What’s Your Relationship With Creativity?

2/8/22

Dear friend,

This month in the Light House, we've started working with the monthly theme of courting creativity, led by one of our community members, visual artist and contemplative creative Kathryn Coneway.

It's such a fun and evocative topic, as Kathryn is inviting us to notice our relationship with creativity in a number of ways throughout the month.

For example, in our first gathering time together last week, she invited us to consider how we would describe our relationship with creativity.

She posed possibilities like:

• Casually dating

• Feeling rejected, let down

• Looking for love

• In need of a matchmaker

• Swiping right (or left), browsing

• Needing some spice

• Staying on the sidelines

Aren't these fantastic ways of thinking about this? I love how creative the metaphor is in its own right.

I wonder how you would answer the prompt for yourself.

For me, I was surprised to discover a lack of spontaneity in my relationship with creativity.

Now, I'll start by saying I spend a lot of time being creative in my work. It's one of the biggest parts of what I do, and also one my favorite parts about it—the chance to spend a lot of time creating all kinds of things.

But when I paused to notice my relationship with that creativity—specifically, what it's like for me to be in a back-and-forth, mutual relationship with it—I couldn't help but notice that I don't leave a lot of room for creativity to have an equal presence and voice with me in the relationship.

I will put it this way: I'm not particularly prone to losing control in my relationship with creativity.

Whether it's something as small as writing an Instagram caption or something as large as creating an online course, I keep a pretty firm hold on the creative process. I get an idea, but that's about as far as creativity's contribution to the process goes. From there, I create to the idea I received, but it's mostly all done by me, with not much (if any) room for creativity to still be there, having a voice or showing up with new ideas along the way.

I wonder how much I'm missing out on, due to this dynamic?

I noticed this lack of surprise and spontaneity in my creative hobbies too.

My favorite creative hobby is cross-stitch. I love to sit on the couch at night, stitching my way across a piece of cloth while Kirk and I watch a favorite show on Netflix.

But this particular creative hobby lacks surprise, discovery, or improvisation. From the counted pattern I follow to the embroidery thread colors I use, the entire experience is prescribed. There is zero part of the experience that asks me to give myself over to something that might emerge unexpectedly and invite me to follow it.

In fact, the only place I've experienced a "let's see where this goes" kind of relationship with creativity is with a novel I started working on a little over a year ago. It's a historical fiction project, and every piece of working on it, from the characters to the storyline to the settings to the research, has felt like following a scavenger hunt, going from place to place and gathering up pieces as I go, curious all the while where it is leading me and having absolutely no idea where that might be.

I have loved it. It's really fun! Like curiosity and discovery and surprise and "what if," all rolled up into one, the entire time.

But that's not the usual way I create.

And that is feeling worth noticing and sitting with and wondering about.

What about you?

When you pause and notice your relationship with creativity, is there a way you'd describe it? Does anything surprise you about that?

Yours in contemplative light,
Christianne