rise & shine

This morning I was reading brain pickings, a blog that I always enjoy.

This one is called "The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Arist's Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life."

She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity (“The child I was,” she writes, “is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”); the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.  

The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists—it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides.

It's really about the quiet concentration time we all need to be creative. Something we have less and less of in this busy world. Do you have this same struggle with finding the time for concentration and creativity?
This original 6"x6" oil painting is available, unframed, for $95 here.