Prickly Creativity

I know that I'm in trouble when I start doing this stuff.​

Flower pictures are just not my kind of thing, even if they are very prickly...  

I know that creativity takes time and energy to cultivate yet my workload has been too high lately to make proper space for my own creative process.

And, while I have nothing to say about flowers, they are a photographic staple; an easy cliché.  So, in the snatched moments between various tasks I might step out with my camera and try to 'take' something. 

Yet it seems like the process reinforces an intuition that I hold:​

• Creativity is a necessary activity. The urge doesn't go away if we ignore it or simply get too busy.​

• Creativity needs time, patience and disciplined persistence. It doesn't 'just happen'.  What 'just happens' is clichéd and predictable.

• ​​Supporting other people's creativity (which has been the main source of my workload) is not, in itself supportive of our own creativity. (With thanks to @seeleymob for pointing that one out!)

• ​Creativity is made not taken.

So it seems that the first step in 'doing the work' is to protect our time and energy such that we enable our own creative endeavour.

Sadly​, there are no short-cuts.