Cotton Candy

Cotton Candy amy freeth-rice 2024

#6

I am thinking today about ideas and where they originate. Several of the books I’ve read on the subject of creativity and art and ideas reference the concept of ‘source’. Source- as I understand it- is a universal soup that surrounds us and whose ingredients are all the stuff we might come up with as ‘ideas’. From source we could get bendy straws or lunar landing modules or sea salt dark chocolate or some great picture. Source is something from which you can harvest your ideas if you are in the right mindset to do so. Source seems to imply that ideas are just there waiting and if you don’t make yourself available to them they will languish or someone else will get them. On some levels I believe this, on some levels my sarcastic suspicious inner voice thinks nahhh how can it be? Mostly though I do like believing it and am happy to think that my next idea- good or bad- is just waiting for me to ladle it out of the cosmic soup and make something of it. I also like to think of ideas as cotton candy- just a mess of colorful sugar crystals that just need to be warmed up, spun around, pulled through a screen and then it will start to come together as something real and useable- if only for a momentary delightful burst of sweetness before it melts away to nothing again. -amy 5/31/24