The Ice Frog

// October 19th, 2009 // creativity

We all know the story of the frog in the pot.

A frog dropped into a slowly heating pot of water is unable to notice the rising temperature and, not knowing to jump out of the pot, is boiled alive. It’s a great metaphor to illustrate the necessity of action in the face of impending doom.

When working on creativity issues a more common scenario arises at the opposite end of the spectrum, where the doom is not impending but ancient history. This situation is often the starting point for people when they begin to consciously work at being more creative. It calls for a new frog metaphor entirely–The Ice Frog.

The Ice Frog has arrived in your life when the warm pulse of creativity has slowed, then been frozen, by long periods of doubt and inaction.

My most memorable encounter with the ice frog began as I left a job many years ago with laughter ringing in my ears after after telling my manager and assistant manager that I was resigning to have a shot at becoming a professional cartoonist.Over the next year or so there were lots of rejections, I actually failed to get a single cartoon published. But it was the the disbelief and laughter of my bosses that I carried inside my head throughout that period which eventually gave birth to the Ice Frog.

After 12 months I gave up and got another (lower paying) office job and did very little drawing. For a long time.

The chilling pronouncements of those around us, when taken on board, can eventually freeze any outward creative movement Those who face this barrage often hold fast to their creative impulses by going underground, isolating themselves from further criticism. Which would be fine, except often these critical outside voices become stamped into our consciousness with enough force that they often reincarnate. Usually as a part of us that takes on the role of a savage inner critic.

Just as a frog freezes first on the outside and then through to it’s core, the inner critic is the mechanism through which our creative inspiration hardens and stills.Energy is blocked. To the point that even when the impulse is there, the physical form is frozen solid. Writer’s block, painters block, stage fright, any form of demobilizing panic, this is the point where serious work needs to be done.

The Ice Frog is not just physically frozen, but also frozen in time. The real loss here is not just the current capacity to create but the lost opportunity of creative growth that could be happening. The gaining of greater and new technical skills, and understanding of our chosen art-form that we would have attained had we been creating.

Ice also distorts vision. From inside this frozen state there can be a sense that things will always be this way: stuck, blurred, fractured into disorienting shapes. It becomes easy to believe that you may never create again.

This is false. Creativity is an inner quality that can be pinned down or buried, but is always capable of being brought back to life. So, how do we bring the Ice Frog back to life?

Warmth. For me it was the warmth of my own attention, my own presence, to my creative practice.

Reading Frederick Frank’s ‘The Zen of Seeing’ was what began ‘defrosting’ my own Ice Frog. It helped me find a willingness to build a new relationship to creativity that wasn’t based on outside evaluation of my art. I began to draw just for the sake of drawing. My sketchbooks from that time contained page after page of sketches my own feet, coffee cups, tottering book piles. I just sat there, present to my own circumstances and drew what I found. With whatever ability I had. This was enough.

Building up this warm, attentive relationship to my drawing feels so right to me. I’ve read of other approaches for addressing creative stuckness and they so often come across as the equivalent of smashing the Ice Frog with a hockey stick, or taking to it with an ice pick. That just seems so counter productive to me. The energy of that response is too close to that of the people around us who so often devalue and belittle our creativity int he first place. Sure a solid hit with the hockey stick might get you some sense of  movement, but what quality of movement? The ice pick might get through the ice and reach the frog. But at what cost?

I kind of like that those sketches so often focused on my feet. How fitting that the warmth began it’s return through the extremities and worked it’s way inward. Over time more and more creative energy opened up as the blood began to flow through my creative body, my Ice Frog. My love for drawing and cartooning returned and soon I was drawing nearly every day again. It was a long time before I started putting any of my work out there for others to see, but the road back had begun.