I thought about starting a blog a long time ago, but it got put on the back burner due to a lack of time and energy. As December 2017 neared its end and I pondered my resolutions for 2018, I decided that starting a blog would be a goal for the new year. And, as I have just returned from some time off for the holidays and things at my job are still quiet before the new year gets into full gear, I have had the time and energy to get this thing going. Also, I have gotten past one of my previous roadblocks: being uncertain about what I wanted the blog’s title to be.

I thought “The Third Self” was a fitting title for what I wanted to write about: the arts and psychology. I’d been searching for a name that would convey the state of mind that gives birth to all sorts of creative processes and allows for uncertainties and freedom, and I found the poet Mary Oliver’s essay “Of Power and Time” from her Upstream: Collected Essays. Oliver writes about three selves, the first two of which she considers to be our “ordinary,” practical selves: a child self that we carry with us through our whole lives and try to continually integrate into our sense of who we are and a social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation.” Oliver describes a third self that she associates with “flow” and creativity. Writes Oliver, “Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.”

I am interested in both the process of creative thinking in all its contexts and also the products of creativity: the various visual and performing arts, as well as mainstream media and what they say to us and about us as a culture. My first academic love was examining these media and arts and their meanings. My second academic love was psychology and striving to understand the human mind, spirit, and emotions. And, on a more personal level, I have loved creating and exploring through making art and participating in dance and drama. My life has been so enriched by being able to read a book that moved me to tears, to watch a film that touched me, to walk through a museum full of masterpieces, to vicariously soar while watching a dancer, to lose myself in a song, to capture an image on “film” (or these days, digitally). Through this blog, I will be exploring these loves and seeing where they take me.