KEEPING THE MIND CREATIVE
Everybody is talented, because everybody who is human has something to express. ~Brenda Ueland
To continue that thought, everybody will express it in their own way which makes it unique to each person. We all know there are ways to express this creativity, right? It usually comes out beautifully through one form of art or another. Like for me its photography. But what I want to discuss here, in this blog, is not limiting it to one form of art only. I want my mind to be creative as a whole, irrespective of the medium I use to express it.
Now every person goes through creative blocks, a slowdown, meltdown or just boredom with their medium of expression. For me, it’s never boredom, but blocks and fatigue happens for sure. And I’m okay with that! Because overcoming these blocks, challenges me. And challenges help me become even better than before.
So what do I do when I’m having a creative block? I create something, that’s purely for me, in a completely different medium (from the one I suffer the block in). Pottery has been a great source of releasing pent up stress, enhancing my visual strength and growing my minds powers to create. Thinking creatively in a different medium of art/craft can be totally empowering. It has the power to strengthen visualisation. I honestly just enjoy the process of creation from a lump of clay to a hand-built piece of art.
I say art, because its art for me. I love to create and that’s why I love pottery or photography. I love the process of visualisation, and the process of creation. I love the feeling of excitement it gives me when I’ve created something I love. I love the challenges it poses and I love the hunger to get better at it… always.
Another easy, stress free tip to moving past the creative block, is doing creative projects with my kids. So by nature they are simplistic. They are not very time consuming and they can be immensely satisfying to create. My daughter and I created a sock doll recently (a doll made from an old sock essentially). Now we could have stopped at creating something that resembles a human figure but we went on to creating the dress and hair and styling the hair and the works!! Why? Because the process of creating something from scratch, completely unique, makes me happy! The doll also makes my girl happy! So win win!!
Every year I do summer projects with the kids at home. It started with my one kid, then the other, about 5 years ago. Every year we do age appropriate art, craft, cooking, etc. activities. No rocket science. They are simple activities to trigger brain cells to the act of creating. To emphasize the simplicity of these activities, let me show you one we did recently. We created faces with things we found around in the garden (did it on our park bench, with twigs, stems, flowers, seeds, basically any natural elements) The beauty of this activity was in the power of visualising. Each one of us made a face, all different, all beautiful, all art to me. I went on to making a few more since its addictive , I tell you!!
I could go on about my projects but the idea here is for all of us to find our own pet projects that resonate with us. Projects that will help in finding ourself, bettering ourself and creating something. How do we find these projects? I sometimes start with what are the things that interest me. At other times, I find a starting point in my crafts cabinet. Another time it was triggered by something my son said. For example, he read something about Morse code in one of his adventure books. We were fascinated by it and we did this- Learnt our names in Morse code and strung dot and dash beads together that made up their names.
The possibilities are endless. Focus on enjoying the process. Embrace curiosity and learning. Explore and do all this for yourself.
“What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realised, because you think its sacred. What is sacred is the time you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.” Elizabeth Gilbert in the book Big Magic.
Shruti Moghe