The Power of Vacation and a Virus: Reviving My Creative Focus
I am full to the brim with amazing vistas. Forty-two hundred miles of driving for three weeks took my family and me from Kansas to the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York, which is surprisingly mostly wilderness. We journeyed through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York with detours to Montreal and Stowe, Vermont. It was a crazy amount of driving for any summer vacation, but all that beauty and time away did two things: they enlarged my creative focus while also narrowing it.
On vacation, I seem to have more capacity for the sublime:
leaning against an old building in Montreal while my daughter and I fiddled with the camera trying to get the perfect shot of a basilica.
watching my teens make their smaller cousins squeal with delight.
devouring apple pie in an old schoolhouse turned diner.
paddleboarding across a perfectly still mountain lake.
riding the ferry across Lake Champlain at sunset and feeling a sense of completion after a delightful ten days with my college-age daughter (precious time).
walking through a birched forest alone at dusk as the birds sang over me.
Vacation reminds me I need more space for boredom and solitude. It's so easy to do this on vacation. Don't plan much. Lounge around. See what the day holds. I want to continue this sense of space-making in my daily life.
The Virus
The glory didn't last forever.
I picked up my son from camp and realized it was going to be a VERY LONG drive home. He coughed feverishly in the back seat while we drove home for three solid days. I got the virus a few days after homecoming and was in bed for over a week.
Illness has a way of reminding us of our limits. During that necessary recovery, I realized my body needed some TLC. I've spent over ten years with a chronic illness called adenomyosis that requires some space-making and tending these days. So I cleared a lot of potentially stress-inducing stuff from my calendar and second-guessed myself a lot. But once I let go of some commitments, a deep sense of relief overtook me.
Vistas
Each of my sublime moments had one thing in common: an expansion of my senses into a new perspective. Even the illness did this.
“Vista is generally used today for broad sweeping views of the kind you might see from a mountaintop. But the word originally meant an avenue-like view, narrowed by a line of trees on either side. And vista has also long been used (like view and outlook) to mean a mental scan of the future—as if you were riding down a long grand avenue and what you could see a mile or so ahead of you was where you'd be in the very near future.” *https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vista
I took in so many breathtaking vistas on my vacation, but the one that sticks out to me is actually one where I couldn't see what was ahead. Early one morning before picking up my son from camp, I walked down the road to Lake Pleasant which was shrouded in fog. I couldn't see the mountains which towered on the other side of the haze. I could only see what was right in front of me for today. The water lapped on the shore but I could see no more than 20 yards out.
Most of our days are more foggy and smallish rather than clear, breathtaking, and sublime. This is especially true in the spiritual formation of the artist-leader. We usually can’t see more than a few feet in front of us. Maybe we aren’t experiencing any real sense of God in our work. Or perhaps motivation to do our art eludes us day after day. Some days we can simply feel so alone.
I feel these regularly. What I found at the lakeside was the wondrous and hidden merging for a moment, a reminder that God’s presence is both near and mysterious. Many days, we will see what’s before us with great lucidity. On other days we won’t see a thing.
Vacation afforded me space to reconnect, be delighted, and imbibe spaciousness. The virus reminded me God provides restful times to tend to first things. Both converged into a reminder that the quality of my creative focus depends largely on my attentiveness. I now see a vista that narrows my days into a slower road than I’d like to undertake truthfully: into a restful way of doing my art. Here God continues to draw me closer to him, so that’s where I’m headed.
A prayer
God, thank you for expanding and deepening my trust in you as you touch me in the tedious and wonderful.
Reflection
What moments of synchronicity (a sense of connection or things coming together as they should be), glory, or pure delight met you this summer?
What might God be inviting you to make space for or let go of in this next season?
Some random thoughts about space-making and creativity that may be helpful:
If I have no space in my days, I'm setting myself up for burnout.
Pursue good B.S.: boredom + solitude.
Consistent creativity grows from a sustainable life.
If you’d like more creative compassion and spiritual courage like this in your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter below.
