Creativity, pt. 1

I've been thinking about creativity a lot lately. Writing this blog is a creative act for me. In addition to writing, I love to knit, sew, felt, cook, bake, and decorate Ukrainian Easter eggs. Simply making things gives me so much pleasure. I don't feel as adept with drawing or painting, although in high school I was enamored of the work of Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter, and wanted nothing more than to illustrate children's books. But ... life took me on different pathways, as life so often does, and I ended up as an elementary school teacher who does all these other things on the side.

A few years ago I had an existential crisis that centered on my creativity. At the time I had young children, and was in a particularly stressful teaching situation. It felt to me as if I was being sucked dry: my well was dry and I had nothing left. I could barely get myself through a working day, then I would come home and sit in the dark with my fingers in my ears to block out ALL stimulation. It was a terrible feeling! (And hard on my family.) I did a lot of beating on myself -- "Why did I become a teacher? I should have become an artist!" -- pretty relentlessly.

I began working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and it was a great help to me. Doing the practices she suggested got me more focused on what I wanted my life to look like. I joined a couple of different groups of mostly women, who were also looking to make changes in their lives. And the funny thing was, I kind of did a full circle and ended up right back where I had been all along (kind of like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. No ruby slippers though.) With one difference: I was very clear that I wanted all the parts of my life to intertwine seamlessly with one another as much as possible.

Now about 8 years have gone by, and I'm in a very good place. I LOVE my job. I LOVE my community. I'm making music, which was a part of myself I had buried really deep for a long time. But I'm beginning to feel these stirrings in my soul that tell me I want something more, specifically I want to create more. So I turned once again to the myriad books that are available about awakening/reclaiming your creativity ... and they're just not doing it for me this time. In fact, for the most part they annoy me!

And I think it's because I know exactly what I need to do: If I want to create something, I need to just do it. I have all the materials at hand.

I also find that so much in the books is about the individual -- how to reclaim your creativity -- and so much of what moves me these days is community. The community of my classroom, my school, my Quaker meeting, my neighborhood ...

I want to write specifically about 2 books that I've recently gotten from the library, but I think I'll save them for a separate post.