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Here’s an example. I had a client once who never felt that she had time to explore her just maybe-creative self. She lived with a chronic sense of sadness over this. I asked her a number of questions about her regular life. It turned out that her apartment was overflowing with about twenty years worth of un-filed paperwork. She felt that she certainly could not learn to “be creative” until she had surmounted the huge mountain of making a filing system from scratch, which of course she had been postponing for years. Working together on this situation, we made the process of inventing and implementing a filing system fun. It became a way to play instead of being a dreaded drag. She proudly ended up with four full garbage bags of paper, knew where the rest was whenever she needed it, and gained access in other situations of her life to an untapped creativity that she had always had within her. I call this “artlife”: recognition of the constant creativity that’s at the root of our lives. Artlife process uses the energy we are using anyway, re-channeling the grist of ordinary events and actions into fresh explorations and adventures. We can learn how to do this in the same time that we’re already living. Renegotiating what is already in our lives, rather than adding more activities to our daily routines, artlife process is more about how we do what we do than about what we do. This question of being either more or less aligned with your life’s aesthetics can obviously be explored at many levels: psychologically and professionally, perhaps even in relation to how you live on and with Planet Earth. Living artfully — both in the artistic things you make and in simply being artful — you reclaim your creative birthright, embracing more of all that you are, in ways both tangible and intangible, large and seemingly small, so that you bring art and life back together, as they are meant to be. Many pre-modern cultures don’t even have a word for art. Art-making has been so embedded in ordinary life, has been so intrinsic to virtually every daily task — from making storage baskets to conducting burial ceremonies — that often no distinct word for the activity developed. Or else words developed like the East Indian one, shilpa, a word for art that includes perfumery and engineering and lovemaking! We are the same kind of people as the farmers and fisher-people of other times and places, in no way intrinsically different. So it is still true in our place and time, that we are all able to create innovative forms for and in our lives, and this is, really, what it is to be an artist. Even our endless thinking is, in fact, often a very creative rehearsal for our next performance! How to reclaim this part of your birthright? Over many years of teaching art process to others, I have found that one direct way to reclaim your creative nature is to look for it where you least expect it: right in the midst of your regular daily life. When you wake up in the morning, you start making choices. Make a cup of tea first, or get in the shower, or listen to the news? It goes on like that all day. Nobody is there telling you how to make all those mundane choices. Artlife is partly about how you immerse yourself in what’s in front of you, into seemingly insignificant acts that can actually be entryways for reconnecting with such longed-for soul-replenishing pleasures as making gardens, clothes, gifts, paintings, or filing systems. Of course, it is also about taking the next step, finding out how your own special creative impulses want to develop. The process moves back and forth, between playing with, and making rituals out of, repetitive routines that you thought were boring, and to coming home to more explicitly exploring unknown or forgotten artistry. It’s like a flow between the two banks of one river. But don’t we already have more than enough “answers” to what ails us? Perhaps what we need are simply tools for changing the situation from within. “Wait a minute,” you say, “my life is already really busy. I don’t have time to add anything else to my life.” This is my point: suppose there are tools not about tacking on one more thing, looking in one more place that’ll do the trick, but about using what you have, relating moment by moment with facets of the life you’re actually living, tools that can evoke a different quality in your regular life. One direct way to reclaim your creative nature is to look for it where you least expect it: right in the midst of your regular daily life. These tools use the existing patterns and rhythms of your life, use the same energy used in fighting against what is, in waiting to get “somewhere else” to start living your dreams. Using this same energy to transform aspects of your life develops and nurtures the artlife function within you into fuller blooming, brings art and life together into a living whole. I’m reminded of a woman who came to a talk I gave recently. She spoke of how, as a dental assistant, her workdays are all about getting patients ready for periodontal surgery; she plays all day with helping people move from dread to genuine curiosity! It is embedded in your cells to know how to make beauty and meaning of your life. You were born knowing how to do this in your everyday surroundings and activities, even if you have forgotten some of this part of who you are. It doesn’t even have to be difficult of take years of study. The clues to how to do this are all around; we all experience their whispered or flashing-through messages. We just need to open to playing and experimenting with what we already have with awareness, a willingness to explore, and the daring to maybe make a mess! One of the biggest opportunities for doing this is in the natural world, always there out beyond our frequently all-too-human-centered preoccupations. By letting yourself be touched by the mystery of a tree or a potted plant, treating as important a fascination with cauliflower spirals or clouds or the tremendous age of pebbles, you treat yourself as important, alive, and natural, and are curiously enriched. Looking at pebbles is not difficult, nor does it take long, and the mysterious inspiration that comes from doing so, from remembering your connection with the earth, can feed into so much else in your day. All it takes is starting somewhere and letting it grow, like those weeds that sprout up through cracks in concrete. A good way to start in by exploring the artlife dimension of just one part of your regular life. Make a list of some aspects of your daily routine. Let the list sit for an hour or two or a day or two. See what sticks — the one thing that seems most interesting or challenging — then experiment with this for a while so that you can develop your curiosity and see what results in a tangible way. Or, go for a walk around your home. Find — or, if it makes sense to you, let yourself “be found” — by three things. Let the things come to you easily; they’re probably just ordinary objects lying around. Look for them with no particular goal in mind, just seeing what comes. Then, let one represent the life you dream of. Another can represent what you ignore about your current life. The third can represent some way in which how what you ignore can show you a way to create more of the life of which you dream. When you’ve decided which is which, place them together, say on a table, for a bit and see how this combination feels to you. Then switch them so that each holds a different one of the three aspects chosen, and notice how this may work, too, in some unexpected way! If you keep a journal, try writing about what comes. If not, maybe describe it to a partner or friend, or in some other way state your recognition of what came, perhaps in a quick drawing, doodle, or scribbled note. Of course, this process requires a willingness to play and to let ordinary things be imbued with more than ordinary significance. But if you will let it be so, you’ll discover that a good many of the “ordinary” things with which you choose to surround yourself do indeed have this kind of power to help you make sense of your world and even to metamorphose with its help. This cannot be explained to the normal mind, only discovered. I encourage people to look at the results of such processes as though they don’t already know what is the case, to see what came as meaningful on its own terms. Your artist-self gets stronger, bolder, by practicing accepting what you have done in such ways. Amazingly enough, innate forgotten gifts and skills begin to grow, almost in the way that the grass grows, by itself. Then you discover from within that art heals. When you go toward being and making art right here in your regular life, you touch something profound, something true to your original being, something with the power to transform. This is what I call artlife. Jane Seaton, Ph.D., a transformational artist and transpersonal psychotherapist, teaches artlife to both individuals and groups. She describes her work on Artlife: Creative Journeys for Life Healing, her best-selling audiotape set. Explore these ideas firsthand in a workshop presented by Trebbe Johnson and Jane near Bellingham, “Flowing with the Universe,” May 10-12. Contact <janesea@artlife.cc> or (206) 352-5410 for more information. |
We are used to thinking
of art as being largely something to view or listen to, something
made by experts with talents and skills that most of the rest
of us lack. We are actually all artists, and making art of many
kinds most of the time, whether we know it or not. Getting dressed
in the morning — that’s an interesting sculptural project!
We listen to and make sounds all the time. But are they all art?
Is there a dividing line that makes some actions art and some
not? Perhaps it’s simply whether we bring attention and
care to — and so bring beauty and meaning into — our
everyday actions.