As a child, I read “Love, Stargirl” by Jerry Spinelli and connected right away with Stargirl. I loved her fearlessness to be herself, her wonder for the world, and her abounding kindness. In the story, Stargirl leaves behind orange halves throughout the town as a treat for birds and other animals. These oranges come to mark her path. If someone in town saw an orange half on top of a fence, they knew Stargirl had been there.
I write Kimber Was Here to have a record of how I make sense of the world. These essays are my oranges.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for following along.
Hello wonderful souls!
I wanted to write and say thank you to everyone who responded to my last post about Disentangling Jesus. I know it is a sensitive topic to write about, and I am grateful that so many people responded with compassion and love. That post was by far my most viewed post and it sparked beautiful and thoughtful conversations with friends, family, and strangers alike. I see you! We are in this journey of figuring out life together!
I am aiming to write my Something for Sundays posts every other week in addition to this newsletter. I appreciate all of your encouragement, feedback, and support along the way as I create this newsletter to be something I am proud of.
Speaking of creating, today I wanted to write about creativity.
To me, being creative is an incredibly personal process. It’s a feeling and process that truly defies words. Trying to harness creativity is like being one of those ropers at the rodeo trying to lasso a full-grown steer. It’s wild, feels unpredictable, and ebbs and flows.
If you know me and have had even one conversation with me in the past year, you probably know that I am on a feminine-energy education kick! It has opened up a whole world to me. I view creativity as a feminine energy – coming and going, not quite consistent, full of life and freedom, deeply connected to our intuition. Once we have a brilliant idea and have nurtured it and given it space to grow, we can harness the masculine energy to fully execute.
This is why I love the image of yin and yang! We need the execution, logic, and practicality of the yang mixed with the flow, intuition, and sensitivity of the yin. It’s so beautiful how the masculine and feminine work together (by the way, I’m not just talking about male-female dynamics, but also the masculine and feminine within ourselves!). Understanding these energies, to me, just makes the world make sense.
In my experience, it has been hard to be consistent with my creativity. I did ONE Inktober challenge in my whole life last year, and by the end, I never wanted to draw again. Pushing myself to PRODUCE CREATIVITY sucked the life out of me.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that, for me, creativity is much more of an organic process — one that almost feels out of our control.
I have been reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin and I was surprised to find that I wasn’t alone in this experience with my relationship to my creativity. He fully supports the idea that creativity is a spiritual experience. His book has blown my mind by posing one simple question:
Are our creative ideas ours?
Rubin’s theory is, basically, that ideas are not ours. They are something of their own, floating through space, and our job is to be an open vessel, waiting to receive them.
Have you ever had an idea for a business or a song or something, and then find out later that someone else has done it?
Maybe it wasn’t your idea – it was just AN IDEA – and someone else was in tune and ready, while maybe you weren’t quite in the space to execute it.
The thought of some of my ideas being given to someone else to execute is scary enough to me that it drives me to keep going!
Instead of trying to conjure up creative ideas within ourselves, we can relax, open ourselves up, and trust that we will be inspired. Then, from there, we nurture that creative seed, follow that electric feeling of creating, and develop the idea more and more. We recognize that we are being led to create, and it’s vital to learn to tap into our intuition.
Seeing creativity as a spiritual experience and as a way of being makes perfect sense to me.
When I was little, my mom had stocked a big closet full of art supplies. Whenever I was bored, I would go to that closet, fling open the doors, and find (what seemed like) endless amounts of clay, paint, paper, craft scissors, ribbon, you name it! I would make little creatures out of clay, create my own props for my theatrical productions involving the neighborhood kids, write stories, and paint dragons and cats and people over and over and over.
I have always loved my art classes and face painted as a side job/hobby, but I never thought about pursuing my art seriously. I loved how free I felt when I was painting, and didn’t want that to become a stressor for me. Now, as an adult, I do not regret that decision. But because I was unable to take classes in college, my space and time to create dwindled a bit. I am creative in other ways – like writing and teaching – but I do sometimes miss the time as a child of sheer exploration and creating just for the sake of creating.
There’s a magical place that my friend introduced me to here in Austin that is called CRAFT. It’s basically an open studio with only a $5 fee (+donation). Their whole philosophy is just to create and craft without worrying about an end result. The majority of their supplies are donated from the community, and you can just come, scrounge around for materials, and then make something out of it!
For the New Year, some friends and I went there to create vision boards. I didn’t really know what I wanted to put on my board, and instead cut out pictures that seemed interesting to me and tried to link them together. I had set out to make a classic vision board, but I ended up putting a bunch of pictures of birds, quotes about change, and even added a porpoise jumping out of the water.
Afterwards, I looked at it and felt surprised – this might seem a little cheesy, but I felt like this was something created by my subconscious mind, by something bigger than me! I wasn’t intending on making a board all about change – but that’s what was in my heart. It’s what happened when I stopped trying to control everything just let my art speak for itself! (I wish I could do that all the time)
I wonder – could this creativity be applied to more than just our passion projects? We are always building ourselves, aren’t we? Each small step, each small decision, amount to bigger and greater things. I think there’s wisdom in CRAFT’s philosophy: relax a little, and just create for the sake of creating.
There are times that I get so focused on an end result or goal. Get married, get fit, have babies, take over the world! I forget to enjoy the process of it all. I forget that I am actively co-creating my life with God.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
We are in the unique position of being actively created by the Creator and being in the active pursuit of creativity. Although many things happen to us and for us that are out of our control, we have the ability to amplify what we have been given. Whether that be music, stories, art, or friendships, we are all creative in our own way. We are made in the image of the Creator. Think about that title: Creator! I love the idea of creating being an act of worship. I was created, and so I create.
Do you consider yourself ‘creative’? What kind of things do you like to create? I’d love to know.
Thanks for reading,