Creation Also Looks Like This

I know that this is not often the type of photograph you see on my social media feeds. I mean it’s depressing right?

But it’s truth.

And if I’m honest, some of my best creating comes out of crisis.

Exhibit A: After my divorce from a partner I spent the past 17 years with I formed and facilitated a sister circle for women who wanted more. More of what is really a question you’d have to ask them. I’m not sure I can define what I wanted more of back then. Or even now. I just knew that there was, that there is – a longing to explore what ‘more’ might mean.

Exhibit B: After yet another particularly rough breakup (with someone who changed my life in unspeakably beautiful ways), I wrote my first piece of poetry. And much to my surprise, it was published.  Which led to other publications I’m mightily proud of.

Exhibit C: When we almost lost my mom to Covid last March, I ramped up a project with an illustrator friend and we completed a 32 card oracle deck in only 9 months (you can find it on IG @creative_collective_co).

It seems that creativity comes to me easily in times of great pain where I desperately call upon it to keep me from complete self-destruction. However, sometimes I’d like to experience such alignment under less traumatic circumstances, to meet up with my Muses under less precarious conditions.

And I’m getting there – mainly by establishing a more disciplined practice when it comes to my craft.

I’m learning that it is all just a continuum anyway.

Today, the tears came again. This time while driving down Mentor Ave., Aspen Dental to the left of me, Carpet One to the right (I mean could I have picked a less romantic place to cry? Why not at the Windermere Peaks like T. Swift in her bonus track the lakes? Or a church bell tower? A field in the rain?).

And here’s the strange part – I don’t even know why I was crying. I don’t even know if they were happy tears or sad ones.

I just know that I’m glad I had them. Glad they were still there.