52
Projects is an exploration of your creativity -- a way of
turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and finding a flash of
inspiration in our everyday lives. Memory inducing and life-affirming
writing exercises; photographic assignments that capture the essence
of fleeting moments and times that you wish could last forever;
exploration of the arts — from the culinary to the literary;
ideas for giving from the heart; mail art that seals in and delivers
the true treasure of friendship; video- and tape-recording schemes
that secure for the future an unedited and unfiltered understanding
of the past; ideas to document and preserve the little details that
make up the life you are living; archeological digs through cluttered
drawers and dusty boxes; and adventures that take you to places that
you have never been before, even though they're right in front of you.
The only materials
required are already within you: memories, creative energy and
imagination. Skill level and age are irrelevant, and the cost of
making the projects ranges from very inexpensive to nothing at all.
The projects can take an hour or a lifetime.
Whether you write,
paint, draw, sculpt, carve, dance, sing, play music, take
photographs, cook (or even if you don't know what your medium is) --
use 52 Projects as a tool to discover the art of your life and
inspire your next creative endeavor.
Project
#33
FIND THE FIRST
POEM YOU EVER WROTE.
Read it over. Try
to remember the story of why you wrote it, what inspired you, and who
it was for. Write it all down.
Then, write a new
poem. Once you're done, date it, and put your first poem and the new
one back in the place where you found the first one, so that they can
both be rediscovered at some point in the future.
5 Variations on
Project #33
33.1 Find
the first story you ever wrote. Give it a good read and spend some
time enjoying the memory of how you came up with the idea and put it
down on paper. Then, rewrite the story.
33.2 Find
the first letter you got during your high school years. Look up the
person who penned the note, and then send a reply. (Enclose a copy of
the original letter.)
33.3 Find
your first journal. Sit down and read it all the way through (as
painful as that might be), making notes in your current journal along
the way. What can you remember like it happened yesterday? What
extremely significant event, as covered in one or more entries, is
something that you can't, for the life of you, remember at all? What
makes you blush, and what brings it all back? What makes you think,
"What the hell was I thinking?" What makes you wish you
could go back in time and do it all over again? What makes you thank
God it's all over? What's it like rediscovering the early discoveries
of your life, as written down in your first journal? What lessons
have you learned, it seems, over and over again?
33.4 Find
the first pictures you ever took with your very first camera.
33.5 Find
the very first picture ever taken of you with the love of your life.
Featured Product:
by
Jeffrey Yamaguchi