creating is hard

So, I was talking to a friend on the phone this weekend, and we were discussing creativity and art. I quoted (or paraphrased) from Dorothy L. Sayers' The Mind of the Maker, saying, "The first thing -- the very first thing -- we learn about God from the first verses of the Bible is that He's a creator. And, if we are made in His image, that means we're creators too."

On a bigger, broader scale, this means that I'm going to begin more ruthlessly honing my own gifts as a writer to submit articles, fiction, and poetry for publication; but today, I was content simply having gone to church, and came home determined to recreate my apartment, which in the wake of a month of dragging sluggishness has fallen to crap.

But since I actually hate cleaning, I narrowed my eyes at a few large white spaces on the wall that I'm slowly covering with small, cheaply framed photographs and old postcards (and I mean old. Some of them have hit a hundred) and decided to hang a few more.

The problem with cheap picture frames is that most of them, inexplicably, aren't made to hang from walls anymore, but to clutter up flat surfaces; so you have to drill or pick or poke or scrape nail and screw holes (screws for some because I kept running into studs) into the wood or cardboard, and hope you can get the balance right. (My dad spends hours hanging pictures, measuring and drawing lots of x's on the walls in pencil; I have a sort of whimsical approach born of sloth and impatience, and bang the nails in helter-skelter, and pull them out if they don't work the first time. I like trial and error.) I'm also creatively incorporating one corner into the overall effect, and fitting nails in such a way as to allow pictures to hang across the corner, facing out at an angle.

The look is neat, if I do say so myself, but the problem with such precarious hanging situations in the no-wall-holes/balanced-on-nails-in-the-corner frames is that every time you start to pound another nail in, about five pictures come crashing off the walls.

I managed it all right, with a lot of grumping and stubbornness, but it made me think that making a workable, attractive something out of a conglomeration of somethings is hard enough, let alone a unified, diverse, interdependent, beautiful, perfect something out of nothing. Talk about awesome.

And I'll bet Mars didn't keep hitting God in the forehead while He was working on the exact angle for Earth.