Do you need a low stress way to include seven minutes of creative contemplation into your week? Consider this your helpful nudge towards a slightly more creative life. If it helps, come back every week for a quick hit of creative contemplation. Each week I’ll share a new nudge. It will include a Thing (T), a Place (P), and a Sense(S) for your focus, a TPS creative nudge.
Welcome back from last week’s stone fruit bonanza! Were your fresh fruit inspirations store-bought or home-grown? Did you use those minutes of creative freedom to whip up a delicious peach cobbler worthy of its own photo shoot? Perhaps you wrote a sensory poem or carved a unique fruit sculpture beneath the protective canopy of fruit trees. Even if the only fans of your work were the many bugs and pests that love this summer heat, I bet you found sweetness in nature’s seasonal bounty and allowed it to inspire your creativity.
It’s a new week; it’s time for a new nudge. I’m encouraging you to get outside and get moving to get into the groove with this week’s creative thing: gutters. They are useful features of our urbanized environments and one that (when working properly) goes completely unnoticed. Outdoor plumbing is an essential ingredient of modern living, guiding rainwater away from buildings and preventing erosion. They keep walkers and riders apart. And so much more.
They grab my attention on my morning walks with all the things they carry in, out, and through our neighborhoods. The daily overflow from our lawns and gardens creates hundreds of nameless creeks and culverts to explore. Find one to follow, maybe one of those convoluted by the tree root systems of our urban forest. Then try one or more of these:
Gutter (Mind) Map: Spend some time exploring the gutters in your neighborhood or around your home. Look for interesting patterns of connectivity. How do they connect to drainage? Where are they going? Sketch a crude map or create a photo series that showcases the unexpected interconnectedness of these everyday features.
Know Thy Flow: Take water and natural materials like leaves, twigs, and flowers to create a flowing artwork in a gutter. Pour sudsy water down the gutter and observe how it interacts with the materials you’ve added. Take photos or videos of the water’s journey, capturing the movement and changes as it flows. This activity combines the visual beauty of water with the functional design of gutters.
Gutterventure: Imagine the journey of a leaf as it travels through gutters. Write a short story or a series of vignettes from the perspective of a raindrop. What adventures does it have? What obstacles does it encounter? This exercise invites you to personify the elements of nature and weave them into imaginative narratives.
Waterway Save: Collect materials found around gutters—such as small branches, car debris, and snack wrappers—and use them to create a sculpture. Arrange these materials in a way that tells a story or represents a concept. This activity encourages you to see the artistic potential in natural and discarded items, transforming them into meaningful art pieces.
Embrace the functional, the aesthetic, and the innovative, and let these activities carry you through the week with a fresh perspective. As we explore the creative potential of gutters, let’s appreciate their utility and significance in our built environments.
Did you know that innovative gutter designs are being developed to help address climate change? Some gutters are equipped with filtration systems to capture rainwater for reuse, while others are designed to support green roofs and vertical gardens, enhancing urban biodiversity and reducing heat islands.
Using infrastructure to support our creative drive allows us to see how these systems address the future world with larger, more intense weather of all sorts. Here’s to finding beauty and inspiration within our daily routines and to the endless creative discoveries made possible by the things we often overlook.
