The Magic of Collage

I’ve been playing with digital art for about 8 months now, and in that time, I’ve fallen in love with the practice + process of collage -- not only as an art form but also as a way of seeing + relating + building.

In my collage art, I take bits from lots of different images + put them together in new ways.

Which is a fractal of something much bigger.

In a way, anything we make is collage, and creating collage art has tuned me in to how I practice this -- and how I might practice it more in other ways.

First, collage requires us to make the most of what we have.

When I make my art, I’m working with the images I can find (a built-in limit + occasional source of frustration).

Sometimes, I have a vision in my head, but I can’t find what I’m looking for, so I have to use something else + try to fit it all together in a different way.

But getting inventive when the raw materials are less than ideal is a useful skill in art + life.

I think of this past year -- how we all did what we could to make life livable + functional in a pandemic -- how we figured out zoom + home offices + virtual school, explored new hobbies, connected in different ways, and more.

Life became a patchwork of different threads. And that definitely didn’t make it all okay. There’s been lots of grief, loss, and chaos.

But lots of creativity + possibility + change too. Because we had no choice but to rearrange the pieces of our lives to create a different collage than the one we expected.

I also think about how a collage often starts with one tiny magical thing.

Sometimes, a complete vision comes to me for an art piece that I want to bring into form. But more often than not, I start with one bit of one image that feels electric + alive -- a person, shape, landscape, object, etc. -- and then explore how I might build a whole story + complete work of art around it.

These fragments + treasures become the magnets that pull in more ideas + move the currents of creativity.

Sometimes, all we need is one bit of magic, one touchstone that feels alive, one special ingredient to get started.

We can build a lot from a single seed of possibility.

And finally, there’s magic in collage around what happens in the layering, touching, and relating.

Because a collage is more than a collection of images that look good together. It becomes something other + something more.

The bringing together of what we don’t always expect but inexplicably works is a wonder.

It opens possibility, challenges expectations, and inspires us to keep exploring + creating.

So if this resonates, I definitely recommend collage as a creative + spiritual practice. What might you collect, bring together, and create?

Going Back In

What choice do we have but to keep going?

This is something I remind myself when I’m feeling frustrated by a (seemingly) impossible goal or project, slow progress, or lackluster outcomes - in my own life and/or in the collective.

When I hit a creative block, when I try something and it doesn’t work, or when I feel stuck on a project, there’s sometimes a moment when I wonder: is this the Universe finally telling me I’m a failure and it’s time to give up?

But I pull by myself back by 1) telling myself everything I know about how creativity, mastery, progress, and life work 2) asking: would quitting actually help anything? (probably not) 3) remembering that the trying itself has value.

There are times to reevaluate and change course around the details, but my intention to live a deep life means I need to keep going and always be stepping toward creativity, learning, and connection.

I think about this too in terms of our collective efforts to dismantle systems of oppression, respond to climate crisis, and build a more just society. Anyone who cares about these issues or is involved in movement work knows what it is to wrestle with despair and discouragement, to stare down impossibility and wonder where we go from here. But what would it even mean to give up on the vision?

When we’re aligned with our deepest values and moved by love, we keep going. We don’t even get to decide. We flow; we move; we engage; we connect. We find whatever hope and aliveness exist in the trying.

I’m finding more and more that living a good, deep, creative life is just a series of going’s back in, a commitment to following love to its obvious conclusion and steadfast directive:

Onward.

Cultivating Devotion over Perfection

One of my best practices for overcoming my perfectionist tendencies is to cultivate a mindset of devotion.

For me, this means remembering that creativity, at its core, is about a commitment I’m making to myself and to my process of *becoming a person who creates consistently*, no matter the outcome.

So rather than getting stuck on one small part, trying to make my creations perfect, or obsessing over merits and metrics, I remember I’m *creating a body of work*. 

And a body of work requires me to keep moving, keep trying, and keep creating – in a spirit of devotion.

This gets me in a headspace of remembering that creativity is an ongoing, unfolding practice of becoming and stepping into stretchy identities (writer, artist, coach, etc.) – so if I’m creating and moving forward, this means I’m already succeeding and meeting my goals.

So when I put something out into the world and it falls flat or when I try something new and I fail or when I feel like my creative magic has disappeared, I return to this question: what am I most devoted to?  What am I trying to create for myself at the deepest level?  These questions help me find my way back to something good and true for me.

My own commitment is to live an out-loud, alive, creative life.  What’s yours?  And how it that vision guiding your life, process, and day-to-day?

Creating When You Don't Feel Good

I had a life-changing realization recently that I don’t have to feel good to create.

Much to my surprise, I’ve found that I can sit down to write, paint, or make something when I’m not feeling amazing.

And perhaps this is obvious, but it was sure a revelation to me.

Here’s a nuanced distinction I wasn’t quite getting:

Being connected and in flow with good energy matters in creativity. It definitely helps to have access to my vision and imagination. It’s good to have a solid energetic grounding in what gives my creativity life.

But this isn’t the same thing as feeling emotionally good.

The work I do to cultivate and plug into my deep creative energies is something I do on an ongoing, regular basis and not something I have to capture in a moment in order to do a thing in the material world. I can trust the inner work I’ve done already and also trust myself to access it when it matters, even if I don’t feel it emotionally.

(Plus, it is often the act of creating – actually doing the work – that connects me with good energy and gets me feeling good and in flow).

So sharing in case it’s helpful. As someone who personally benefits from so much of y’all’s creativity, I never want to pass up an opportunity to encourage folks to keep going. The world needs your art.

The Invitation of Creative Urgency

Creativity is urgent and insistent. Our art, our vocations, our activism, our work in the world – it all matters. It all carries weight and significance.

But I’ve often resisted this urgency, conflating it with the demands of a hyperactive dominant culture that pushes us to be productive at all costs.

What I’ve come to realize is that our creative urgency is a different thing than the urgency of panicked striving that disregards the organic cycles and processes that support our creative energies.

Creative urgency is real – and an important thing to feel, I think. It speaks to the necessity of vision, imagination, ideas, and art in our world. And we can listen and respond to this urgency without interpreting it through the lenses of oppressive systems that will always and forever tell us we’re not enough, and that we’d better push ourselves to the edge of destruction in an attempt to prove otherwise.

The urgency of my creativity is not the urgency of capitalism (which always demands I do more, produce more, and be more), and when I feel urgency, I’ve found it super important to take a moment to discern which sort I’m experiencing. The former pulls me forward, invites me into bigness, connects me with power, and inspires vision and possibility. The latter has me preoccupied with measurement, comparison, panicked striving, and external expectation. It’s an urgency that kills the best parts of my creativity.

And so while I do ask my creativity to produce for me (as some of my work in the world asks for that), I also take intentional breaks to separate creativity and production – to set aside space free from judgment and expectation: space for process, flow, and experimentation. And perhaps most importantly, I do not ask my creativity to “prove” anything about me – my enoughness, worthiness, giftedness, etc.

Our creativity is urgent because it’s a portal through which we step into and open spaces of power, aliveness, hope, and possibility. And these are all things we need, things the world needs. So when that urgency rises up in you, pay attention and follow its lead. It’s calling for something big and important.

Creativity and the Deeper Thing

On the creative path, there are all sorts of ways to get tangled up and pulled off course by fear, perfectionism, and beliefs we hold around productivity, enoughness, and visibility. It’s a simple enough (though not always easy) process to dive into these pieces and do the work to get somewhere good, but in my experience, there is another essential step in uncorking creative flow.

And it’s basically finding a way to remember that creativity is always bigger and deeper than the thing we’re creating.

I’ve found it helpful to have regular conversations with my creativity, and here’s one way to do this: remember a time you felt connection, exhilaration, flow, resonance, freedom, love, etc. in your creative process; get anchored in how that feels or shows up in your body; and then step into that feeling to “take on” its consciousness and channel its energy. From there you can journal from its perspective, ask it questions, or allow it to guide your creative process.

This is what I consistently find when I do some variation of this exercise with clients: there is always a depth of wisdom, spirit, or vastness present. Which doesn't surprise me because our creativity is a holy and alive thing.

And when we can connect to the depth and vastness of our creativity, we step into a whole other frequency of energy, one that can't really support or sustain our fear.

And while it may not be possible to live here all the time, even a glimpse of it can start to change things.

And this is why it matters to me that more folks find a way to unleash their creative power: because it’s more than what we make with it – it’s the energy inside and beyond us – the light, connection, and resonance we share with the world and pour into the collective.

So if you feel creatively stuck, see if you can find your way into the deeper thing, the underlying energy of power that wants to pull you into all manner of creative goodness and possibility. I'd love to hear how it goes : )

Art as Hope

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that art reemerged in my life at this particular moment – that my impulse to begin tinkering with watercolors happened in the midst of deep grief, hard uncertainty, and painful despair.

There have been some really hard things happening in our country and world, and I realized at some point along the way that denying, minimizing, or bypassing any of it would never work. I had to accept its realness. My task is not to make the horror other than it is. My task is to find a depth of beauty that matches the depth of despair – to find a goodness that can stand its ground and hold its truth in the presence of swirling grief.

When we have been pulled into new depths of despair, it simply means we have to go deeper to find a love that can meet it.

Art helps.

When I’m tempted to believe I’m powerless, creativity reminds me that no, actually I am still in possession of immense power. Because when I’m creating, I’m using the power of my aliveness to dream up visions, put energy into form, and recognize beauty. Art – my own and others – reminds me that aliveness is thriving, as is our collective power.

In other words, art is an answer to despair and creativity is an act of hope. Because it’s hard to keep believing there is no possibility when I am literally creating it inside of me.

So please keep creating, friends. Your art matters.

The World Needs Your Art

Six months ago, I was not painting. In fact, I had not picked up a paintbrush in more than a decade.

Five months ago, I brought home some watercolor supplies and started dabbling.

Three months ago, I started painting a lot and sharing my work.

Art has been the lightning-bolt epiphany of my 2018.

I am so happy to be making art, and although I can appreciate and understand the timing of it all, I am also sad there was a decade of my life that I wasn’t.

I had two primary objections to creating art of my own: I believed it didn’t really matter (or at the least the kind of art I would make wouldn’t really matter), and I believed I was not artistically gifted enough.

The shift started when I heard Fabeku Fatunmise talk about art and how/why it matters - that art is a transmission of energy and talisman of magic. I began to see for myself how art is a portal into a language, experience, and world beyond words, how art creates a bridge into what we can access no other way.

I began to notice how art was transforming me. And then I began to imagine how I might take the energy inside of me and make it into shapes, forms, and images on paper too.

Suddenly, it didn’t really matter how much talent I had. I wasn’t trying to paint a picture that could be mistaken for a photograph; I was trying to take an energy inside of me and make a thing that transmitted that same power and frequency.

Art has created so much magic and connection in my life this year – as I’ve taken in others’ art and shared my own.

If you have your own objections to making whatever art calls to you, I hope you recognize those as the lies they are - and see that the world needs your art and will be a more magical and alive place if you create it.

Creativity, Aliveness, and Hope

This is what I’ve come to believe about creativity:

1) We do not create creativity. Our creative power just is. We support it, free it, nourish it, and channel it, but we do not make it because it already and always exists.

2) Creativity and aliveness are the same thing. Creativity is simply the energy of our life-force reaching beyond the boundaries of our selves to find expression in some tangible form – words, images, colors, objects, ideas, connections, etc.

3) Our aliveness is always pulling us forward into vision and creation. Creativity then is simply a matter of uncorking what is already alive within us.

I find this perspective incredibly hopeful. Because it means that all our visions and dreams, all we hope to create in and for the world, begins with what we already have within us. It also means that we actualize the changes and visions we want for the world with the same energy and power that animates our existence and being. And to get started, we don’t have to look any further than our own heartbeat.

Language, Art, and Possibility

When I was 15, I decided I was going to learn Spanish. I studied hard in school and lived in Peru for four months to make that happen, and learning (and more or less retaining) Spanish remains one of the life accomplishments I’m most proud of and thankful for.

Language is a dazzlingly gorgeous thing.

Held within any language is an entire universe. I quickly found that learning Spanish was not a simple acquisition of skill. It was a newfound connection to millions of people and many more throughout time. Entire lives and civilizations lived and died inside this container of words.

Language holds so much. Power. History. Culture. Connection.

As I learned, I was incrementally granted access to whole new schemas of meaning and frameworks of reality. My brain sprouted new pathways. There were also Spanish-induced changes to my embodied self. The muscle memory of my mouth, cheeks, and tongue shifted so much while I was in Peru that when I return to the states, I stuttered and stammered for awhile in the aftermath of the abrupt transition from Romantic to Germanic, as English came less easily out of my face.

We need languages, all sorts of them, including those beyond words to express, create, connect, and decipher. They are the “ways in” to what we know, feel, experience, and desire.

I’m learning that art is one of those essential languages. It conveys what is wordless but real, formless but present. It opens dimensions and perspectives words cannot.

I suddenly became fascinated with art a few months ago when I was introduced to the idea of art as talisman (h/t Fabeku Fatunmise) - an object that holds and transmits power, meaning, and possibility. Inspired, I commissioned a piece and purchased another, and then I wondered: wait, could I do this?

The answer is yes. We can all do this.

So I did, and I am, and it is changing me and my world as much as Spanish did.

Just as there is power in our words, there is power in our art. There is power in expression and creation of all kinds.

So what wants to become fluent within you? Which languages want to be spoken through you? And what bridges between self and world will you construct next?

Compost and Creativity

For the past several years, I’ve been on a mission to embrace, explore, and express my creativity - basically, reclaim it from the clutches of academia, where creativity was encouraged, but limited to the parameters of the Chicago Manual of Style and the norms of scholarly discourse.  Since then, creativity has infused my life with newfound vitality, expansion, and imagination.  It’s propelled me toward risk and adventure.  It’s led me to new edges of self-expression.  And as with any energetic leap forward, it’s also illuminated some patterns and shadows to be processed and untangled along the way.

Productivity is one of the more consistent themes that’s come up in the process.  I often notice that when I’m unproductive in my creativity (like when I feel energetically blocked or artistically blobby), I get frustrated and a little panicked over the time and energy I’m wasting and losing in the process.  

When I’ve looked more closely at all of this, I realize: it isn’t untrue.  I do waste a lot of time, energy, and potential.  I throw away a lot of what I create or could create.  And this is okay.  More than that, it’s essential.

Because we are organic and evolving creatures, our systems need space, give, and excess.  And our creative projects, also organic and evolving, need the same.  We need the nourishment of composted waste and recycled dead things to continue to grow and expand.

As I’ve found again and again, creativity defies notions of productivity as linear progression and absolute efficiency (which is what makes art such a fierce, defiant, and effective challenge to capitalism, as well as an essential tool in rewriting narratives around value, labor, and production). Whereas capitalism tells us we need to function like machines – staying in zones of activation, overdrawing our resources, and maximizing output at all times– creativity reminds us that moments of stagnation and slowness are part of the process, which not only allows for convoluted wanderings and wasteful inefficiencies, but actually requires them.

Whenever I waste my creative potential – for whatever reason – I am often tempted to either send it away to a landfill so I don’t have see or deal with what I lost, or, out of denial, stuff it in a jar with some preservatives and put it on a shelf, so that I can pretend nothing is lost. 

But there’s also a third option I’ve been trying to practice more and more.  And that is composting the wasted thing – burying it in my own garden, so that it can be recycled and incorporated back into my system.  But here’s the thing: the catalysts that instigate this composting process are the feelings of grief, regret, and frustration over what was wasted.  I have to feel this stuff to compost the loss.  Which means I carry the residue of the loss (even as it’s transmuted and transfigured) in my garden forever. 

But this is creativity and creation in general.  Waste, death, and break-down are part of what makes it possible and sustainable – together with the beauty, flow, and alchemy, all of it opening a path ahead that – paradoxically – is both well-worn and uncharted.

Claiming Creative Energy

For several months now, I’ve been swept up in a tidal wave of creative energy, a force that seems to be steadily rising in both power and momentum.   Which is awesome (and super fun!) but also sort of feels like bad timing, mainly because I’m in the middle of moderately concerning health crisis that will presumably, at some point in the near future, require ample doses of rest, slowness, and restoration.  So what am I supposed to do with all this energy that wants to act, build, and expand?  Couldn’t we have saved it all for a more convenient time?

But then a friend helped me see how I was needlessly making this into a mutually exclusive paradox.  Because while creativity often pushes me outward and forward, this is not the only option.  Creativity also pulls me inward.  And channeling my creative energy into my own healing, internal process, and personal catharsis is a perfectly suitable use for it.

I share this because it reflected back to me an important lesson and an obvious truth I was missing.  Basically, I am a worthy recipient of my own best energy, and my creativity is not just for the world; it is for me.

It is entirely okay to give what is most energizing and electric in our lives to ourselves first.  It does not need to be channeled into some external, productive something; it does not need to be for others first (or ever); it does not need to result in a tangible, sensible outcome.

So rest and creativity want to co-exist in my life right now, and that’s brings an interesting set of questions: Like, how can I both rest and create at the same time?  How can I invite creativity into my healing?  What new and unexpected thing will be born of this seemingly paradoxical fusion?

So where are your creative energies taking you, friends?  How is creativity blazing your trail or lighting your way?  What is it calling forth or asking of you?   What unexpected, beautiful, and mysterious spaces it is opening up in your life?