Quit the bitching on your blog and stop pretending art is hard, just limit yourself to three chords and do not practice daily…
- Amanda Palmer, Ukulele Anthem
So “A Month on Creativity” is a definite misnomer. I’ve been working on creativity (like all of us, whether we think so or not,) for my entire life. My childhood was spent deep in the trenches of my imagination, sometimes to the exclusion of anything happening in “real life,” man, the world I could create was incredible. My teen years were spent constantly writing stories and songs and observations in my journals and in University, I decided I wanted to make films so I spent four years studying theatre and film (and weirdly, German,) followed by a year internship at a local theatre company and a summer floating around Western Canada stage managing my best friends’ Fringe show.
Then, like all journeys, mine took a bit of a different course, (a seemingly unrelated course, but in hindsight, turns out it wasn’t so unrelated after all.) I traveled around Europe for a year and moved away from theatre and the business of art, but never away from creating. I learned how to play guitar, wrote poetry and songs and kept that journal going for my whole trip and it continues to this day (albeit, at a very amateur level.) Then I got pretty heavy into spirituality, married a spiritual dude and made a couple kids. As any parent knows, little kids pretty much suck up the entirety of one’s earthly existence, at least for awhile and my experience was no different. Creativity took on a different form during those early parenting years. More of a “how can I get 8 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period?” kind of thing. All the while the writing was there, even if it was for only 5 minutes a day.
With kids come kids’ stories. Of course, like most of us, we read stories to the kids before bed and when it was time for lights out and they still wanted a story, we just made them up. That’s where Bob came in. Exhausted of thinking of a story myself, I asked the kids to give me a topic and they said “an apple” and the story just went from there. When I saw my friend, Sachiko’s art, right away I asked if she would illustrate a kids’ book and to my great delight, she said “Yes!” (Well, she asked to read the story first to make sure it wasn’t shit, then she said “Yes!”) That was a couple of years ago and this month was focused on working on that book and doing all the things one has to do to get a book published. Which, turns out, is a lot of things. Still working on it.
I’m writing a kids’ book! Bob, The Apple - A sneak peak of the illustrations in process, beautifully created by the great talent, Sachiko Niebler.
So that’s that. If I were to offer any wise words gleaned through a month of focus on creativity, it would be this: just do it. Don’t think about it, don’t agonize over it, just do 5 or 60 or 360 minutes of something everyday and if you miss a day, do it the next day or the next, just do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a specific project or just making some random thing - a poem, a drawing, a cardboard cutout, a dance party, a journal entry, whatever it is, just make something. It doesn’t need to be good, it doesn’t even need to be seen by anyone other than you. The very act of putting effort towards some new endeavor exercises the creative muscle and gets you to the place where your imagination is not “merely a fantasy-generator,” but rather an “organ of perception” where you can find the sacred in the mundane and transform your everyday experience into something a hell of a lot more interesting.
If you’re sufficiently tuned into the gestalt of creation and pay close enough attention to its unfolding details, you can read the current mood of the universe in an arrangement of red onions in the grocery store bin or the fluttering of sunlight and shadow on the mimosa tree or the scatter of soap suds in your sink after you’ve finished washing the dishes.
Can you do it? Discern the signature of creation at this or any other perfect moment? Peer into the secret heart of the collective unconscious? Guess what the Goddess is thinking?
Hint: It will help if you keep working on transforming your imagination from a mere fantasy-generator into an organ of perception.
- Rob Brezsny
Some Resources I relied on this month for igniting creativity:
Books:
Art Matters, by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Chris Riddell
Let the Elephants Run: Unlock Your Creativity and Change Everything, by David Usher
The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
I also get regular emails from this little sweet little site:
www.brainpickings.org - Maria Popova features poets and the great creative geniuses of our time; this site is chock-full of thought-provoking inspiration.
There are so many more sources of inspiration out there, you’ll find the call to the universe to bring more creativity into your life will not go unheard. Make the call and you’ll see magic happen.