Musings on Creative Practice

on making as a way of staying human

I have been feeling an unmistakable shift in my understanding of my vocation as an artist in this world we live in. I am thinking about this in a professional sense, yes, but even more so in a spiritual and personal sense. The shift feels profound enough that I don’t fully have language for it yet, only fragments and sensations and small recognitions arriving here and there like light through the leafy trees.

For a long time, perhaps most of my adult life, there has been a part of me that understood any success I’ve had through external forms. There are the three books I have published (that I am very proud of), hundreds of classes taught, as well as all the paintings I’ve worked so hard on, then exhibited and sold. Then there is my dedication to the daily work of refining my talent and skills. There is also the respect of the institutions and all those individual artists and writers who came before me whose experiences and work have inspired me and informed my craft and have helped me hone my own ability to make beautiful things that others valued enough to purchase or display or want to learn from me. I know that none of this is trivial and without privilege and I am immensely grateful for all of it. Deeply, deeply grateful—and yet, lately, especially through illness and exhaustion and pain, something inside me has begun loosening from that framework that I have built my career upon.

As I often do when I am musing over things that are important to me, I pulled some cards from my beloved tarot companion: The Devil, Wheel of Fortune, and a strange, numinous card simply called Before.

The Devil threw me at first, as I often associate it with addictions or the inability to break free from something that is impeding me or holding my attention hostage, but the longer I sat with it, the more I understood it in a different way. It did not feel sinister, but it did feel binding. This particular card shows two pieces of wood wrapped tightly together with a glistening red thread. These are handmade bindings. Human bindings. These are the beliefs and identities I have constructed in order to survive, and then eventually outgrow.

I think I have been bound, at least in part, to an old understanding of myself. The accomplished artist. The productive artist. The artist who must continue proving something through finished works, through output and exhibitions, through usefulness, through professionalism. The truth is, chronic pain has changed the landscape of my identity. Fatigue has stripped my life down to what is essential. When the body is struggling, there is no energy left for performance.

Here is one truth: even during this difficult stretch, I have continued returning to my sketchbook. These are not ambitious entries, but maybe just five struggling minutes sometimes, a few marks made, a small pattern or a tiny drawing of an acorn from a bowl on my windowsill. This is about the movement of my pen or pencil across paper. Friends, I swear these small acts have become a lifeline for me because they reconnect me to something alive that lives deep inside of me always always.

The Wheel of Fortune placed right beside this card felt deeply hopeful to me, not in the sense that suddenly everything becomes easy, but hopeful in the sense of a turning point. I felt the presence of cycles, or of realignment. I don’t think I am meant to return to the artist I was before this new era of illness and depletion. The wheel of life does not move backward, but turns forward into new terrain.

Maybe this is what is emerging now: art not primarily as product, but as practice. Art as companionship and as a way of remaining present inside a difficult moment. Art as a quiet conversation between the soul and the world. I know I keep circling back to this conversation, and for this reason I know it is immensely important. I earnestly believe that our creative practice, our work, is as important to our physical, emotional and spiritual health as anything else. Friends, our creative work matters…no matter what that practice is…it matters maybe more than anything. If our sense of wonder and curiosity is taken away we are doomed.

I still believe that art should belong to everyone, butcher, baker and candlestick maker, left-brained and right-brained, rich and poor, old and young and everyone in between. I still believe in teaching people, all people, about the tools and techniques to give them a simple daily practice and then helping them find the courage to make things with their own hands. And yet, my understanding of my vocation feels even deeper than those things now. What I am beginning to understand in a very intimate way is that creative practice itself may be one of the most important ways that human beings heal. I absolutely do not mean heal in the simplistic sense of curing everything, but heal in the sense of remaining connected to ourselves and our place in the universe despite our suffering.

Then there is that final numinous card, Before. That card felt like standing in mist at the edge of a forest path before dawn fully arrives. It feels unfinished and full of mystery in the most beautiful way, as though I am standing before a new understanding of my life and work has only just begun to reveal itself. I also think the card is asking me to remember who I was before achievement attached itself to my creativity, to before I had an audience and I think the answer is simple:

I was someone filled with wonder. And you know what? That wonder has simply been waiting quietly beneath everything else, patient as a seed beneath snow.

I’ve been trying another creative practice lately, creating new bracelets from old ones. It’s been so much fun!

And now, I’d love to hear from you. What if creative practice is not about achievement at all, but about remaining connected to ourselves and alive to the world? Who were you before productivity became the measure of your worth, and what small act of wonder might help you return a little bit more to that person?