Creative Collaborative Cagebreakers by Rhino Ravendove (best fiction books to read txt) 📖

can generate. Be bold, be brazen, be clandestine, be willing to find crevices in the calendar and the clock. Plan a spontaneous rendezvous in a busy or out of the way coffeehouse, in the backyard behind the trellis and the bougainvillea or creep downstairs where the streetlight slips through the little basement window, or upstairs and bathe in the moonlight on the roof on a blanket romping bare and brazen in the breeze.

Should you get caught (and you will) show your poems, the stories, the words, the pictures, the music. They’ll understand. And if they don’t, tell them to go tryst with Imagination, Creativity, their Passion and let loose the inner artist within. And, who knows? You may have set the stage for a creative menage’ a Flow...


The Ravendove: Piece 2

This piece was born of pure flow. Just like I like it. I was doodling (my version of meditation), my daughter walked past, and the rest is Flowtisserie! The teacher in me is always on the alert for those juicy teaching moments. This one for me was ripe, full, and ready for picking.


Comparison Kills

“How do you draw like that?” she asked. “You’re perfect, I can’t draw like that.” The snap of her pencil breaking in half punctuated her sentence.

Teaching moment. “You see the end result,” I said, flipping through my sketchbook filled with half-dones, abandoned doodles, assorted scribbles with X’s laid over them like those X marks on the eyes of dead cartoon characters. “Sometimes you’re looking at the 10th version of a cartoon character I’ve been working on. You didn’t see the erasing, the start overs…hey, go look in the trash and see all the ripped out, balled up, tossed out versions.”

“You mean the ones on the floor?” she asked opening the crinkly wads as if they were oysters. There had to be a proverbial pearl of wisdom inside one of them.

I smiled, “I’m a flowologist, not a ballplayer. But you see all the mistakes I made? Think of them as stepping stones on a path of…”

“Perfection?”

“Not perfection, more like insight or discovery. Trying to find the way – check that, a way – to say something with a picture. My way. The minute I look at another artist’s work and say, “I could never do that” or “why doesn’t mine look like that?” I’ve killed my creativity.

“You never look at anyone’s art?”

“I look at a lot of other artists’ work.”

“Do you compare it with yours?”

“All the time, but I try to catch that thought and see it another way, ask a different question like, “How does she do that?’ or ‘What tools did he use to make this?’ These questions inspire, they blow on the spark inside me and cause a fire. Now I have a Burn To Learn: Who is this artist, what’s her background, where did he learn to draw like this? And do you know what I find out?”

“What?”

“That he also struggled and made mistakes. She wanted to quit – and sometimes she did – before she picked up her pen or brush again. Now I’m inspired, not ‘cause they didn’t make mistakes, but BECAUSE they made mistakes. I feel connected, connected to another human being. I don’t feel so alone. I might even try to draw like they do and in the process I find my style, my flavor, my flow.”

Silence. I felt like I talked too much -- again. Then I heard the gentle crack of paper wad oysters being opened again, the easy click of a mechanical pencil, and the soft scratch of its tip guided by my daughter’s hand. Moments later she handed me an 8x11 piece of paper with a doodle.

“I looked at your drawing and got inspired by you.”

She handed me a sketch with some erased lines and eraser crumbs clinging to the paper. It had traces of my style and all of her struggle, her surrender, her soul.

“What do you think?” There was a smile on her face and recovered confidence in her voice.

I smiled back, “That’s flow, baby girl, that’s flow.”


SECTION 3:
The Creations


EarlGreyCrunchBerryIII 1

“Opposable”
(from Flowdowg)
by
The Ravendove

My third piece had to be fiction. I like making up stories, but for some odd reason I do not like to share them. Probably that old bugaboo in the white wig, The Judge, at work again. How many times I’ve I allowed his gavel to slam down onto my creative expression? Too many.


[the following is an excerpt from Flowdowg: the Urban Legend of Po Tolo, described as one part graphic novel and one part sci-fi, fantasy meditation on the meaning of humanity. This scene is a transcript of a conversation between a young Flowdowg and his counselor Dan ScreamingEagle, DVM]

Opposable: Rescued from a ransacked, secret vivisection laboratory, mentored by the mysterious AME Monks of Assisi, Po Tolo aka Flowdowg, a human-animal hybrid searches for wonder in the wilderness of himself and his surroundings.


From the desk of
Dr. Abraham ScreamingEagle, DVM

Dear Bro. James,

During the past 3 months I’ve spent observing and working with Po Tolo, I’ve seen remarkable growth and changes: 1. Less hair (Ambras syndrome in remission doubtful), 2. Vestigial tail has shrunk significantly; gnawing less and less, hand-paws itching more and more. I’m more concerned with the emotional, psycho-social development. Adolescence is challenging enough for regular human boys, but a human, feline-canine Brid (hybrid)? My skills as a veterinarian and animal behaviorist are really being tested, and I find myself relying more and more on my Tongva training as a fourth generation medicine man. Again, here’s the transcript. Not surprisingly, the subject was marbles.

Following is a transcript of the session I had with Po Tolo or ‘Flowdowg’ as the boys at the monastery call him. Just a few quick notes. (hope you can read my writing!)

This is Dr. Abraham ScreamingEagle, the day is Tuesday the 23rd day of March 2021. This is session number 15 with Po Tolo who’s lying on the floor looking at a white card with a black circle…

Dr. Abraham ScreamingEagle: Anymore dreams, Po Tolo?

Flowdowg/ Po Tolo: Last night. I saw a universe and 36 rainbow coated planets in a perfect circle. And 4 gods in black robes. Three of them were chewing bubblegum and rolling planets at the big circle of planets with their thumbs. They won’t let me play, so I bark and run knock the planets all over the sky.

Eagle: Are they real gods, Po Tolo?

Po Tolo: No. They’re the other boys at the monastery.

Eagle: Last time you called it a sanctuary.

Po Tolo: Yes. It is. It was.

Eagle: It was?

Po Tolo: It still is, I guess. I want to stop now.

Eagle: Okay.

Po Tolo: No. let’s keep going.

Eagle: Fine.

Po Tolo: You’ll agree to anything I say won’t you?

Eagle: No. So, back to the boys in the monastery…

Po Tolo: Sanctuary.

Eagle: Your choice.

Po Tolo: Well it’s a little bit of both. Anyway, the other boys like to gather on the grass court with their bamboards.

Eagle: Bamboards?

Po Tolo: Yes. They’re these smooth, square boards made of bamboo.

Eagle: Do these boards have a purpose?

Po Tolo: Yes. They were game boards to play – no, not to play. Not at first in the beginning. They started off being used for beheading wild game. The boys carry them around and during breaks or free time, flip them over put them together, make a big square, empty their marble bags and make one big circle.
Are you drawing a circle on your paper over there?

Eagle: Yes, how did you know? (cognitive remote viewing or a lucky guess?)

Po Tolo: Just knew. It sounded like a circle. In the dream it’s always 4 boys with a bag of planets, 9 planets in each bag.

Eagle: Do you have a bag? In the dream?

Po Tolo: Yeah I have a bag, but only 7 marbles. I’m always missing two. Kuklos.

Eagle: Excuse me?

Po Tolo: The game they play’s called Kuklos. They pour out their marbles. Watched them bounce across the board. Line them up in a perfect circle. One of them would pull out a white marble and thump it at the circle knocking one of the marbles loose. They start shouting, and laughing, they start fighting and say they’ll never be friends again. Then the next day comes and they gather around their brown squares in the green grass and start again.

Eagle: Do you play?

Po Tolo: Not with them. Not in front of them. And they never ask me. But I bet that’s because they know how good I am. I never understood the game, but I watched it with the eyes of a pointer. And I have my own technique because I don’t have, you know…

Eagle: You don’t want to say it?

Po Tolo: …they say I’ve zota. That’s what the boys say when I used to ask them to play.

Eagle: Zota?

Po Tolo: Yeah, z-o-t-a: zero opposable thumbability. “You aint got an iota of zota.” That’s what they say.

Eagle: How’d you feel about that?

Po Tolo: I don’t care… do you know what it’s like to…to ache for something, to want to do something and be left out because you do not have? Or to live in a world that is so… available and so unreachable, unattainable, ungrabable…to not be able to hold on to anything except with your mouth, or be trapped behind an unlocked door, yelling for somebody to come open it, or go hungry all day and pretend that you’re fasting while sitting with everyone at a dinner table full of utensils? What about the ache to hold someone’s hand or to play a stupid meaningless marble game…

Eagle: What else?

Po Tolo: I’m done.