For me, keeping my creative flow going is like keeping a garden. I really have to tend it. Some seasons, art comes easily to me. It’s always in the air and all I gotta do is reach out and grab it. Other seasons, it isn’t easy. I feel peaceful in my own mundanity. But engaging in creativity helps me communicate with myself. It helps me make meaning. So I have made it a practice. Almost every day, I find a way to do a small meaning making ritual and write something down about it.
What is Meaning Making?
Meaning making is so human. I don’t know of a community that doesn’t have to make meaning one way or another. Whether we make meaning spiritually, scientifically, or emotionally – we do this all the time. It’s how we collaborate. It’s how we keep peace inside of ourselves and as collectives.
My ritual is to make meaning around my art. To take my artistic impulses seriously and let them run rampant. Here’s what it looks like in practice. I give myself space. I go somewhere alone and clear my mind of anything logistical or logical. This is not the space for that. I open up my inner stage to some small detail that I just can’t let go of.
This Morning’s Ritual
A Poetry Anthology
So this morning, it was my grandmother’s book. She is a poet. She published a book that my cousin illustrated. It’s a powerful symbol to me. My bike awaited. I was filling up my little backpack with my Wild Unknown Tarot Deck and my notebook. I had to go into our little foyer with the wall to wall book shelves to grab my headphones and knocked my grandmother’s book off the table. A random event – a meaning made. I brought PJ DeWitt Little with me.
A Beautiful Landscape
I got to my spot along the Tennessee River when the boulders ran into the bank. Then I read some of her and Kate J Baer’s poetry. I was already thinking about mothers and babies when I pulled the Empress Card. These are mundane coincidences, but they are mine. They came to me.
A Tarot Card
And so it is The Empress is a tarot card. In the wild known deck, this card represents the feminine in all of us. It points to maternal relationships in our lives. So I took these mundane coincidences to my art practice this morning.
This is How I Write my Book
The bank of the Tennessee River feels more playful than an ocean, less pretentious than a sea. The river makes me little and makes me feel at home. So I told the river about my mother and the poetry my grandmother made of her. I remember in my grandmother’s words that before I was what I am today, I was serious and shy. That inspires me. And then I wrote this little draft of a poem from that feeling.
This is Today’s Entry
I wrote: “Take your shoes off / Even on the sharp stones / Everywhere you go is holy ground. Have you ever thought of it that way? Have you ever sat with it under any honeysuckle?
Your mother / Her mother / Her father’s ghost / who’s with you now. / Tell them you know.
It will help / even them / remember.”
Let it Breathe
This isn’t a finished poem. It’s a little journal entry with a few poetic phrases I will likely come back to. This is my process for a first draft. I have thousands. And when I am really blocked – when I really can’t get myself to write – I go back to these journal entries and pick the pieces out. I remake them. Or if I just can’t write, I go back to them and make collages from the concepts. There is so much here to take and run with.
Join Me Every Day for Inspiration
I’ll be leading meaning making rituals more and more over on Instagram and then here in longer form. You can take them as seriously or as willy nilly as you want. So draw a circle around your logical life and let your imagination run away with itself. Take hold of a string and unravel it all the way down. Even on the days your art feels like work, this will keep you connected to your creativity.
I hope you’ll meet me here or over on Instagram to do these rituals and make these prompts. I’m so excited to show you all my secret places in Alabama.
Facilitating Art Community Online
I want to put a big notice here of something. I’m not a spiritual leader. I’m an art community facilitator. I think engaging in our creative space and believing it helps legitimize our ideas to ourselves. Because of my background in yoga and meditation, my personal practice and my methods often include a spiritual aspect. I am hoping we can all take what works for us individually and leave the rest.
I want everyone to come here open enough to engage with all parts of themselves playfully, but I would never ask you to believe something you don’t. If the meaning I make doesn’t work for you, then try to find something in the bones of the ritual that help you make your own meaning. Once we step out of this circle of play, we hopefully bring fond feelings back with us – but these meanings are not binding. Just feelings we honor as they come up and walk away from us.