The extract below is from the penultimate task of the Butter Mouse's book. In my copy there are a handful of scratchy question marks scrawled into the margin with a felt tip pen. Maybe someone tried to complete the year long challenge, decide nothing was happening, and gave up with weeks to go. What a shame.
If you have played along at home, I hope you have gained some sort of reward. Even if you have not seen figures from the past stroll past your bedroom window, hopefully you a few more completed projects sit around your home.
For me this week is about realising that you have sharpened your creative tools over the last eleven months. That even thought all of them involve external items as a catalyst, ultimately the ideas arise from inside you. If you can accept that, then what seems at first like the hardest challenge may turn out to be the easiest. Perhaps that’s what our question marking friend did not understand.
Plus I like how the theme mirrors reaching the conclusion. It is like watching the words fade away under a dimming candle.
Nos da! Even though it's morning. But we are close to the night time.
Welcome this change! Focus on the vast breadth of the darkness, and do not pine for the light of before.
And cheer up! We are here to paint pictures and write poems, not mope in the gloom.
This time around you will need to think about darkness. And thinking. Think about thinking.
This close to the end we need to discover how far to push a creative challenge without falling into somewhere new.
Many say you need a spark to get a creative idea flowing. But maybe the greatest ideas lie undiscovered in the gap between those sparks. Let's anti-create creative projects from nothing.
Mix a pleasing drink. Sit in a comfy chair. Turn over all four of your cards, and begin. Do not try and push two ideas together, or tease something into being. Let something loom at you out of the dark. Give birth to your piece in one big lump.
Begin. Before it is time to move on.
