Feeling creative is, for some of us, a life-support function – especially in recent times.
It’s easiest for those who have shelter and food, while holding awareness of those who don’t. For hundreds of millions, just thinking up and acting on the next step toward survival — if survival is still possible — are supremely creative acts. For me, newly appreciating my relative safety, it requires multiple shifts of attention. If the creative spark here can reach you, I hope you can save it for later if life is too precarious to shift attention. I also hope you can let it warm you now.
Sensing the creative spirit may take extra effort: The ways we expressed and enacted our best in the Before Times may no longer be available, so we may have to go deeper. Maybe all the way to outer space, the way Carl Sagan did in his “pale blue dot” comments on Earth as a tiny blip in the cosmic field:
“That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
Ideally, this idea will crack apart loops of thought or feeling that are impeding inspiration or confidence. Lifting the mind to the heavens can put pain in a larger context and let the beauty of the stars be known in our bodies (we are star stuff), somehow softening the edges of our experience, making it more shared, more vast. This time of year, in the northern hemisphere, people instinctively focus on the night sky, looking for light in the pervasive darkness.
How to create something new and worthwhile in the middle of all this? First it has to feel okay to take time to try, knowing you’re empowering yourself to be of benefit to others – whom you haven’t abandoned by focusing inward for a little while. As for technique, I’ve spoken with readers who remember Julia Cameron’s first blockbuster, The Artist’s Way, chock-a-block with ways to find one’s personal muse. Fewer remember the sequel The Vein of Gold. Both had a tone so lighthearted that the flavor doesn’t fit today’s mood. But an idea from Vein of Gold keeps coming back to me.
The idea is to recognize what lights you up, to open completely to it, and then express the essence of it in your own way (not copying its appearance but sensing the inner magic of it, and thus the magic in you). To begin: Every day, make a list of every moment that elicits appreciation in you – every encounter, every piece of good news, every sight or sound or taste or smell or touch or idea that made being alive a source of gladness. Notice every detail of why it delights you, and write what you feel. Even announcements about beneficial efforts being made elsewhere can be a source of en-courage-ment and inspiration. The list includes treasured memories too, as long as they’re evoked in sensory detail, allowing them to reawaken as a felt sense in the present moment. The key is to start identifying the pattern in what lights you up: projects that resonate within this vein, with these threads, are thus doubly rewarding.
This practice also has the effect of tuning your perception to be more alert to these phenomena when they arise in your environment – waking and dreaming, day or night. With practice, even daily details that had gone unnoticed might start to glow. Visualizations, associations, metaphors, and revelations might float to the surface.
Here’s where the transformation process blends with artistry: Not only can you get lit up by spontaneous joy more frequently, but you can use horrible-feeling experiences as a starting point, whether they come in response to the news or to personal encounters. Take out a piece of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle. On one side, write a detailed description of an unwelcome sensation, and on the other side, describe the sensation you’d wish for instead, its opposite. It’s the first step in associating the difficult feelings with remembrance of the missing beauty they represent, and then rekindling awareness that the beauty is still active within, is part of you.
The energetics of dramatic change during this process can also launch outer arts and activities. But even without creating outer art, you’ve created a higher-vibrating being, more capable of being harmonious and helpful in the world.
If all this feels like too much work right now, a beautiful way to find comforting resonance – in fully acknowledging the pain of the world in this moment – might be to read Terry Tempest Williams’s “Unraveling.” She comes to the threads at a different point in the process.
In writing this, I wondered what my own gold threads in the dark might be. My immersions in imagining new worlds (by reading and writing speculative fiction) have imprinted themselves so deeply into my psyche that every new piece of troubling news ignites an impulse to design something better, to world-build a speculative tomorrow. My enthusiasm led me to search for others with the same inclinations, and I’m happy to report that they’re out there. This new connection is even merging with gold threads from my past, focused on ingenious solutions from Nature, and they are both getting brighter in the combination.
I’ll send these vein-of-gold threads into web-space and keep looking for further resonant threads weaving toward me. That process is a miracle in itself, with our tiny dot traveling at 67,000 mph around the Sun, 490,000 mph around the center of our galaxy. I feel infinitely small on this pale blue dot, yet the miracle is still alive in the gold threads I weave. I believe you can find even more of your own glowing threads than you already know about. Maybe we’ll meet at some new loom in the coming world.
Photo credit: Pixabay