The Adaptive Nature of Creativity
finding creative expression through every shape and season of life
Issue #35/ Welcome to Good and Beautiful Things
This quote that I found a few weeks ago has finally put words to a part of me that I’ve never quite been able to name over the course of my life. It describes a moment that has drawn me, sometimes like a drug, offering a deep sense of joy and delight since I was a kid. I’m talking about that moment of creating something, the moment when an “idea becomes a solid there”.
As a Christian, I believe that this urge to create comes directly from being made in the image of a Creative God. When I find delight in the artistic process, my heart can’t help but thank God for the gift of this delight.
Understanding that creative expression is a pretty significant part of me helps explain why I didn’t know what to do with myself when these moments ended abruptly a few decades ago.
But here’s a spoiler about this story: creativity has a way of adapting to its environment in order to survive and even flourish.
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In the year and half between college and motherhood, I got lost.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I lost a part of myself.
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My first memory of turning an idea into a “solid there… a substance in a world of substances” is when I was ten-years-old. In fifth grade we had to write a weekly story with our vocabulary words and each week I looked forward to the challenge of fitting unlikely words together into a cohesive story.
The love of story-making led to drama class and drama class led to a performing arts high school. Five days a week, I took classes on acting and directing but also on movement and writing. From then on, creativity lived in my bones.
After high school, I went on to study theater in college, where the act of incarnating ideas continued to happen daily through writing, art and theater.
I took my creative life for granted, much like the air I breathed or the body I inhabited. Creativity had been incorporated so seamlessly into my life for so many years that I didn’t realize how much it mattered until the outlets I’d known for over twelve years suddenly came to an end.
Two weeks after I graduated from college, I got married and a year and half later, I became a mom.
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To be clear, marriage did not break my connection to creativity and neither did motherhood. It was the circumstances around these changes that left me missing a part of myself.
I moved twelve hours away to start married life. I didn’t hesitate because I was only focused on what I was gaining (the cute boy that I loved and still love 24 years later) and not what I was losing (everything else).
I left the community of friends that understood the urgency and joy of making things.
I left the classrooms that provided almost daily open doorways to imaginary worlds.
Instead, I took office jobs in drab, gray cubicles.
I ran head first into closed doors when I tried to find a theater job in my new hometown.
Enter loneliness.
And listlessness.
By our one-year anniversary, I was pregnant with our first child and no further along in tying the threads of my former creative life with this new life I’d embarked on.
At age 23, I became a mother.
Enter diapers and sleeplessness and spit-up.
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When I rewatched the movie Paterson last month, the artistic energy of the wife reminded me of the creativity that (almost frantically) sought release during my early days of being a wife and a mother.
In the movie Laura’s urge to create overflows onto every surface around her. While her husband drives a city bus during the day, quietly writing poetry on his break, Laura finds her own outlet by painting the furnishings of their home in black and white motifs. From her clothes to the couch, to the walls, to the cupcakes she makes for the weekend market, her designs are everywhere.
One day her husband (Paterson) comes home while she’s painting all of the trim on the white walls black.
“It just looks more interesting, doesn’t it?” Laura asks.
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For the first time in my life, the tentacles of creativity had to search actively for outlets, adapting to the shape of my new world. And since my new world was babies, that’s where the art turned its focus.
First there was scrapbooking.
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Next came photography.
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And then came collage picture frames.
Creativity overflowed into a bedroom mural for the girls and birthday cakes in the shape of a guitar and a buried treasure chest.
Despite art classes I’d taken over the years, I’d never been particularly good at visual art but as I began instructing the kids as part of our homeschool, my skills grew.
Again it was the persistent adaptability of creativity. Unlike a theatrical performance which required a stage and a set and cast, art was something we could do around the kitchen table together.
Along the way, my kids became my creative community.
Eventually, I started a blog about parenting and another blog about our homeschool life. Writing found a way into the four walls of my life.
A core part of me adapted to the situation and found outlets for expression. Even though scrapbooking and frame decoration weren’t my artistic dreams, they scratched the itch enough to get by.
It took losing a part of myself to find out that the essential parts of ourselves will always find a way to show up.
Continue the Journey
From the Archives
The story of creativity is, of course, more nuanced than what I’ve shared in today’s newsletter. Here’s a newsletter from a while back about wrestling with perfection during those early days of motherhood and scrapbooking.
On Substack
If you have not discovered writer and teacher, Jonathan Rogers, I highly recommend you check him out, especially if you are a writer or artist of any kind. He’s always sharing great thoughts that help keep me sane in a world of algorithms and envy.
Here’s a bit from his most recent newsletter:
“So…living a life less saturated with mass media is a step toward learning how to see again, but, according to Pieper, that kind of fasting and abstinence is ‘no more than the removal, say, of a roadblock.’ If you really want to learn to see, Pieper suggests, you need to be involved in artistic creation.”
Words Worth Remembering
“Look around you. Look at creation. Look at the trees as they fly by. Look at these kind of verdant hills. These trees don’t have a sign, do they? ‘Praise the Lord’ or ‘I belong to Jesus.’ They just give glory to God. They don’t need a sign.”
-Bono speaking to Franklin Graham
(shared in his conversation with Mike Cosper/Christianity Today)
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Blessings from the Guest Nest,
-Aimee
I mostly keep this identity hidden, but I think it’s because for too many years it was the only thing people knew about me. I was violin girl. The first question when people find out is always, “do you teach??” and for years I’ve felt like I “should”. I’ve finally had to own the fact that it’s just complicated, and that’s ok. Recently I told my children that I used to play music at church and one of them asked, “you played the organ?” 😆
I relate to so much of this, Aimee. I was a violin performance major once upon a time. I haven’t touched my violin in years for a variety of reasons, but it’s funny how these things can morph