how to rekindle your creative spark

it's still there, I promise!

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This post tries to answer: how do you do creativity?

When I was younger, ‘doing creativity’ was effortless, like breathing. I simply was a painter, because I painted. I was also a poet, a songwriter, an author, an actor, a sculptor, a dancer. I wrote short stories. I built with Play-Doh. I danced in the living room. Life was one big creative experiment. 

It’s me! The painter!

And then…it wasn’t.

As I grew up, creativity was replaced with utility. I wrote academic papers scored by rubrics. I played piano to satisfy elective requirements. I cooked simple meals as fast as I could between classes and studying. Play was lost. To an extent, so was joy — two key ingredients in the creative process.

After a few years apart, I noticed the blank space where my creativity had once lived; my life had grown quiet without her. I peered in, wondering: where had she gone? I worried we might have lost touch forever.

So when I quit my job last year, I decided to try and get her back.

At first, I had no idea how to coax her out from hiding. We had been estranged for so long that we barely spoke the same language. To rekindle our relationship, I would need help.

And so I enlisted some tools — and once I started using them, they worked. Immediately.

Creativity peeked in, bashfully at first, and then leapt towards me and threw her arms around my neck. I’ve been waiting for you! she exclaimed. What took you so long?!

My creativity, it turns out, had never left — she had just been buried by work, school, and the minutiae of being an adult. As we found our way back to each other, I realized that creativity really, really wants to be included in our lives.

While we might have different gifts, we are all creative beings. If you’re skeptical, try these tools and let me know if you change your mind. ❤️

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.” — Martha Graham

3 tools to ignite a creative life

• The Artist’s Way is a book and 12-week program that came recommended to me by various friends and family members. Fair warning: it’s a lot of work (even I struggled to stay on time with the reading, prompts, and assignments…and I was unemployed!) but it’s also incredibly transformative.

• Big Magic is a book by Elizabeth Gilbert (who I love) that helped give me the courage to make my creativity happen. It’s entertaining, thought-provoking, and happens to be a lovely complement to The Artist’s Way.

• The 100 Day Project is a free, global art project with a simple concept: pick something creative and do it every single day for 100 days. This could be anything: painting tiles, writing haikus, sculpting mugs, creating content for a newsletter…(hint hint). You can check out other projects on their Instagram.

Via Liz Gilbert’s Instagram: “Constant creative response.”

Via Lindsay Jean Thompson, this year’s project facilitator.

Some creative living tips

• Take stock of the people, places, and things that inspire you. Art galleries, street corners, fabrics…anything. Write them down. Notice any patterns that arise.

• Pay attention to inspiration! Start carrying a notebook (or just your Notes app) to capture ideas and when they visit. 

• Carve space for yourself to create, whether it’s a desk, notebook, table corner, or something else entirely. Make it special.

• Find and engage with your local creative community through pop-up shops, living room concerts, stand-up poetry, ceramics classes, dance shows…allow yourself to be curious. Allow yourself to be a beginner.

• Create for yourself. Create for the joy of it. Keep on creating, no matter how many people see it. 

Places inspiration likes to visit

Inspiration also hangs out in museums in Amsterdam (of course!)

Some creative truths

• We are all creative beings. 

• Even if our access to our creative channel becomes stuck or blocked, our creative spark is always there, waiting to be found. 

• When we engage with creativity, life becomes more colorful, whimsical, and fun. It’s still painful and beautiful and absurd, but our creativity allows us to engage in constant dialogue with how we experience those contradictions.

• The creative source is as infinite and inexhaustible as the universe itself. If you open yourself up to it, it will run through you, as you, and materialize into the most curious and wonderful things.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” - Maya Angelou

The impacts of my year-long creative experiment were overwhelmingly positive: I felt myself become lighter, more resourceful, more playful. I became receptive to the frequency of inspiration. Maybe most encouragingly, I could cut out snowflakes with my little brother, hands sticky with glitter glue, and actually enjoy it.

This very newsletter was born from that experiment! So were hand-mended shirts, rolls of film, watercolor cards, pressed flowers, poems, songs. And creativity and I are only getting started.

Creative living asks you to be curious, to pay attention, and to be brave. This is how you use and share your unique gifts with the world.

I’ll sign off with some of my favorite words from Big Magic: “do you have the courage to bring forth [your] work? The treasures hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.” We all have sacred, strange, sparkling treasures within us — and I’m hoping you’ll say yes, too.

With love,

Eden