Rediscovering Creativity

When I was living in black and white, all my hobbies were pushed to the sidelines.  As a young adult, I used to quilt and sew.  I liked crafting and painting when I was a child.  As a new mom, I taught myself to crochet, but by baby #4 I wasn’t even doing that.  Survival mode meant stripping down life to the very essentials of baby care and self care.

I needed to take some time to actively bring some fun back into my life, and for me, the spice of life is creativity.  My bare bones life wasn’t killing me, but it was very dry.  Rediscovering my creative side was an important way to bring a dash of color into my life.

I wanted some sort of writing challenge.  I wanted to be the sort of person who wrote every day.  I had heard of morning pages somewhere, so I bought the Artist’s Way book and decided to try Julie Cameron’s 12 week process for Artistic recovery.  I had no idea what I was getting myself into!

When I first started writing, just getting words on the page was difficult.  The artist’s way process asks people to write three pages every morning.  It helped me learn how to get the words to flow again.  The author also asks you to look inside yourself to what kinds of creativity spark your interest and also what’s holding you back.

An important insight I gained from doing the 12 weeks of the books was to ask myself what I wished I could do with my life.  I learned the types of things I wanted to explore in life.  For me that was quilting and watercolor and dance.  The process also asks you to take yourself on an artist’s date every week.  For me, that meant sewing a Regency period dress and buying a set of watercolors and playing around with them. 

Creativity is vital to living a full color life.  I loved the intentional rediscovery of the kinds of creative processes I wanted to try.  Also, I loved how writing, crafting and art started to replace the mindless phone surfing.  I thought I didn’t have time for art, but I sure had plenty of hours of Facebook I could redirect.  I also like how my creative work sets a good example for my children.  When they see me painting and sewing and crafting, it inspires them to get away from their screens and get creative too.  My youngest daughter will sometimes sit next to me at the dinner table and do her “morning writing” right next to me in the early dawn hours.  Her morning writing has a lot more beads and glue, but we are both starting the morning off right.