This is a space for every creative, but a special place is held for those of us who want to protect and cultivate our creativity as a hobby and as an everyday occurrence in life. Creating a creative practice that is flexible, yet reliable is a tall order, but one that is truly rewarding and peaceful. We all know that life and creativity are not always easy, smooth, or pretty. Days are hard, nights can be long, things go wrong in all kinds of crazy ways. The trick is to find the beauty in those moments, to protect our practice in a shroud of magic and romanticize the crap out of the good that we do have. We all have our ways of doing this, of romanticizing our lives and certain moments or activities. I want to share my way of romanticizing the creative life that I am trying to build.
Some background about me. I spent my childhood in Church every Sunday with my family. This practice of an hour of devotion to my faith each week was massively important to me. There were weeks when I would go on my own throughout university. It was during this period of my life that there was a significant life event that led to a separation of religion and faith in my worldview; the separation of dogma and institutional rules and the teachings of love and acceptance in the faith and I stopped going. When my husband and I got married (outside of the Church) it became apparent to me that it was important that we have our marriage recognized by the Church and that we decide to raise our children in the faith as well - if nothing else, then as a framework in which to view and operate within the world, choosing to accept, rebel, or question from a place of safety. We began going to Church together and had our marriage convalidated by the institution. I say all of this to place a lens on the conversation coming on the page.
When I was removed from the tradition and ritual and structure of the Church I never relinquished my worship of creativity - dance, writing, this blog, creativity as a life sustaining and meaning making practice really became a fundamental piece of who I was becoming in place of Church. When I returned to religion and Sunday service beyond my own faith in my heart, and I became reacquainted with the peace of the pews on Sunday and the delight of theological discussion, I realized that my creative practice, the creative life I was attempting to build was in service to that same feeling of peace, and sacred, holy joy. Two main revelations occurred for me to draw this conclusion. 1) I examined the threads of the the things I’ve loved to do throughout my life - dance ,writing, reading, working out, teaching - and all of them, at their core, require and are in service to creativity, much like faith undermines our daily decisions, interactions, and meaning making in our lives. 2) The language I used when I started writing this blog around what creativity was, how it felt, what it meant to me - words like sacred, holy, grace filled, ritual - all of them paralleled in the Church and reflected the tradition and structure I was missing.
The other attribute I associate with this idea of romanticising creativity and the good we have in life stems from being, as many writers and creatives will tell you, a hopeless romantic. Most people think that a hopeless romantic always sees the world through rose coloured glasses and spends too much time daydreaming. While that may be true some of the time, at other times it can look like feeling all the feelings, maybe a little more deeply than anticipated including the not so pleasant ones. We want to fall in love with everything, not just another person, but with our lives. When we think about the type of life we long for, the one we want to build, what does that look like? How does it feel? I often find myself using these words and phrases to describe the best activities and pieces of my life, so why not use them to describe the whole damn thing? By doing this, we are choosing to believe in something bigger than ourselves out there, being part of our inspiration, faith, love, joy. Call it what you will, when we choose to live a certain way we choose to give ourselves the best version of our lives that we can. Join me as I walk through the ways I romanticize my creative life.
Sacred - My creativity is a time and an activity that deserves time, space, and attention. It is a practice that requires devotion and protection.
Divine - It is not simply a thing I do. It is a gift I get to channel into this world; to create something that didn’t exist before. To share pieces of my soul with others.
Reverence - It is deserving of respect in my approach, my diligence, my speech, and the way I share it with others.
Grace - It gives and is deserving of grace in my life; to have gentleness reflected from it into my life, and to be handled with understanding, free of guilt or shame, both when I partake of it, and when I must leave it alone.
Ritual - Creativity is a practice and activity that we engage with, often repetitive in nature, familiar and recurring.
Though all of these terms are romantic and generous and indulgent in nature, I by no means treat my creativity or the work that it produces as being precious. What I mean to say is, although I honour, respect, and cultivate a feeling of awe and serenity around my creativity, I also love having it be at the center of life, unexpected, and at times cringe worthy, and that is still adhering to the romanticized notion of it pictured above. Just because I want to protect the time and practice of creativity I build, doesn’t mean I protect it to the point of exclusivity or believing that it is too precious to be torn apart or trashed.
In the same way faith or family or marriage are sacred and romantic and ideal, they are also real and messy and imperfect. It’s about the way we choose to approach and honour these commitments that makes them, in essence, holy. Now I don’t know about you, but if integrating creativity in my life helps me view every other aspect of my life in this way too, that’s the way I’d prefer to live.
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