TJ Hirst

Symbols of the Christmas season already span the shelves at our neighborhood stores. Many symbols resemble more about what retailers are hoping we’ll buy than anything else, some symbols beautifully represent the season and a just a few truly express feelings of faith about the birth of Christ that Christians celebrate.

At our house Christmas decorations and music don’t officially begin until the day after Thanksgiving, but this year I’ve captured a few extra days. Today, I taught the birth of Jesus Christ in Luke 2 to my teenage seminary class, and we’re going to study The Gospel According to Luke right through December. The New Testament account of Christ’s life will be my biographical companion for the season.

Since I’m busy singing Christmas songs in the morning with my students, anyway, I also pulled out my Christmas ornaments a bit early to share them with you. I decorate my Christmas tree as a personal expression of my faith. I am a Christian and a Mormon. Yes, Mormons believe in Jesus Christ—I certainly do. I hope my life is a symbol of my faith in Him.

I didn’t ever understand symbols in literature or symbols in the scriptures until I realized that symbols don’t have one right answer that everyone knows except me. Instead, I’ve come to see symbols as a way to represent or convey meaning about something else, like a particular truth, belief or idea that may be hard to visualize or describe without a physical reminder.

Two years ago, my study and memorization of The Living Christ: The Testimony of The Apostles coincided with the Christmas holiday. At the same time, we opened our home for a holiday benefit house tour. The 17-year-old Fred Meyer glass ball ornaments hanging on our 14-year-old artificial Target tree needed some updating.

I chose each ornament for our new tree to symbolize a particular aspect of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ from The Living Christ. Some are well-known symbols like doves for peace, but others represent my own associations and creativity. On Wednesdays through Christmas Eve, I will share my symbolic ornaments from my Living Christ Christmas Tree and what they mean to me.

When I interviewed my songwriter friend, she expressed that she lives her creative life in phases—she creates and then she absorbs.

I’ve never allowed myself that. Or known how to do it. My creative drive pushed me to produce.

Now, though, her words have worked on me. Absorbing is still creating; it is just another part of the process. And an essential one.

My phases are still fast-moving and turn around over days, not months or years like hers, but at least now I can sense the need to shift. I produce for a few days and then I renew for a few.

My children have a couple days off school, and we’re absorbing together. Or I am absorbing from them while they create. KH painted a beautiful apple with watercolors. EH finished the last chapter of her book. NH played architect with Dad.

When we’re talking creative communities, I can’t think of a better one that the one that immediately surrounds me.

What phase are you in?

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

I’m transitioning from stay-at-home-mom to create-at-home-mom. In yesterday’s post, I figuratively opened my windows on my creative writing space to call out to other creative individuals to make more connections in the online community. I need those links to other writers and readers, editors and thinkers, virtually and in real life, to teach me, inspire me, stretch me, and guide me.

I’m searching for links to not only other writers or editors but creative people whose work is inspiring and who talk about their creative process. I’m still too new in the blogging world to know what creative groups exist in writing and artistic communities online, and I need help.

The aim of my existing blogroll and the blogs in my Google Reader is to compile links to writers and other creative individuals. Most of these individuals are strangers, but every one has inspired me in simple but important ways. Thanks to you for what you create.

4 Reluctant Entertainers is a wonderful example of letting go of perfectionism so REAL hospitality and creativity can shine. Through her, I just discovered, Today’s Creative Blog.

I am Thrilled by the Thought that even though there is much art, literature, music that I haven’t discovered yet, I know Rebecca will connect me to something I wish I could have already appreciated.

Robin at Around the Island sends her beautiful experimentation with photography and writing from her “Island” in Tel Aviv.

Annie at Basic Joy created the Letters to a Parent project which motivates me as a mom and a writer.

Allysha at Bells on Their Toes sees and writes the cleverest vignettes on the everyday things and keeps me from getting too stodgy in my writing. Plus, she’s established what I think is an ideal connective place for creative thinking and writing at Just an Orange.

Sarah at Genesis Moments shares wonderful pieces of her writing, places she’s writing and thoughts from her writer’s journey. But most of all, she leaves the most heartfelt comments whenever she visits.

Minna is my favorite photographer. Miriam Lovell Photography is my favorite creative hangout from which I’d like to view the world.

Lei at My Many Colored Days combines photography and mothering into her beautiful setting.

Scattered Jules is the blog of author Julie Wright, and it always nice to see a published author going through that process.

If you can tell from a banner the depth of creativity in an individual, it is An Ordinary Mom’s banner that lets me into her creative mind to see how she loves, raises, cares for, trains, teaches, and inspires her children in a creative home.

I first found C Jane from Segullah, and loved her wit, but I have quietly stayed to read the wisdom that has flowed while she blogs for donations on behalf of her sister, Nie Nie, who is recovering from severe burns suffered in a plane crash.

Daring Young Mom dares me to think about why I write and my most important priorities at home.

Holly at Marathon Bird is the fastest reader I know, and she introduced me to what is now one of my favorite books, Watership Down.

Julie at Mental Tesserae writes like I want to. Her honest personal essays identify the why and how of what we do in our culture and make me think it through all over again.

Michelle at Scribbit is a writer who can express her opinion without getting too one-sided, sappy or preachy. She is constant and reminds me to keep plugging away at my goals. I’ve participated in her writing contest almost every month since January because it pushes me to think on different topics and stretch my writing skills. I also discover talented other writers who participate.

I have never, ever left a comment at Design Mom, but with a designer for a husband I can’t keep my eyes off her discoveries.

Donetta’s thoughts in  My Quiet Corner encourage me to keep connecting my spirituality with my own creative writing. Spiritual truths are a fountain for creation.

Karen at Organzability writes down-to-earth practical stuff, but that’s the other side of me, too. Who would have thought you can be organized and creative?

Sarah at Scribbulous is an author making progress on her story, and I’m very inspired to start mine because of that.

I just recently started reading Laurel’s personal expressions at Just Around This Corner,  which sound like she’s just sharing with her girlfriends. I cannot, however, seem to get that same feel to my writing, and its something I want to work on. I have this card on my desk, under my computer screen that says, write like you are writing to Michelle, my close friend who moved to Oregon. Hi Michelle!

But I am making other friend connections, like Rachel at Idaho Cheneys who promised to read great books with me every month.

I just discovered  Chrysalis, which is a weblog fro thinking Christian moms, and I say, “Yes.Yes. Yes. I need a connection like that.”

And, I share a love of Finland, a truly creative country and people, with Dalene at Compulsive Writer.

Each website is a creative endeavor that builds my creativity. I can only read so much, but I want what I read to uplift and motivate me, and I’m probably missing some key creative connections.

I plan to create a page with an expanded and categorized Creative Blogroll of personal or group blogs that are a good mix of inspiring writing and other forms of creativity. And I would love your insights and suggestions. Will you leave a comment, go to my contact page, or send me an e-mail at tj [at] tjhirst [dot] com with your suggestions for other creative places on the web where you and others congregate, converse and create?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

I have this incredible place to write in my house. We climb up a ladder to this attic hideaway that we call a crow’s nest to withdraw from the noise and activity of the world below. Floor-to-ceiling windows open the room on three sides, beckoning us to look out toward even more inspiring creations.

Some writer’s might think it is the perfect space, and it is. When I’ve spent hours writing in this old IKEA chair on a laptop, though, I know I cannot stay here forever. So, it’s good that my husband and I created the rest of our home to answer the varied needs of our creative family. It’s not a perfect home nor are we a perfect family, but the environment sparks our creativity.

A couple of years ago a regional Minnesota magazine, Lake Country Journal featured our home on their cover and in an article inside called Closely Connected. The photographs and story highlighted the close physical connection of my husband’s architecture firm in a two-story detached studio next to our house.

His creative design solution enhances our family life, allowing work and home to be accessible to one another. He can come and go from our home and his office throughout the day. At dinnertime, our children can wave him in through the window to bring him home from work.

Sadly, though, his firm, Oldham Hirst Design has outgrown their office by our house. They recently moved to a larger renovated office at Franklin Arts Center, an historic building that has been redeveloped into art-related businesses, studios and live/work spaces for artists by Artspace. Already, their creative energy flows as they work around other artists.

I shared a bit in their artistic buzz when we attended a reception this weekend in a gallery at Franklin Arts Center for artists featured in Lake Country Journal magazine. I connected with a friend who works at the magazine, and we talked writing and editing. She prompted me to think beyond my career goals to something I never considered.  I met another creative soul who shared her method of writing any idea out by hand—anywhere—when it comes. I promised not to tell anyone, but she says she wrote some lines of a poem while driving down one of our rural highways on the ripped-out pages of a telephone book from the floor of her car.

Back at our creative house and alone after many years during the day with children at school and Paul gone to a new office, I have the solitude, time and inspiring place to write, write, write. And I do. And I will. Yet, now I know I need more. I need to develop my writer’s space, like they have their art space.

My answer is here, at my website, and in the broader community it offers. Daily writing disciplines me to regularly create. And, my presence here is as much of a creative connection as those windows in my crow’s nest. I need those links to other writers and readers, editors and thinkers, virtually and in real life, to teach me, inspire me, stretch me, and guide me.  Through the broad windows I’ve seen how other writers also write to understand, how to honestly be true to my own creativity, and much more.

What I still need to do, though, is to stop just looking out the windows from my protected writing place. So, I bravely open these windows and call out to more creatives like me, “Is anyone home?”

The places, events and people of my life emerge from my subconscious as the settings, plots and characters of my dreams.  In my sleep I pluck from a lifetime of who, what and where like I am trick-or-treating at doors across the world. Then, my mixed assortment of real people, places and scenarios appear in eerie fictional stories, out of time and situational context, as the ghosts of my sleepy-time entertainment.

The ghosts of houses past loom as stages for the dramas behind my closed eyes, with the childhood home of my elementary school years as the most frequent backdrop.

In the latest, I peered out that familiar living room window on Fisher Lane to see a bridge explode and fling debris through our ceiling. (Never mind that that particular bridge crosses the Missouri River 20 miles in the other direction). Fortunately, the home of my teenage years with a centuries-old cemetery—or graveyard as we called it—in the back yard has slipped from my nightmare writer’s notice.

The ghosts of decisions past add anxiety to my sleep when I discover that I am reliving old deliberations with new twists and outcomes. As a notorious second guesser, whether I am awake or asleep, I am more suited to the role of third party observer of a friend or family member who is weighing his or her options.  That is why I particularly enjoyed a recent dream when my friend invited me along on her house hunt, where we easily chose a cleverly-updated ranch with new tile and a curved bar in the kitchen. In reality, she moved over six months ago.

The ghosts of people past reacquaint themselves with me in the oddest places and times in my dreams.  I’ve had fictitious mass reunions with people I have known in a food court of a shopping mall and while waiting in line for a restroom. Our conversations create comic relief during a night of fitful sleep.

The closely related ghosts of relationships past are far more frightening than funny. I get a little panicky in the morning when I remember my dream included someone from my life five, ten or twenty years ago. Why is my subconscious pulling HIM into my dreams at this time? Is is a crush I never outgrew? Does it mean something more?

If you’ve ever read Dicken’s Christmas Carol, it is hard not to wonder why each ghost appears. Most nights, though, my candy stash of characters and scenes doesn’t add any more meaning to my life than a handful of Milk Duds. But think of the possibilities I can pull out of my bag during the day when I write.

Author’s Note: Since I am not a huge Halloween fan, the theme of “Ghosts” for Scribbit’s October Write Away Contest nearly scared me away, but it was fun to dress up my writer self in a little different costume for this entry.