrote this year, not to mention the editing and speaking I did, I was ruminating about what was left unfinished when I asked myself: What are you most proud of creating? And the answer that sprang to mind was: My lifestyle!

Of course, I owe my very life and any creative ability to The Creator, God, but within that overall context, I am very intentional about designing a lifestyle that I love and that is ultimately a reflection of God’s good gifts to me. Besides that I can think of no better barometer of how I’m living than that old adage: “happy wife, happy life.” It blesses me no end that my wife is happy, which in turn makes me very happy. As another saying goes: “if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

As I posted yesterday, we recently returned from a dream vacation to our former home of Nantucket and it was wonderful to celebrate my wife’s birthday with friends while we were there. What made it all the more special for me was to see how much my wife was enjoying herself, whether it was seeing all our friends at church, mailing Christmas cards from the island, or seeing snow on the beach, she was having the time of her life.

You can see the smile on my wife’s face in the above photo speaks for itself. We were about to board the ten-seat “puddle jumper” of an airplane just before witnessing a gorgeous sunset over the ocean as we approached the spit of land that is Nantucket Island. It all contributed to a memorable homecoming for us and it’s one that neither my wife nor I will soon forget.

Poke the Box

Best-selling author Seth Godin has earned a reputation as an out-of-the-box thinker and his latest book called Poke the Box is no exception. The book is the first title from The Domino Project, his paradigm-shifting attempt to revolutionize publishing by simplifying the process of connecting books and readers.

Powered by Amazon, Godin’s electronic book venture is designed to be a game-changer, and while it may be too early to comment on that, Poke the Box is indeed a provocative “manifesto about starting,” as he calls it.

Godin’s mantra is start it and ship it, suggesting that he who hesitates is lost. In his own words, “soon is not as good as now.” He points out that not all flux is necessarily risky and insists that not flowing with flux may be the riskiest move of all.

“It’s easy to fall so in love with the idea of starting that we never actually start,” writes Godin in a line that hits all too close to home. According to him, when the cost of poking the box is less than the cost of doing nothing, then you should poke. And I could not agree more!

Making Sweet Music

One of my very favorite quotes is from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Don’t die with the music still in you.” It speaks to me of the need to live life in such a way as to allow the creative gift that lies within each of us to find its voice. Whether it is through the actual playing of music or not, we are each gifted with creative ability meant to be shared with others and designed to enrich our own lives.

On that note, if you’ll pardon the pun, today I came across another musical quote attributed to William Henry Channing: “To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common–this is my symphony.”

To give credit where it’s due, I discovered Channing’s quote at a minimalist blog I’ve been reading lately called Miss Minimalist. And lest readers assume it is simply another “decluttering” site, while it does cover personal organization it is much more than that. It is an excellent resource for anyone desiring to live a life less encumbered with STUFF and movingly portrays minimalism as the meaningful lifestyle that it is.

Content is King

In his book ©ontent: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, author Cory Doctorow argues that digital rights management (DRM) is bad for artists, not the least of which are writers.

He feels that such measures meant to liberate artistic creativity instead manage to limit it. In the age of the iPad and similar devices designed to facilitate the digital reading experience, his commentary is made all the more compelling.

According to Doctorow, “New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.”

The point he makes is that content is king and thus made to morph: “Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it.”

I don’t know that I’m on the exact same page as Doctorow but I do find myself agreeing with his overall thesis: “New technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that’s what tech is for. Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of.”

Creative Corner

While online the other day I came across a picture of the actual desk where my wife’s favorite author, Jane Austen, is reported to have created her bestselling novels. What struck me about it was its diminutive size. No larger than a tea table, it looked barely large enough to eat scones at, much less create the literary masterpieces for which Austen is known.

What I can’t help thinking is whether Austen didn’t need as much exterior space because she had adequate interior space as a result of the time and place she lived. She not only lived during a kinder, gentler period, but she also wrote from a place more attuned to the reflective pace necessary to think and create.

One of the highlights during my and my wife’s holiday vacation to New York City was our visit to the Morgan Library, where there happened to be an exhibit of Jane Austen’s original writings. It was inspiring to see firsthand the handwriting of a genius and to witness the fruits of her creative labor.

And here at home, my wife and I recently sampled several movies via Netflix that adapt Austen’s trademark wit to the big screen. Nearly two hundred years later, it is readily apparent that she had an innate understanding of the human condition. What’s more, it is amazing how much creativity she was able to conjure up in her creative corner of the world.

Free for a Fee

Whether you are a producer or a consumer of media content or both, you cannot afford to not read Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. The editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Anderson has his finger on the pulse of creativity and commerce like few others.

As Anderson writes, “The new form of Free is based on the economics of bits, not atoms. It is a unique quality of the digital age that once something becomes [digitized], it inevitably becomes free—in cost, certainly, and often in price. And it’s creating a multibillion dollar economy—the first in history—where the primary price is zero.”

“The rise of ‘freeconomics’ is being driven by the underlying technologies of the digital age. Just as Moore’s Law dictates that a unit of computer processing power halves in price every two years, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. What the Internet does is combine all three, compounding the price declines with a triple play of technology: processors, bandwidth, and storage,” Anderson continues.

Anderson is quick to point out the difference between free as in “freedom” (libre) and free as in “price-less” (gratis), i.e. free speech versus free lunch. Of the types of free (gratis) models, perhaps the most familiar one to readers is the “freemium” model, which is free to basic users and offers a premium paid version (think Flickr and Flickr Pro). The key to freemium is the Five Percent Rule: five percent of online users support all the rest.

To clarify an often-misquoted axiom, Anderson writes, “Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive.” In other words, as long as there is a fee associated with its creation, information needs to be subsidized somehow.

The Plenitude

While on a business trip a couple months ago I picked up an intriguing book in the MIT Press “Simplicity” series called The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff by Rich Gold. For the uninitiated, “plenitude” means “the abundance or plentiful supply of something.” In terms of the text, it refers to all of the “stuff” we each create and consume on a daily basis.

One particularly golden gem of insight that I gleaned from the book had to do with the concept of creative artistry: “The art flows from personal vision and from a unique sense of self. To many artists, art is more a calling than a profession, though one still needs to be trained in it, and there is certainly a business side.”

That statement liberated my thinking by giving me permission to create as an artist with a uniquely personal perspective and interpretation of life as I see it and not simply as a producer of commodity. As Gold suggests, “Without artistic vision stuff tends to…commodity…and…if you are merely producing commodity, you’re dead.”