What does your creative practice look like?
Mine looks a bit like this:
Nature walks and swimming in the sea,
Photography and collage,
Embroidery and working with found objects,
Staring at the wall and driving in silence,
Conversations with friends,
Gardening by trial and error (mostly error) and throwing a meal together without a recipe,
Political memes and computer games,
Mothering and unschooling,
Stories and books and songs and writing down words as they come to me.
My creative practice looks like all of the above, and so much more in-between. All of them important, all of them valid, all forming an indispensable part of the wide spectrum of my creativity.
This idea of creative practice as a spectrum – not unlike the neurodivergence spectrum – comes from my friend Melody Vaughan and this beautiful piece they wrote recently. Melody’s writing provided me with inspiration and language to express this idea of a creative practice – of creative life itself – as a wheel, instead of a list.
A wheel or a spectrum doesn’t force you to order things like a list does, doesn’t create a hierarchy, and invites you to think about cycles and various sources of creativity instead of a rigid, limiting structure where some forms of creativity are valued – and rewarded – more than others.
It allows it – you! – to ebb and flow with the seasons, with your energy levels, with your curiosity, with your hyper-focus periods. There is no shame in letting one part of your creative practice go into hibernation. To not pick up the camera for months, or not wanting to write another word for weeks, to let things compost and take root, invisible until they are ready to peek out from the soil.
It’s particularly present for me right now, as we are heading towards the darkest time of the year, the time where nature rests – but we humans are expected to just keep plugging along, with no opportunity to pause, for things to germinate and to be revealed come spring time.
I’m resisting this urge to be hyper-productive, to keep playing the game at all costs. I’m allowing myself to slow down, to connect, to think and to play without an expectation of a result.
Because, frankly, you never know how one thing might lead to another.
So, tell me, how does your creativity look like right now?
What parts of it are alive right now and what parts need to compost or hibernate?
I’ll leave you with this quote from Katherine May and her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times: “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
