Plastic Fantastic
A prompt to encourage your practice of creativity this week from Riversider and local author Larry Burns.
A prompt to encourage your practice of creativity this week from Riversider and local author Larry Burns.
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.
We’re taught not to play in the street by our moms, but I hoped you disobeyed and found some ways to use gutters to inspire creative play. Like me, did you discover the hidden beauty of these urban waterways? Whether you mapped where the water goes, wrote an ode to a cell phone you lost down a storm drain or transformed found objects into something weird, I hope you rediscovered something to enjoy about our unnatural environments.
This week, we’re shifting our creative gaze inward to indoor innovations that give us more time to be creative: light bulbs. The light bulb is a universal symbol of inspiration and bright ideas, no surprise given its impact on all parts of our lives. But what might be a better symbol for inspiration today? Perhaps the smartphone, with its vast potential for creativity and connection, could serve as a modern icon. As we bathe ourselves in light bulbs, let’s appreciate their role in shaping our environments and experiences.
Light bulbs not only illuminate our spaces but also influence our moods, highlight our art, and reveal the hidden details of our surroundings. For most of us, light bulbs extend our productive hours. This means we certainly have several minutes to spare to feed our creative side. Incandescent, LED, or vintage filament light bulbs offer a variety of shapes, textures, and warmth that can spark our creativity. Let’s throw a switch or two and see how they can inspire us to shine a little brighter in one of these activities:
Did you know that Nikola Tesla, the famed inventor and engineer, made significant contributions to the development of modern electrical systems, including innovations related to lighting? Tesla’s work with alternating current (AC) power systems not only revolutionized the way we use light bulbs but also played a crucial role in electrifying communities like ours, helping make citrus a cash crop king.
Embrace the playful, the practical, and the imaginative, and let these activities carry you through the week with a fresh perspective.
This column was written with the help of a customized GPT from OpenAI. If I can make one, so can you!
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