How to Reignite Your Creativity [Eps 26]
The door was wooden. Nothing fancy. The room beyond its threshold was basic at best. Two twin beds with outdated floral coverlets, the kind you’d see in a motel 6. A sparse wooden desk with a mirror and a few books, a spacious but no frills bathroom hospital-style bathroom, and blinds on the window that barely closed.
I was at a writing workshop in at a retreat center in Missisippi. My room was a space the place I was to inhabit, but not a space I felt inspired in. Clearly. After a survey of my room and putting my luggage away, I switched my perspective my looking out of the doorway by which I entered. I saw tall grassy fields, trees turning gold, and a gazebo overlooking it all that said there was something to be found beyond what I could see now.
Name the beauties
Maybe you look into your life and see a drab room. The central challenge is how to make space for the creative gladness we require in order to create.
This podcast is all about giving artists confidence and motivation to arrange their lives to do their art and reveal God’s glory to the world. It stands for a well-functioning life cultivated and shaped by creative rhythms that restore and empower through story, celebration, rest, and play.
Creativity is the act of making something new and original. Whatever I make is a mark of God’s divine imagination formed within me. It has God’s unique fingerprint and mine. When I participate in life with the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I join in a beautiful original dance. Creativity is a sacred act, in which we participate in the act of creation like and with our God. Luci Shaw says,
... I think God created us to be creators. I’m created to create. And I love the word poem, ‘poema’, means something that is made. And that’s our task. And it’s a task to name things; the beauties of the world around us, to bring them into focus to reflect something that we have discovered, that we want someone else to discover, perhaps for the first time.
In order to name beauties, to be a discoverer and a sharer of art, we must have space.
Are you a spacemaker?
Let’s think about spacemaking for a minute. Time, energy, idea formation, room to make, fuel to refine. I think we all realize we need this to do what we love as artists. But what do we do when our lives are constricted as they are right now with stress upon stress, fear and anxiety? How do we create in unstimulating spaces?
I asked a few of you on Instagram how you create when you feel stuck, which feels a bit like that room made me feel. You said reading aloud, listening to music, remembering it’s a new day, and my favorite, forsaking the laundry for stolen moments at the park. Those are moments of receiving creative gifts, which is vital to any creative work we want to do.
How can we cultivate creativity in life in a season of deprivation, stuckness, and suffering? How can we plant gardens when its winter?
There’s two things about a door. It has to be open to receive you. And you have to be open to walk through it.
First we need to ask: is my door ajar? How open am I today to God’s creativity?
Then ask, “I am ready to receive from the Ultimate creator? How’s my heart? It it open to receive. Is there space enough to welcome the poema?”
Five ways to spark your creativity
Fill your cup with beauty, so you overflow it.
Move, so the creativity will flow.
Find creative people.
Make time to sit and be.
Finally, remember you are a restorer and a reclaimer.
The space you make today will make way for your future creative life.
You may feel like that bland room I had at the workshop or the autumn fields and woods ripe for exploring. To stay creative during a pandemic, be a door. Open yourself to receive. Also be a spacemaker. A person who rearranges her life in such a way that creativity is welcome to come in and have a long chat. Do the things that spark your gladness.
Finally, if you aren’t creative today, that’s ok. It will return. Make space to breathe. To let your mind wander. To wonder. Advent will be upon us soon. Make time to wonder with Jesus.
Your life is a poema, something to be made.
Links:
How to find creativity when yours feels sapped, blog article
Cosmos from Chaos, interview with Luci Shaw, Andrew Peterson, and Carolyn Arends
Tending Gardens in Exile [Eps 14], interview with Carolyn Arends
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