One Year to a Creative Life

For the next 12 months, I’ll be sharing some bits of inspiration, advice, tips, process, research and resources as well as short low-friction challenges, all in the hope that you too discover how wonderful life can be when we are creative. Annie Dillard says that it’s “life at its most free”. And for me, it just brings out the healthiest happiest version of myself. Open, expansive, thoughtful, grounded, joyful, and engaged. I’ll tell a bunch of anecdotes too, just to make it a personal journey, so you see all the stuff I’ve tried and how it turned out – Yeah, not just the pretty bits but the ‘oh shit, what am I doing here?’ stuff too. Life, you know?

Anyway…You don’t have to think of yourself as a (fill in the label: artist, writer, musician etc) to get the most of this wandering process offered here but also, don’t count it out. Maybe you’ve just been too scared of what your friends or family might say if you take up a class at the local community college, or set up a table with paints and paper in the living room. Do it anyway. Be curious. Play. Explore new ideas, attitudes, and habits. Make this into a year-long experiment and assess next summer. What shifted?

That said, I’m reading and learning from current research into creativity itself, why it is so good for us at any stage of life, how there’s so many benefits to our health, brains, and longevity even. Crazy stuff. I just did it because watching other people pretending to have interesting lives on TV wasn’t enough.

Photo: Life As a street-clown in Guatemala, 2005

Why am I doing this though? What’s the point? I really love seeing people try new things, expand their ideas of what it is to be creative, and the magic that comes from that. It’s the “aha” moment teachers look for. Dad was a language teacher at the local community college and that way of sharing his knowledge and helping others was in everything he did, even when it drove me nuts as a kid and just wanted a yes/no answer not a ‘teaching moment’. The family expected I’d do the same but it’s taken me a while and now, nearly sixty, I’m claiming the role, the joy of sharing what I’ve learned with others. So, yes, that’s the core of my work, here on the website, on Skool, at school (well, Santa Fe Community College) and beyond. Explore, create, share. I’m the third phase right now…

My hope is that by offering this year-long process you’ll enjoy a new sense of confidence and playfulness. Those ideas and dreams and wishes you’ve carried with you will come out of hiding in that brain of yours and you’ll make something, whether it’s writing a novel or memoir, sketching cartoons of your daily life, taking classes at the local college, or joining a theatre group. Just actively making and creating is the goal here.

As a lifelong creative person, as someone who’s tried and taken so many courses, degrees (!) and internships just because I’m curious, you’ll get experience and research-based tools and suggestions scattered within the anecdotes.

I remember switching out an engine on a VW bus all on my own – only to stand up afterwards to a round of applause from all the men in the industrial park, being a juggling market-stand worker in Madison, Wisconsin in my early twenties, and then later, traveling Guatemala and playing with the kids and teaching them to juggle. I could tell you about moving from a school-bus in rural New Mexico and going to clown school in San Francisco at 39 and then to Vermont for a master’s degree at 49…Don’t forget the 18 month professional photography course in London, or welding in Santa Fe, or building houses in New Mexico, learning to play ukulele in Baja California at 57. And that’s just the surface, the first examples that come to mind. I’ll need to write a list to remember them all.
That said, my life has been quite creative and full of joy. I want to share those stories with you in the hope that you claim more silliness and experimentation in your own life.

I hope these monthly posts will give you the kind of creative life you have dreamed of.