Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Creativity

Why You Should Sync Your Schedule with the Seasons

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“Then there are those rare days … that dawn with a clarity that muscles its way into every home and studio and office . . . There’s a delicious radiance that seems to come from the things themselves .  . .” – David Abram

We experienced our first spring-like day this weekend — birds singing, sun shining, daffodils in full bloom, windows open. Ahhh.

All day I was bursting with ideas and creativity. Most of us keep making our to-do lists and checking off items right on through the darkest, coldest months. Summer and winter were interchangeable in my former workplaces. Not once did a manager suggest we adjust our work to be more in sync with our natural seasonal inclinations.

But these first spring days have a way of showing us how stubbornly linked our minds and moods remain with the seasons.

One of my friends manages an organic farm. Not surprisingly, his life is more in sync with nature than most of ours. In the winter, he rests or travels. Then in the early spring, he starts working, gradually increasing his hours with the longer days.

But you don’t have to trade your computer for a hoe to get more in tune with nature. One independent author realized that winter was an excellent time to stay inside writing, whereas spring was the ideal time for book releases, so that’s how he arranges his life now. Some companies have started giving employees extra time off during the summer since that’s when people want to be outside and with family. My dad was a freelance writer, and he took nearly every afternoon off in September for fall hikes.

[clickToTweet tweet=”You may be healthier and more productive if you sync your life with the seasons. #productivity” quote=”You may be healthier and more productive if you sync your life with the seasons.” theme=”style1″]

I’m fortunate to have some flexibility in my working life, so I try to pay attention to nature’s cycles and adjust my life and work accordingly. But it’s not easy because our modern lifestyle — climate controlled houses and vehicles, cities lit up around the clock, ripe tomatoes available year round — are so adept at inoculating us from nature’s whims. Planting a garden helps since I have to pay attention to and cooperate with nature from spring to early fall.

But every spring I realize how hard I’ve pushed myself to keep exercising, producing, and working at full capacity right through the winter elements. I suspect winter colds and influenza are nature’s way of saying, “Enough. Rest already,” since many of us are bad at heeding the weather’s hints.

It’s noteworthy that until relatively recently, many cultures observed the new year in March. These early spring days, with their “delicious radiance” do seem a perfect time for making resolutions, for birthing books into the world, and perhaps for opening new businesses and starting ventures. What might the rest of our work lives look like if could take our natural seasonal inclinations into account?

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these related posts:

Do you adjust your work with the seasons? Could you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Become the Solution

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I love brainstorming for solutions. That’s why I started this blog. I wanted to ponder answers to some of the questions I was asking myself after my first son was born, like how can my husband and I create a healthy, happy, sustainable family life? How can societies redesign communities for health and happiness? Four years later I’m still here brainstorming.

Often I come back to a movement that may hold some of the answers: permaculture.

Permaculture is a gardening movement that originated in the 1970s in Australia. Its “father” Bill Mollison defines it as “a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system.”

Sound confusing? I haven’t even gotten into the three tenets or twelve design principles. Honestly, I don’t wholly understand permaculture, which may be why I’ve yet to transform my yard into a food forest.

But I find it to be an incredibly refreshing and hopeful philosophy because it re-frames a tired conversation about our role in nature.

Most of us are well-versed on humans’ criminal performance as stewards of the natural world. Nearly all my earth science lessons from first grade through college ended with discussions of humans’ destruction: a hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, rampant pollution, global climate change. After my dad died, I saw a photo of a polluted landscape and immediately recognized the emotion I’d been feeling during all of these environmental lessons: grief. I’m sure I’m not alone in that emotion.

The environmental movement often espouses footprint reduction as the solution to the devastation. In An Inconvenient Truth, we saw a list of the same solutions I heard in elementary science classes: turn off the lights, drive less, buy energy efficient appliances.

As you know, I’m all for finding joy in simpler lives. But I’m not convinced it’s the answer to our environmental problems.

Derrick Jensen makes a good point in his 2009 critique of simple living “Forget Shorter Showers”: “The logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. . . . we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.” Jensen is trying to provoke political action in his essay, but he captures how psychologically depressing and even destructive it is to think the way we can best serve the world is to disappear.

If our presence itself is the problem, how can we be the solution?

Perhaps that’s why when I first read about permaculture, I felt a rush of relief. The movement is not about shrinking, shriveling, or getting smaller. The ultimate goal isn’t disappearing. It’s about doing something productive that makes the world a better place. It’s about improving the environment through our actions.

In their memoir Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City, Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates describe how they built a permaculture food forest that transformed their barren urban lot into a high yield food-producing habitat for fish, snails, frogs, salamanders, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, bugs, and worms. “Imagine what would happen,” Toensmeier writes, “if we as a species paid similar attention to all the degraded and abandoned lands of the world.”

Permaculture is incredibly powerful because it inspires us to become the solution. It shows us that we can create systems of abundance where everybody wins.

What if we apply the same mindset to other seemingly entrenched problems? We’d probably be able to re-frame all kinds of tired conversations and focus on what we can design and create to affect the world for the better.

It’s the mindset that inspired Seattle to create Beacon Food Forest, seven acres of fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs and vegetables that will be open to the public for foraging, that helped Judy Wicks build a successful business while creating a thriving local economy in Philadelphia, and that helped a Spanish biologist build a fish farm in Southwest Spain that reversed the ecological destruction of the Guadalquiver River valley.

If you haven’t seen Dan Barber’s TED Talk about that Spanish fish farm, it’s an incredible reminder of what can happen when we become the solution.

Check out these resources for more inspiration:

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5 Ways to Make February Fabulous

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“In the coldest February, as in every other month in every other year, the best thing to hold on to is each other.” – Linda Ellerbee

So maybe I was a tad optimistic in that title. Perhaps I should have stuck with “fine” or “fair”. We are talking about February, after all. I often find this month a bit, well, challenging. All of the newness of the year – the parties, the resolutions, the bowls of black-eyed peas – too often give way to the realization that there are lots of cloudy days and long cold nights to go as my little corner of the earth rotates back toward the sun.

I love winter. It just has considerably more appeal in November, when sweaters,  crackling fires, and root vegetables are still novelties. Apparently I’m not alone. A quick Google search turns up dozens of articles and blog posts entitled, “February Sucks,” lamenting everything from Valentine’s Day to midterms to sinus infections.

But this month, I decided I will not just quietly cope with my February malaise. I’m on a mission to pull February from its shadowy reputation – at least in our house. In August, as we’re sitting outside watching the sun set at nine and eating vine-ripened tomatoes, hopefully we’ll say, “This is nice, but remember February?”

Maybe you can use some February mood-lifters too? Here are five ways I’m hoping to rescue this poor wreck of a month:

1. Plan the Garden

What’s the next best thing to eating those first sweet, crunchy snap peas and juicy raspberries? Dreaming about them, of course. And what better way to do that then to sketch out some garden plans? Last year, planning was my key to gardening success, and I learned a lot from what worked and didn’t work. I’m looking forward to spending some February afternoons with a cup of tea, some gardening books, and my sketch pad.

If you don’t have space or desire for a garden, you could plan some containers for your deck, or a window box, or adopt a house plant. Just glimpsing plants has been found to speed the recovery of surgery patients and improve workers’ job satisfaction. Hopefully plants can help rescue February too, a month altogether wanting for more shrubbery.

5 Ways to Make February Fabulous #winter #seasons

2. Invite someone new over for dinner

We have new neighbors, who also happen to be old acquaintances, and we’ve been meaning to invite them over for awhile to welcome them to the neighborhood. February is calling for a break-up in the old routines. Why not invite someone new over to your house too? It’s the perfect excuse for a feast. Eat. Play some games. Discuss ways to spruce up February.

3. Create something every day

Around this time of year, after all of the baking and the making that comes with the holidays, I often find myself in a creativity lull. Dr. Kelly Lambert might say this explains why February is so challenging for me. She asserts that cooking, knitting, sewing, building, or repairing things with our hands and seeing tangible results from our efforts bathes our brains in feel-good chemicals. I know she’s right. I feel much better when I’m creative. “An art or craft everyday” is my new February motto.

4. Listen to music

Music – notably up-tempo music played in a major key – makes people happy. Research indicates that listening to music we enjoy triggers the release of the natural opiates known as endorphins. And in studies, music has been found to boost surgery patients’ immune systems, lower stress in pregnant women, and reduce complications from cardiac surgery. I know music makes everyone in my house happier, and yet I often simply forget to turn it on. I hereby proclaim February the month of music. We will listen, sing, play, and dance.

5. Start a new tradition

Okay, so I’ve come up with a few ways to improve the next couple of weeks, but what about next February and the February after? I mean, if I’m going to make this a legendary month, we need a tradition that we talk about all year. Should we make valentines? Or truffles? Go on a scavenger hunt? Take off for a weekend getaway? I haven’t decided yet … I’m hoping you’ll share your ideas.[clickToTweet tweet=”Do you dread February? Try these 5 ways to make it fabulous. #winter” quote=”Do you dread February? Try these 5 ways to make it fabulous.” theme=”style1″]

Do you love February, or at least like it? Do you have any fabulous February traditions? I’d love to hear from you.

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13 Aha Moments in 2013

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In 2010 and 2012, I shared the magic moments when I heard or read something that surprised or inspired me. Moments that made me say, “aha.” As we say farewell to 2013, I have 13 more for you:

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health. – Michal Pollan

The next time you look in a mirror, think about this: In many ways you’re more microbe than human. There are 10 times more cells from microorganisms like bacteria and fungi in and on our bodies than there are human cells. – Rob Stein

You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions.” – Judy Wicks

Since there is no “healthy soil/healthy microbe” label that can steer us toward these farms, my suggestion is to ask this simple question: “Does the farmer live on the farm?” Farmers who live on their land and feed their family from it tend to care for their soil as if it were another family member. – Daphne Miller

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention. – Jon Kabat-Zinn

“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help. Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.” – Janisse Ray

Thanks to cutting-edge science, we know that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement — giving us the competitive edge that I call the happiness advantage. – Shawn Achor

I melted, and accepted, and only then could I actually enjoy his presence instead of worrying about losing him or changing him. And this, as I’ve learned, is the best way to be. – Leo Babauta

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today. – Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham

The findings suggest that job burnout is “a stronger predictor of coronary heart disease than many other known risk factors, including blood lipid levels, physical activity, and smoking. – Anne Fisher

We also know, more definitively than we ever have, that our brains are not built for multitasking — something that precludes mindfulness altogether. When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general wellbeing suffers a palpable hit. – Maria Konnikova

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. … Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. – Peter Gray

The most profound thing I have learned from indigenous land management traditions is that human impact can be positive — even necessary — for the environment. Indeed it seems to me that the goal of an environmental community should be not to reduce our impact on the landscape but to maximize our impact and make it a positive one, or at the very least to optimize our effect on the landscape and acknowledge that we can have a positive role to play. –  Eric Toensmeier

Did you hear or read something in 2013 that surprised or inspired you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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The Most Powerful Thing in the World

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It’s March, and as I write this, it couldn’t be lovelier here. (March does have a way of surprising us, doesn’t it?) In these parts it came in with sunshine, daffodils, and birdsong.

Last week I received my copy of the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine, which includes my review of Janisse Ray’s The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. Ray’s book is about seed saving, and it’s part memoir, part poetic manifesto, and part how-to.

Ray presents a bleak scenario about seeds. Ninety-four percent of vintage, open-pollinated seed varieties have been lost forever since the turn of the 20th Century. “Goodbye, cool seeds,” she writes. “Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.”

Nonetheless, The Seed Underground is an upbeat read. Ray calls seeds “the most hopeful thing in the world,” and she profiles a handful of “quiet, under-the-radar revolutionaries” who are collecting and exchanging seeds in a quest to preserve our food heritage against enormous odds.

The Seed Underground inspired me to learn more about seed saving and got me excited about experimenting more in my garden this spring. I hope you’ll check out my review if you see a copy of YES! Magazine. I’ll be sure to post it here once it’s available online.

In other news, we survived our long stretch of sniffly, sneezy, fevered February days inside, helped greatly by … a pack of construction paper. Valentines. Glider planes. Homemade kites. Crowns. Cards. Envelopes. Shapes. Handcrafted books. Oh yes, we are making the most of this $5 pack of colored paper. What a fantastic reminder that kids don’t really need expensive toys to have a great time. And often the most basic supplies inspire the most creativity.

I hope you’re also enjoying some good weather, or some creative afternoons inside, or some combination of those, as we are.

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5 Ways to Rev Up Your Creativity

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“I’m going to make something every day this year,” I announced in December.

When I saw my friends’ responses, I thought perhaps this might be too ambitious an undertaking. However, I’ve really just decided to turn more of my attention to creativity this year.

Why? Well, when I peek back through the years and squint at the more unhappy periods of my life, I detect a common thread: I wasn’t creating much of anything. Maybe I was working overtime at a day job. Maybe I was in a season of editing instead of writing. Maybe I was just uninspired. But a dearth of creativity and a general malaise seem to go together. Which causes which? I’m not sure. But I know that when I’m working on a creative project, I feel more alive.

I know I’m not alone. Matthew Crawford, author of The Case for Working With Your Hands traded his job in a Washington think tank for a career fixing motorcycles, because “knowledge work” made him feel tired and useless. “Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day,” Crawford writes. I think we can all relate to that thrill of making or fixing something with our own hands.

In her book Lifting Depression, Dr. Kelly Lambert explains what might cause the burst of happiness creating gives us: “When we knit a sweater, prepare a meal, or simply repair a lamp, we’re actually bathing our brain in ‘feel-good’ chemicals.”

So this year I’m making things.

I’m off to a great start. In the last month, I’ve knitted half of a scarf out of bamboo silk, made kombucha and St. John’s Wort oil for the first time, wrote a handful of poems, brainstormed a new novel, and churned out quite a few drawings. Mostly I’ve had a lot of fun. But I’ve also remembered what makes creativity hard: there’s often a lot of groping around, stumbling, and failing involved.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

5 Ways to Rev Up Your Creativity

Perhaps you’d like to join me in paying more attention to creativity this year? If so, here are five things experts say can help stoke our creative fires:

  • Spend time in nature

A University of Kansas study of a team of hikers found that a four-day backpacking trip boosted the participants’ creativity by 50 percent. You might need to leave your electronic devices in your backpack to reap the benefits. Ruth Ann Atchley, the researcher who conducted the study, suggested the results may have been due to turning off the distractions of modern life as much as the natural setting.

  • Embrace boredom

Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire in Great Britain found that boring jobs encourage creativity. It turns out performing dull tasks lets us to detach from our surroundings and daydream. So committing to creativity might mean committing to some mental downtime.

  • Focus on the process instead of the results (or just dance)

“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free,” the poet Rumi wrote. In an interview, artist Dana Lynne Andersen said that one of the biggest mistakes beginners make when sitting down to paint is focusing on the end product. To get her students focused instead on the process of being creative, she encourages them to dance. That makes sense, since dancing is a creative process with no real end product. It may be worth a try, and as Rumi points out, there’s really no reason not to dance.

  •   Learn from kids

One afternoon I watched a soccer coach force a group of elementary-aged kids to run laps around the track. They looked like deflated balloons as they trudged along, and it occurred to me that kids should really be coaching us on joyful, exuberant outdoor play. Similarly, young kids are experts in creativity. In a famous 1968 study, George Land found that 98 percent of three- to five-year-olds showed genius levels of creativity on a test developed by NASA. By the time the kids were 15, only 12 percent exhibited divergent thinking. And when the test was given to thousands of 25-year-olds, only two percent showed divergent thinking. So what makes kids such creative geniuses? They ask lots of questions. They marvel at things. They find any excuse to play. It’s a model worth studying.

  • Commit to practicing

All humans are creative. But a lot of us don’t commit to creative work, and perhaps the biggest reason  is that it forces us to confront our own mediocrity. We likely will never compare to the best artists, musicians, novelists, designers, and even home-brewers of the world. Of course, the one way we’ll get better is practice, and Ira Glass offers some wise words about recognizing your creative work sucks and doing it anyway:

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. … You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Here’s to creativity!

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular posts about creativity:

What are you creating? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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