Curating the Curious
Welcome to Curating the Curious, the podcast that celebrates staying curious in life and never settling into a box.
This show is for the creators, the seekers, the explorers, the truth tellers….and the forever students of life.
No matter what age or stage you’re currently at, this is not as good as it gets and it is never too late to begin.
Join me as we explore all of the questions that come with the idea of curiosity. A place where the possibilities are endless and you can always start again.
We expand our lives through curiosity. One of my greatest passions is finding ways to encourage and inspire others to keep pushing, sharing, living, and making things for the world to see.
Curating the Curious
Day 13- Sometimes You Gotta Grow Your Garden Before You Paint It
Welcome to DAY THIRTEEN of our new 30-day COMMUNITY PROJECT where we make something with our hands every day in order to improve our mental health. We all realize that creativity heals...it's time to put that knowledge into action.
I'm going to publish an episode for you to follow along with several days of each week (I'll take breaks on Fridays and weekends in order to give you time to catch up as needed). These episodes will exist here, marked with the days numbered, in order for you to follow along at any speed that you like. Miss a day? Doesn't matter. Just pick up right where you left off and keep making things. These episodes will give us all some accountability, but if you need more, pair up with a partner. It really does help!
Join our creative community by making something today, whether it's for five minutes or several hours—your brain will thank you. Let's do this thing together and turn all of this sh*t into something beautiful!
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Things take time. Did you know that Monet grew his gardens before he painted them? I saw a quote about this many years ago by Atticus and then did a whole deep dive on the history of his gardens and his home in France, and then I immediately made plans in my mind to go visit those gardens the next time I was able to go to France. So apparently Monet had been a collector of Japanese prints and he had all these prints of Japanese gardens, a pond full of floating lilies, a Japanese bridge, and he displayed these woodblock prints all on the walls of his home. These prints became the inspiration for his paintings, but first they were the inspiration for his gardens that he grew and the bridge that he built and all of those things that he ended up painting, which became the famous paintings he called his actual living garden his most beautiful masterpiece. The fact that he built all of this and grew these gardens and then created those famous paintings is such an unbelievable reminder that we can't always just be churning stuff out.
Speaker 0:Things take time and we tend to undervalue gestation. The things that take place in a woman's body during the first trimester of pregnancy is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest, yet we see nothing on the surface. There are some things that you literally just cannot rush, and along the lines of yesterday's episode, which was about what seeds do you want to plant, sometimes that's all you've got is this idea of a seed. You haven't planted it yet, it hasn't germinated. You know that you eventually want to grow it, but it's going to take some time, especially if you want to do it right. Sometimes all we can do is get that soil ready, plant those seeds and then trust in the timing of our lives, do everything that you can to provide the right environment for those seeds, but know that some seeds they're just not going to sprout and others will in a way that you couldn't have ever imagined. But staying open to the possibility of it all is the most important thing Possibility it can be endless.
Speaker 0:I have two quotes that fit together so perfectly for this entire idea. One is actually by Claude Monet and he said I would like to paint the way a bird sings. And Maya Angelou says a bird doesn't sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. I relate. That's the only explanation I can even come up with for having this podcast in the first place. I don't have answers? I don't know. I just have a song to sing and that's all you need.
Speaker 0:Now that we're on the topic of painters, I'm thinking of one of the coolest films I've seen that I've never spoken about. It's called Big Eyes by Tim Burton, and I think it's from like 2014. Visually it's super similar to Edward Scissorhands and very Wes Anderson, although since Edward Scissorhands was made way before Wes Anderson, I feel like Tim Burton must have been an influence for him. I've looked it up and I've been like, oh my gosh, is this one of his influences? And I cannot find one thing on it. But anyway, visually it's super cool. The story's cool. It's about painting. Amy Adams is the star. I watched it on a flight home from a very, very cool trip that I did a few years ago and was just blown away by how inspiring it was for me artistically.
Speaker 0:And speaking of travel, today's project I am using my Polaroid printer to make some of our summer travel photos into Polaroids. So many things just look cooler on film and I love the whole tactile thing that comes with Polaroids, so I'm printing those out and that is my project for the day. I also received all my scans back from when my family and I went to Europe in June and it was really exciting. I got to tell you I don't know what took me so long to start doing this, but I just love the look of film. I love the imperfection, I love the waiting for the scans, I love the wondering if things turned out or not. But most of all I love the no edit, no editing, no stress. I get my scans. What comes comes. What works works, what doesn't is gone, Done.
Speaker 0:The only disappointment I have from it is that 90% of my photos are buildings and monuments and streets and I really did not take that many photos with people in them which I don't even know what. I was thinking. I was trying not to annoy my family. I stuck to the buildings and the doorways and stuff like that, which I love and I'm happy to have, but could have used a few more people in my five rolls of film. Also, I finished the Women by Kristen Hanna and that is a damn good book. Holy cow, the Nightingale is still my number one, but man, the Women is good. All right, that's it for today and until tomorrow, stay curious.
