In Search Of....Creativity
In Search Of....Creativity
So you think you canʻt write-draw-invent-innovate - HA!
Mahalo, thank you for showing up. For reading what I write. For showing up for others in your life every day. And I hope, for showing up for yourself. Itʻs summer time, many of you are on your vacations maybe even personal staycations but still I can see the number of views and am amazed to find there are people out there reading what I write. I have a little more to say about the creative urge so humor me here. And if you clicked through a random link or someone shared this or a previous post, you can enter your email address to become a subscriber (for free!) and get more writing once a week.
I hope some of you were intrigued by the idea of taking a (metaphorical) Staycation In Search Of whatever haunts you a bit. Or In Search Of whoever or whatever you know you are (or should be) In Search Of - a new career, a new approach, a new love, new frames for your glasses or for your points of view.
And then maybe some of you dismissed my idea as quickly as it arrived as not right for you. You are In Search Of…Advice because you believe the answers are outside of you. Also, I searched by writing, but you donʻt write. You donʻt draw or paint or sculpt. You just arenʻt creative or wise, you need a tour guide to show you the way. You fear you would go off alone in In Search Of that answer and get lost, so better to just double down on whatever is in your comfort zone. Or so you say. But Iʻm not buying it. Your personal mystery, the beating heart in your story, I can hear it. I can feel it. I can almost hum its tune.
You see I have a hangover from my 1,000 Words Of Summer literary staycation. Not the head hurting, throat parched, stomach sick kind of hangover. What I mean is my senses are still just a bit more attuned and watchful. My brain is unusually excitable over every new idea and story it encounters (watch out - those of you who know me know that my mind always follows the newest shiny thing like a cat pouncing on a tiny dot of laser light, so imagine it now!) My nights are filled with long, involved dreams in which whole worlds appear or are threatened by an alien invasion.
Everything and anything has more meaning with this heightened awareness. I see connections between disparate bits of information…like an interview with a gardener on a 4,000 square foot house lot in Northwest Ohio (not a typo, I did not mean Oʻahu) suggesting a whole new tack for me to take when educating newcomers to Hawaiʻi on knowing their place. By “knowing their place” I do not mean me finding a bit of real estate for them to buy in Hawaiʻi. I mean as part of that helping them understand this place, and their place within the entire context of island and culture in which they now find themselves. Or have lost themselves as the case may be. I found and lost and found myself here and I work at knowing my place every day.
Relationships take work.1
Creativity, on the other hand, does not take work. Its expression does, but not the creative impulse itself. The better name for that is “play.” Being creative is what little humans do, they do not have to be taught to do it, and neither do you as an adult. Every child is good at it, and so are you.
Hand a small child a crayon and a piece of paper or cardboard and they will begin to draw. While they draw, they tell a story out loud or whisper words to a nonsense song of their own invention. Let them loose on a beach or in a forest or a backyard and watch them construct forts with moats and winged unicorns out of stones and twigs and shells. I guess today kids probably quickly move on to Minecraft. Children learn about the world and their place in it through playful exploration and re-creation of it.
I remember the day I stopped drawing. The day that convinced me I had no talent or right to be an artist. I loved to draw as a child. I used my allowance to buy those booklets at the newsstand, the ones with step by step illustrations showing how to draw dogs or horses. Do those still exist? I suppose kids find that on YouTube now. Anyway, I would copy those drawings for hours. Then one day, one magical day when I was 9 or 10 years old, I was looking at my fist, fingernails facing towards me, and I suddenly saw it. Truly saw it. I grabbed a pencil and drew my fist.
Obviously not a childʻs fist. I stopped writing for 10 minutes, found a sketch pad and a pencil and let myself do something Iʻd be waiting almost sixty years to try again.
I ran excitedly to show to my parents, it felt like finally those hours spent copying out of the booklets had worked. I knew how to draw!
My parents barely gave my drawing a glance. They did not draw or paint. They valued knowing about art, had paintings and drawings and kachinas and soapstone sculpture from their travels. But the making of art was not a part of their upbringing, and I can see with 20/20 hindsight that they simply did not know.
I put the drawing of my fist away and stopped making art. I was 59 years old when I finally signed up for a Womenʻs Art and Yoga workshop at Kalani Retreat Center in Kalapana, Puna. As each participant introduced herself, I was shocked to discover that the other attendees were actual competent artists - as in they had work in gallery shows. But I knew I was in the right place - the two young women teaching the workshops were scholars and fans of environmental artist Vijali, with whom I had traveled to Tibet, and excited about that connection between us. I remembered that Vijali believed I could make art so I convinced myself they would too.
Why did I do a yoga-and-art staycation in 2015? Well letʻs see. That was the year of my divorce. The year I moved to a different home, with my 25-year-old hanai daughter and her 5-year old in tow. The year I suddenly found myself as Broker-in-Charge for three offices and 30 or so agents on the Big Island. In other words, a year of transition, breakdown, changes at once difficult and positive, changes sought and changes unbidden.
I instinctively turned to practices that would turn off my thinking mind and allow insights and answers and guidance to sneak up on me. Thatʻs the kind of re-set staycation Iʻm talking about.
The thing about the creative process is that our subconscious knows what we need to know before we know it consciously. It allows us to tune in to crazy universal intelligence, stuff to which we had no idea we had been given an all-access pass at birth. Suleika Jaouad wrote on her Substack this week about the first gallery exhibit of the art she began making two years ago when she was hospitalized with a recurrence of leukemia. She needed titles for each painting, and as she studied the paintings she began to understood the message in each one, as she put it, “the what and how and why of my subconscious mind.”
Even if you are perfectly content, you have read this patiently to the end but are not In Search Of anything right now, promise me youʻll take a little risk this week. Just shake things up a tiny bit. Drive a new route to the supermarket. Get off your phone and plant a single rose bush or hibiscus in a corner of the garden. Invite three new friends over for a dance party. Make a date with your granddaughter or nephew and go to a climbing wall. Or if climbing walls are your thing, take them to a pottery studio or a rodeo or volunteer together pulling weeds at a park.
Itʻs always a perfect moment to shake a little something loose.
I have written a lot about relationships and will keep writing about them in this Substack.