No Snow Day

It’s brutally cold in Denver: Minus 19° overnight and a high today of only about 20°. All I want to do is burrow in somewhere cozy and wait for warmer weather. One of the disadvantages of working or studying at home is that you don’t get any snow days. We didn’t get much snow out of this storm, so nobody’s getting a snow day today, and I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t have to join the rush hour madness this morning.

When I face new students at the University of Phoenix, one of the first things they always ask me about is weather cancellations. They react with surprise when I tell them that we just don’t do them. Denver’s national reputation for cold and snow aside, our weather really isn’t bad. The bigger issue, though, is that dealing with the impossibly full schedules of adult college students is extremely difficult. We can’t just cancel classes and forget about them; we have to make them up within the same week, a Herculean task.

Staying cheerful in freezing temperatures can be an adventure. Yesterday ten people showed up at my church to go caroling even though it was only 5°. We had a good time and maybe even brought a few people a little Christmas cheer.

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Building a Nest

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”

Jane Austen

Every summer, my friend Chris and her husband Peter spend the month of July at the same lakeside cottage in Maine. They read, play on the lake, take walks and naps and just relax. They take a cell phone, but no computer.

As soon as they arrive from their home in New Jersey, they set about changing the house (as tiny as a dollhouse, according to Chris) from a generic, tacky summer cottage into their home. They remove the furniture, pictures, knickknacks and dishes to a storage facility and replace everything with their own stuff. This takes about five hours.

At the end of their vacation, they reverse the process, replacing the original furnishings and putting their belongings into the storage unit. They do this because their surroundings are very important to their state of mind.

The way we decorate and live in our houses, studios and offices affects our mental states more than we may realize. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t get much done in a beige room. I need color, plus lots of books and paper and (colorful) pens and music and natural light and my computer. My cats are also a nice addition, although I frequently have to shoo them off the desktop.

When I ask my students to design their ideal learning space, they always include music and elements of nature such as plants or aquariums or windows facing trees and gardens.

Think about the kind of environment that makes you feel most creative and productive. Start by imagining what you would like if money were no object. Then see which of the elements you can incorporate into your work space, now.

According to Pregnancy Weekly, the nesting instinct kicks in at about 5 months, with “an uncontrollable urge . . . to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world.” Since many people refer to creative projects of all sorts as their babies, it isn’t too far fetched to think about designing a nurturing nest where your creativity can thrive.

© Copyright 2007 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Chaos Theory

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”
- AA Milne

My artist’s date this weekend was a garden tour sponsored by the Conflict Center. Normally, this annual event is a favorite of mine. The gardens in my working class neighborhood are not the overly designed and manicured gardens of the wealthier parts of town and that is fine with me. These gardens require more creativity than cash and typically feature recycled materials and plants acquired from friends and neighbors. As acclaimed dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp said, “Whom the gods wish to destroy they give unlimited resources." Nobody around here has unlimited resources.

This year, I was a little disappointed. The gardens were more ordinary, not the exceptional examples I enjoyed in previous years. As usual, my favorite garden was the one that was crammed full of plants and artwork, with something interesting to look at no matter where your eyes lit. If you’ve seen my house, you already know that I’m the opposite of a minimalist, although the simple and serene Japanese style garden with incense burning throughout was also nice. For me, it would be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

One of the best things about a garden tour is the ideas it gives me about what I can do in my own yard. This year was no exception. My yard has suffered from neglect the past couple of years while my focus turned to, among other things, my dad’s declining health. Yesterday, though, I took another look at it and found a few things I could do to reclaim it from chaos. My neighbors will be happy to hear it.

If you don’t have time for a real artist’s date, take a few minutes to watch this amazing Women in Art video.

© Copyright 2007 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

An “Urban” Suburb

"The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out." Dee Hock

I had my Artist Date last Friday at the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Englewood, a suburb south of Denver. I’ll tell you more about the exhibit in a later post. Here I want to talk about the Englewood City Center, where the museum is located. Yet another example of the New Urbanism that attempts to create a mixed-use “vibrant downtown core” feeling in the middle of a sprawling beige suburb, it showed promise when I drove into a small park displaying sculptures and a fountain.

Maybe I should mention up front that I always feel like an illegal alien on the planet suburbia.

City Hall stood on one side of the park, across from a three-story building with offices, many of them still vacant, on the ground level and apartments above. The block leading down to the park is the same, with a few restaurants, a coffee shop and a bead shop among the law and insurance and architecture offices with apartments above. At the end of that block is a HUGE Wal-Mart store, looming like the mother ship.

I like the concept of putting housing, retail and office units together, but this seemed a little sterile to me. Of course it’s new and still half empty, so that will change, but here’s the thing: I wouldn’t want to live next door to a Wall-Mart. Those people who “camp” in RVs in Wal-Mart parking lots might disagree with me.

The whole time I was there, I saw a total of about a dozen people around, unlike the neighborhood business districts near me, which these new downtowns are trying to emulate and which always seem to be crammed with people drinking coffee, talking on their phones, pushing strollers and walking their dogs.

I’m not sure what the problem was. Maybe it will just take time for the place to develop some character and personality. Or maybe they need more variety of housing—single family houses, town homes and lofts in addition to the cookie-cutter apartments. Or maybe downtowns only work, well, downtown. I know I was happy to get back home to my little urban village of North Denver.

© Copyright 2007 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Overstuffed

"Out of clutter, find simplicity." Albert Einstein

I’m a packrat. I admit it. I save everything and have a hard time getting rid of anything. I still have close to 400 record albums that I haven’t played for many years and I don’t even want to talk about my book collection.

My clutter comes to light when I decorate for Christmas. I have about five times as many ornaments as I can actually use on my little five-foot tree. When I bring out the other decorations – the Santa collection, the teddy bears and the rocking horses, I have to put away vases and toys and knickknacks to make room for them.

This year, I SWEAR, I’m going to use this switching out activity to get organized. I’m tired of living in Dogpatch. I have this vision, if I don’t clean up my act, of people dreading my death not because they’ll miss me, but because they’re afraid they’ll be responsible for disposing of all my STUFF.

People tell me that getting rid of things is a soul-cleansing experience. I’m holding onto that thought. While I don’t think I will ever adopt a minimalist approach to life, I’m remembering these words from Immanuel Kant: "Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life." I’m looking for wisdom.

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved