Practice Makes Practice
The peak and end of summer have combined to feel like a whirlwind for me. Between moving and all the changes that accompany it, I find myself chewed up and spit out. As someone at a critical stage of life, building my finances, dealing with the pandemic implications (like everyone else), and, well, moving… it’s meant that when I haven’t been out on the water or prancing around like a faerie, I’ve had to keep hustling (that’s millennial speak for work my ass off to pay the bills.) Now, I’m not complaining, I know how fortunate I am, I love my job, and I’m grateful for all that I have. Point being, I haven’t really had much in the way of “extra” time to dive into my creativity in the ways I love the most.
I’ve felt a bit forced to put down that mantle, or at least not hold it up as high. While doing this has been a necessary, temporary, small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things, it HAS started to negatively affect my happiness because of who I am at my core. I’m an artist. I’m a creator. I’m a creative artist. (Took me a while to brainstorm that one, truly.) If I’m not doing something to feed that, to channel the energy, it stagnates. I can turn elsewhere and, say, help rebuild the website at my job. Sure, that’s creative (I’ll convince myself). But it doesn’t quite fill the cup. It isn’t the same as choreographing a dance, engineering a voiceover demo or painting on a canvas.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt this beckoning urge to come back to myself in this way. I can be intense with my urges, so the conversations with myself have gone a bit like, “But I wanna do it NOW, and it has to be HUGE. And it has to be PERFECT. And I have to present it to the WORLD. Budget, I NEED a budget. I need a director! Calm down Audrey. That’s, well, a bit much at the moment. You can’t go from 0 to 60. Projects take time. Okay, okay, you’re right, I’m just needy and excited cause I love to sing and dance and my ascendant is in Leo.”
And after the battle with myself, the childish part of me concedes, the mature part of me has now heard what my needs are, and I come to the conclusion that I need to do something creative. Just DO it.
Now, what does that look like? What can that look like? These were the big questions I sat with until I realized… why am I still sitting here thinking about it? Why don’t I just DO it. Do the work. Create something. Go. Be. I’ve always been about the process anyhow.
Fast forward a couple conversations later, and I realized my creativity is a practice in itself. While I love to perform and present, I love my platforms, I love the fulfillment of a finished piece, I also love being creative at all. And right now that means a lot of this work won’t be polished or even finished, it will just be in progress, messy, whatever I need to channel in a given moment. That may mean I share it, or maybe not.
What I’m discovering is that my creativity is best expressed as a Practice. I’ve spent my whole life until recently doing creative things for production’s sake. There was very little emphasis on or honoring of how sacred Process is in itself. Perhaps that’s just been my perception my whole life, filtered through my own cognition, but it’s still what I feel has been imposed upon my creativity by the lens of my creative world, the structures, communities, institutions, industry, and traditions.
As a Practice, I get to hone in on my skills while serving a higher purpose, the love that is given and received each time I move my body or stroke the canvas. Skills and purpose act as a positive loop, actually, feeding each other. There’s a deeper sense of satisfaction when I do these things for me, and so that’s what I’m choosing to lead with as a path to reviving my creative self, redirecting my stagnant energy, and moving toward harmony only accessible when I’m IN the work. From there, I get to share my Practice. I’ve created a platform, a career, a life around my creativity, and so I choose to share it in the same way I now honor it. It is what it is.
And now for the witch talk…
This is also where the moon comes into play. One can only be aided by following the moon’s cycle, riding the wave. This is to say that menstruation and the new moon coincide with brainstorming, the fertile void. Whereas, the full moon and ovulation coincide with visibility, exposure. (Read Kate Northrup’s book, Do Less, for more on the lunar cycles… it’ll rock your world.) Even if what I feel I’m creating is in Process, the full moon will help me to bring it up and out. And if I do feel presentational, well the full moon is just going to amplify that energy. Tapping into the variations of energies already present is a productivity hack.
So I guess I’m finding a rhythm with actually doing the work now that I’m mostly settled into my new home. That said, there’s still a big part of this creative energy devoted to home improvement (because I just want to curl up in my greenhouse disguised as a cottage come wintertime).
Speaking of seasons, it’s the beginning of an end, one of the larger cycles outside of the moon, one of the smaller cycles within the year. The fall season, time to wrap things up and wrap myself up, a chance to complete the projects already on the table. A chance to create new habits while honoring the things that were. Allowing space for culmination and clarity. Allowing for the duality that is the nature of balance and that of Libra season. The winds of change. As the summer fire dies, the fall wind clears anew. Paves the way for all things to transform, look inward, and sit in silence once again. Might we seal up what has been created the last cycle so as to prepare for that shift?
I recognize this seems contradictory to my Process/Practice concept, but look at it this way. Perhaps the sense of culmination associated with the fall is not necessarily found in the completion of a past project, but rather in the recognition of its meaning, its last phase, its purpose, and the ability to choose what comes next.
Do I move forward with it and allow it more space to grow and express? At the perfect time when all things finish coming to fruition? Or is there a voice saying, “I honor this project and put it to rest so that what it taught me may inform my new work.” The answer is… it depends. Yes and no.
Today, I finally start harmonium lessons. My acrylics are out, that painting from June ready for more. I filmed a dance the other day, and it felt expansive. I keep adding to my home studio so that it feels like an incubator for creativity (I’m actually writing in here now.) There’s a voiceover I’ve been contemplating that’s begging me to be recorded. The list goes on… and at the end of the day, I don’t believe it matters what I think, it matters what I feel.
Sharing this is a vow, a way to hold myself accountable because I often say these things in moments of clarity, and then lose sight of them in moments of cloudiness. Perhaps my deep dive will allow me the chance to be so lost in my creativity that even when the clouds come, they’ll just be another shade in the spectrum of my creativity.
Aho.