ideas and processes
out of the classroom and into the eairth we go
some drawings from my compost logo making process, which I thought made an interesting and sort of beautiful thing on its own:
In general, I try not to post pictures of my sketchbook, or any practice-place where I come up with ideas. It seems like when I share my sketchbook pages online, then later when I try to come up with ideas, creative source energy is blocked by a sense of obligation to make something post-worthy. She, referring to that only-sometimes-accessible force of creativity that exists outside myself, chooses to retreat and I am left with a sense of impossibility. My logic-brain can still improvise ideas I think will do well for the likes, but art-made-from-the-heart remains hidden. What’s up with that?
Finding ways to make art from a soul place and not a performative-ego place is an ongoing challenge that I find myself navigating. I was walking this evening up the hill behind my house and I sat down where I could see the sun setting. Part of my mind was like, this is good. Write about the sun setting. And had an icky reaction to that, because it came from this place of feeling like I should write about the sun setting because it has a high probability of being well-received. Instead, I took out my notebook and wrote down some notes about what was happening inside my body. My ego-self spoke up again, Nice, nice. Write it in cool handwriting. Take a picture of it in this golden sunset light. Make one of these notes the title of your next newsletter. Tell them where you got the title. They’ll eat it up!
My ego mind sounds like the bad boy from an early 2000s kids movie, but that’s also sort of what he feels like. It’s not a creative soul energy that is expressed here; instead it’s more like a fearful resourcefulness. There’s a writer named
who talks about the toxic way that going after likes can not only crush our soul-self’s expressions, but flat out kill us inside. When this happens to me, like tonight up on that hillside, I find myself wondering where this behavior came from. I have two theories:My brain got to be this way from many years of being on social media at an impressionable age. I went through a period at 13 years old where I stopped making art all the time and transitioned to spending a lot of time on Myspace. I spent hours learning to take selfies, post bulletins, manage my top eight. I went on to participate heavily in Facebook as a teenager and Instagram throughout my early twenties. During these years, I learned how to prove my worth skillfully using words and pictures on the internet, much to the detriment of my mental health and general human wellbeing.
It’s from decades of participating in institutional education, where my performance and ego always mattered more than my soul. There are certainly memories of having my specific creative endeavors ignored or spurned by teachers, but I think more impactful was the ongoing push throughout all of my schooling to redirect attention out of my own bodily intuition and into my head, all the while pushing production and achievement. Last year I read Raising Free People by
, one of the many books out there on the topic of “unschooling” children. Unschooling is exactly what is sounds like: removing children from formal education and reintegrating them back in the lives of families, communities, workplaces, and the natural world. She talks about the history of schools as a tool of colonization, and her personal decision as a Black mother to remove her children from them. I’ve mentioned it here before, but it was eye opening. I think a lot now about the impact that 16+ years of education inside of institutions had on my mind and my body. It shaped even how I think my own thoughts.1
Most likely it’s some combination of the two, a toxic concoction that prevents me from accessing and expressing the great source energy from whence all truthful and heart-borne ideas come. These two powers of deep self-consciousness around how my art is received and default cerebral problem-solving results in a creative block.
Creative block is a common experience, if only evidenced by how many books and resources offer tools to combat it. In my life, it appears for days or weeks or years sometimes. During these periods, there’s no tapping in or feeling possibility. I don’t sit down at the page or the paintbrush or the guitar because the pressure feels immense and yucky. One thing that has helped to wiggle me out of impossible block is the shift I’ve recently experienced regarding my own relationship to inspiration and where it comes from.
I will use the term ‘inspiration’ interchangeably with ‘ideas’ because in my experience, they are the same. I define it as an energetic shift that occurs in my body that calls me toward expression. For me, ideas come easily and freely when I am alone in the more-than-human world, on a walk or a run or just out in the thickets of madrone and Doug fir with a pad of paper and a pencil. I’ve started practicing this more over the last few years. I think I first got the idea from Mary Oliver, who said in an interview that this was her process for finding poems— just wandering around in the woods with a notebook. I have the best times when I go out for two hours or more, no phone but yes pencil. Sometimes I bring paints and a big sketchbook if I think I might want to play with that. The most important thing though is that I don’t go out with a goal in mind, or even with the idea that I am going to make something or come up with an idea. I must go out receptively and be curious about who or what is interested in finding me out there.
Elizabeth Gilbert has thoughts about what I might find lurking in the wilderness when I go with a curious mind. She says,
I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.
I love this so much. If I decide to believe in the independent consciousness of ideas, it changes everything in a good way. It makes following inspiration a worthwhile pursuit, because I actually do not know where it will go. It makes the thought of creating art for internet points absolutely ridiculous, because I now have a more-than-human partner who is calling to be expressed, likes or no likes. It takes the crushing, ever-crushing weight of being a good artist off my back. I am not a container of my own ideas that I must shape and mold into something great. I am the partner of an idea, and together we’ll try to make her manifest.
This view of ideas is animistic. It gives consciousness and agency to something outside me with whom I am participating in order to make art or writing. This is both freeing and completely subversive to the notion that we are the owners of our own work. It does not fit well with a culture of copyrights and patents, in which the inventor/writer is individually responsible for gifting the world his genius product/essay. In this worldview, the act of creating art is a participatory act with the other-than-human. Submitting the outcome of that to an academic critique feels ridiculous. I’m following intuition; how can I be given a grade?
Derrick Jensen argues in his book Walking on Water: Reading Writing and Revolution that the present education system crushes our intuition, creativity, and individuality. I agree with him that traditional schooling is not a fertile ground for creative expression.2 However, I do think there’s some balance to it—some way that education and group workshopping can be of benefit to the manifestation process of creative work. In Walking on Water, Jensen describes his subversive teaching methodology to undergraduate students in his creative writing classes: He would not grade their papers on quality; instead he would grade on quantity. The more essays and stories a student wrote, the higher their grade. He also gave class credit if students revised their own papers and resubmitted them. His philosophy was that the more a student was writing and editing their own work, the more they were learning about writing. He also spent class time having discussions about wide ranging topics and playing games. “Anything to help imbue our writing and our lives with feeling,” he explains.
I think that’s why it feels good to be alone in the woods, or walking around the burned hillside in front of the sunset that I may or may not write about. I have time to think my thoughts and time to feel my feelings. Nobody is looking into my notebook or making sure I come home with anything. The pressure is released, and inside that spaciousness, possibilities arise.
Of course, there’s a part of me that fears the consequences of making creative work in private.3 How will I ever get paid? If I don't have an advanced degree, will people take me seriously? Am I hiding from professional opportunities? Will I be a public programs manager at a small nonprofit forever??
, one of my favorite writers on this website, wrote recently in an essay titled Go Ahead, Squander Your Potential, “the idea that we owe it to society to be as ambitious as possible; to maximize our achievements, our impact, or our profit” is a game. It’s a construct of capitalism, and we are actually just allowed to wander in the woods with a notebook if that is how we choose to pursue artistic expression. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the work private if it is the only way we know how to maintain our tender relationship with intuition.I don’t have all the answers to the questions swimming around in my head, but I do know that inspiration likes me better when I can receive her without expectation of production or achievement. Looking for ideas in the silence and solitude of the other-than-human world feels more safe to me than trying to come up with something to present to a canon, a peer group, a critiquing audience. I can tell myself that I am in artistic recovery from years of social media and formal education. In her essay, Jia goes on to wonder if squanderance4 is the place where the greatest potential for creativity and transformative change comes from—the areas between the cracks, outside society’s expectation of productivity. So I’m grateful for the container of the natural world in which to wander. I’ll catch what I can out here and bring it back here, likes or not.
In Raising Free People, Richards shares a story about how one of her daughters wanted to leave school because she didn’t “have time to think her thoughts.” I find myself checking in every once in awhile: am I making time to think my thoughts?
Neither is social media.
And only sometimes sending it to my 17 newsletter subscribers.
This is not a recognized, real word but it sounds great so I am leaving it.