Tuesday, September 18, 2012

In the process

I always love looking at the clothes during New York Fashion Week, but my favorite part is meeting the people.  Everyone in the crowd has some passion that will spill out of them if you just ask.  There are many people who are in the process of building a new clothing line, an on-line business, or a documentary.  I have great respect for people who are in the middle of the "process", because I have spent most of my life avoiding the "process".  I am a task-oriented achiever, and I want to be finished yesterday.  I want a list of items to check off and at the end of the day to be done.  I think this is why I worked in accounting for 9 years.  So, here are some of those creative and hard-working people who inspired me to have some thoughts on staying in the process (see my thoughts at the end) -     

Kika Vargas (wearing her own collection) is hoping to show next year at New York Fashion Week - 



Nina Zadeh created a website called Zaden Row to sell clothes from various New York boutiques and to enable people to "shop like a local" -




Katie Bartels took the plunge by leaving a New York law firm to design jewelry full-time - 





Catie Cacci and her friends are filming a documentary on fashion bloggers.  It seems to me that making a documentary would be so difficult, since the whole story has to be told through the mouths of other people.  As they were interviewing me, I was wishing I had some well-formed revolutionary thoughts on the blogging industry.  I don't know if I gave them any usable footage, but I can't wait to see what story emerges in the film -




I am very self-motivated to start a lot of projects, but my natural reaction when something isn't working out is to move onto something else.  People who spend years building something substantial encourage me to settle into the tension of the process.  My primary job right now is to raise two children.  If that is not a process, I don't know what is.  And emerging out from under that job is the creation of art in the form of sewing, painting, writing, and now kitchen designing (just for myself - and yes, we are still in the design stage of my kitchen).  Ahhh...the creative process.  Few activities are as all-encompassing and soul expanding and SLOW as the creative process.  The fascinating thing about the creative process is that you have to work hard to facilitate the end product, but ultimately you have no control over the spark that makes it special.  You can't push the process.  There may be some artists that are very deliberate in their productions, but for the most part, I believe when the end result is good (really good), the artist feels that it came from somewhere outside of themself.  Thus the terms "inspiration", "muse", "revelation", "flow".

I think we experience it as such, because God loooooves the process.  Sometimes I feel like he's laughing at me (in a nice way) when I am growing so uncomfortable with the process.  If it were up to me, I would have taken everything he's done in the course of the history of the world and accomplished it in a week and then wrapped it up in a neat little "to do" list.  But he dragged it out over thousands of years and then (instead of a list) gave us a person.  And thus began another process.

I think he gave us the process as a gift.  A gift in which we experience a little bit of the divine.  It's in the spark of an idea that we see the creative mind of God.  It's in the steady flow of hard work that we see the patience of God.  It's in a new understanding that we see the size of God.  It's in the perfect ordering of seemingly random events that we see the love of God.  At the end, when everything is finished, we can look back and appreciate what happened.  But it's in the midst of the process that we feel the impact.


*The views expressed in this post are strictly the views of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the people pictured above.  I did not interview them about their creative process, and they did not sanction any of my God-talk. 

**Don't worry.  I'm not finished showing you the clothes.  I just needed to balance all of the frill with some substance.


 




1 comment:

Katie said...

love your little disclaimer comments at the bottom. and the "God talk."