Making art makes it possible for new growth and positive change to happen
Making art makes it possible for new growth and positive change to happen
We really do have the power to make changes that have a positive effect. It all starts within us.
Hello friends, this week I’m focused on how we each have so much power to inspire and create change, just by creating … something. The very act of thinking and feeling creatively has a positive effect on the bigger picture, and on each of us.
We really do have the power to effect change, even at a small scale.
Read on for my latest article.
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Love, Kris
How does our individual and collective creativity create positive change?
Having permission to be curious and creative changes the whole game.
Just by showing up with an open curiosity, asking that all important question ‘what if?’, and playing with possibilities, you create more space for those possibilities to exist.
Yes, even if you don’t complete the thing you started, or don’t show it to anyone, or don’t even like it!, you’ve opened a door.
You are creating a change, from within yourself. This is much more important than any of us have been taught, generally. You create even more change when you do it again, and again.
This is different from when we wait for others to approve, or give us permission to even make something new to start with.
Popular opinion is not the way we evolve, grow, and make needed healing changes. The opinion of the group, when it’s thinking together, is that we are safer with what we know, even if we don’t like it. If we risk everything to create something that could be better, we might fail, and then that would be, well, failure.
Every creative who creates is very familiar with failure. It’s part of the whole deal. We have to be willing to fail.
More importantly, we have to be willing to succeed!
Creativity is not a game of winning or losing.
It’s about exercising the spirit, the part of us that just likes something, is inspired by it, and wants to go explore it. Perhaps you want to design and plant a garden of very colorful plants that bring all the local pollinators to your yard. Maybe you want to bring neighbors together to build a community garden that feeds a lot of people.
Daily creativity is making dinner at night, finding fun ways to get through boring tasks, learning how to collaborate with others.
There’s a lot to be said for the power of emotional creativity. The people in the front lines of helping others get through tough times in their lives, are creatives and healers. They are doing deep and difficult work, many of them with grace, love, and joy.
Creativity is about choosing, doing the work, solving the problems along the way, finding new solutions you might have overlooked before, taking risks.
Creativity applies to everyone: artists, teachers, parents, leaders, healers, business owners, environmental activists, voting rights activists, people who love democracy and want to help grow the one we have now into an even better system that works for all.
You can create positive change even when there’s resistance to any change at all.
Change is inevitable and we might as well roll with it.
Change is scary. We can’t help it, the unknown future can be a stressful thing for people. When fear is lit up, it’s hard to remember that much of what’s happening is out of your control and mine. However, we have a very powerful effect on how things change when we show up and do the work of creating, even in our own small micro ways.
These days I’m learning how to trust more deeply, to let go of the control I never had to begin with, and to allow myself to continue to embrace change. It seems that the more I do this, the easier the new fun ideas come to me.
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Featured Artist: Lyn Gaza
‘The Other Side of the Mirror’ is a gorgeous book of photography recently published by a good friend of mine in Los Angeles.
Noel and I met Lyn Gaza and her husband Michael when we moved into the Long Beach Avenue art lofts in the produce district in Los Angeles, our first home in L.A. after leaving Chicago. They lived down the hall from us, and we all became fast friends. This building was a beautiful place to land in L.A., filled with art and artists, as well as lots of art showings, a swimming pool and spa outside in the courtyard, three story tall cactus in the hallways, and lots of cool people to hang with.
Happily, we are still friends! We met up with Lyn and Michael on our recent visit to L.A. in August, and came back home with a copy of Lyn’s new book, which had just been published. Check out her website and book, you can purchase it at her website.
Inspiration for being a curious change making world builder
adrienne maree brown’s wonderful book, ‘Emergent Strategy’, is inspiring me, and helping me feel and see a new world being possible. Find it here, and enjoy!
The world is full of beauty, magic, miracles, and patterns that induce wonder.
— adrienne maree brown, ‘Emergent Strategy’
I hope you’ve been having the time and space to listen to your own art. Thank you for reading today!
Love, Kris