Last night I was invited by a friend of mine to attend the local high school’s musical production of Rock of Ages, Teen Edition.
I was blown away by the talent of the high school students who performed in it! It was wonderful. I loved it. I found it very inspiring that young people in my community could perform at such a fantastic level. Sometimes great theater can move you to do interesting things.
I may have mentioned a few times on this blog that I read and completed a many week and renowned course on creativity called the Artist’s Way.
One of the major tenets of The Artist’s Way, is that while working on the project, you are encouraged to take yourself on an Artist’s Date, every week. They are according to the book “once-weekly, festive, solo expeditions to explore something that interests you.”
While I am not technically still working on The Artist’s Way and I did not attend The Rock of Ages, as a solo expedition I found it to be a very powerful, inspiring experience. It can be a powerful thing to see people expressing themselves publicly. It moved me.
Today, I feel inspired by the performance that I saw last night.
This inspiration makes me want to share myself publically. I appreciate art that makes me what to share with myself because I contend with an opposite impulse inside of myself. This contending impulse tells me that I should not share myself unless I am doing something subjectively extremely amazing. This impulse says only the highest quality of things are worthy of being shared.
However, seeing other people share themselves lets me know that this is not true. Any creative endeavor is worthy of being shared. All creations are worthy.
So I want to share where I am with my running shirt making process that I wrote about in my blog post because it is interesting to me right now.
When we last left off, I was still coming up with a concept and I was struggling a bit because in the past I have only had my own tastes to consider when coming up with an idea for an inspiring running shirt.
Also, as I told you previously, Mr. Katie and I will be participating in The Broad Street and he has expressed an interest in having a joint look. What I didn’t mention in my last post, was that while I liked the idea of joint look in theory, I found this idea to be slightly constraining. I find that I get some inspiration out of my running theme and the running inspiration that I feel this spring warrants is from the book series Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.
I knew that would be a hard sell for a joint running shirt look so I started to feel constrained because gosh darn it, I wanted what I wanted!
However, when I told Mr. Katie exactly what I envisioned for myself which is a motto from Outlander that I could use as a matra while I was running. (I will reveal to you the motto at a later date when I premiere my shirt, though maybe any Outlander fans out there already know what it is going to say).
My thinking inspired Mr. Katie to come up with his own running shirt idea that also originated from a book series that he is reading. I will premiere that too at a later date! I will probably make his shirt f once he finalizes his idea.
So now, our idea is to have our own running shirts that we will wear for the races that we run individually and also have a separate matching shirt with a joint concept for the Broad Street Run. This Broad Street Run shirt will feature a fun quote or idea from a television show or movie that we are both fans of.
See, sometimes you can have everything that you want. You can have the shirt idea that you want and do something really cool with your best friend.
I went to Walmart yesterday to buy my supplies for my Outlander themed running shirt. I bought two shirts in case I mess up or I don’t like how my inaugural attempt looks. As soon as I wash and dry the shirts that I purchased, I am going to get to work on making next week’s race shirts.
I will show you after I finish.
Sassenach!
Thank you for your guess. I appreciate it.
There is a phrase that is adopted by Jamie that represents his feelings before a big conflict. You will see soon.