Happy New Year?
An Uninspired Creative's Guide to Beginning Again
The Creativity Guild is a community of mid-life creative explorers looking to reignite our creative sparks. This is the place to reconnect with your creativity and start the projects you’ve always wanted to work on and be the person you’ve always wanted to be.
A Creatively Dry January
This edition of the Creativity Guild was supposed to come out at the beginning of January. It was supposed to be our “Great Tips to Kick Start the New Year!” issue, full of all sorts of inspirational hacks to help you to get creative in 2023.
The only problem was that neither Steve nor I really felt up to kick-starting much of anything.
Personally, I had kind of a low-key holiday break this year. I mainly stayed around the house. Saw a few movies. Hung out with some friends. Took a slightly odd road trip to Cleveland for a few days (it’s a long story that involves my son’s ironic obsession with all things Cleveland...) By and large though, I entered into the new year feeling kind of…blah.
I had spent the fall of 2022 feeling pretty good, I was writing a bunch, working on some visual art projects that were exciting me, I had taken on a job that was flexing some muscles that hadn’t been flexed in a while. I felt engaged with the world and it felt great. And then the holidays happened and all that feeling of goodness was overtaken with this bloated feeling of blah.
I didn’t want to create anything. I didn’t even want to read anything. All I really wanted to do was putter around the house and binge-watch Netflix. And there was a moment during that time where I actually thought to myself, “You know, I could really just exist in this mediocre state for the rest of my life and I would be just…fine.” I felt resentment for the part of me that seemed to be ok with settling for a life of blah, but I also wasn’t really up for taking any steps to correct it.
Morning Pages to the Rescue
In the fall, during a sprint of inspiration, I had begun reading Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way”. The book has been in my house for decades, but the snob in me always felt like the cover looked cheesy and so I never bothered to open it. When I finally got over myself and cracked the cover I, of course, discovered just how wrong I was.
If you’ve read the book then you know that it’s the real deal. Cameron has tons of specific exercises to follow designed to awaken the artist within. One of the core practices is called the “Morning Pages”. Following her guidance, every morning upon waking you’re instructed to fill three pages of a notebook with writing. The writing can be about anything. I first thought it would be a great place to generate ideas and experiment with new forms. For me, it ended up being a form of therapy, a place to process whatever was circling around in my head during the night and a chance to process it before I headed into the day. The experience of writing the Morning Pages was transformational.
And then one day I just stopped. Around the same time, I also stopped creating any art and settled into a state where I felt nothing better than “fine.”
Getting Lost
For about a decade or so meditation has played a big-ish role in my life. There are times when I do it daily and there are times when I don’t do it for weeks on end. The central teaching of meditation that keeps bringing me back time and time again though is the idea that every time I meditate I am beginning again. By beginning again I’m able to remind myself that I have a body. I remind myself that I am a human being that breathes. That I am a person on this planet surrounded by everything that the world has to offer. When my mind wanders in meditation there is always an invitation to begin again as well, and return to being in the moment. These constant invitations to begin again are basically moments where I acknowledge that I’ve gotten lost and consciously allow myself to restart. “You will get lost,” one of my meditation teachers recently said to me, “but can you delight in the fact that you got lost?”
Beginning Again
I thought about that last week as I sat down on my couch about to once again scroll through Instagram as I sipped my tea, but then I paused. Sitting on my coffee table was the notebook that I had months ago been using to write my morning pages. It has stayed in the same spot, buried under books and unopened mail. I took it from the pile, looked at it, and then began to write.
I wish I could tell you that I’ve written my Morning Pages every single day since and that it’s inspired me to create some amazing art, write my first novel, and finish my long-suffering screenplay. But that would be a lie. I am, after all, a completely averagely flawed human being. However, on the days I do choose to “begin again” and return to the practice of the Morning Pages, I am perpetually amazed at the gifts that writing like this provides. It helps clear my mind so that I can actually be creative. It reminds me that I can do better than “fine” and that the invitation to begin again is always sitting there, just waiting to be seen.
Beginning Again with The Creativity Guild
You may have noticed that this issue of The Creativity Guild looks a little different. It’s because when it comes to The Creativity Guild we’ve decided to do our own version of “begin again”. Our plans for The Creativity Guild in 2023 are ambitious, full plans and scheming. Here are just a few of the things we have thinking of:
Our 2023 goal is to inspire all of us to make more things, to support our creative souls, and to make it easier to start getting creative again. No small task we realize, but we are hoping that this newsletter could just be the spark you need to take creative action!
We are trying to reformat the newsletter to make it more readable and scannable. We want it to be a short read you look forward to, not a wall of text personal diary entry that stays in your inbox for several weeks.
We will collaborate with other people in the creativity space - whether it's other newsletters, podcasts, TikTok, etc - we want to try fun stuff with others.
We are going to keep up the pace of publishing every 2 weeks, but we are hoping at some point this year to publish weekly.
The Creativity Guild in the Wild
Introducing The Creativity Guild Podcast!
Just kidding. We don’t have a podcast, but we were featured recently on one!
The lovely and talented writer/standup comedian/podcaster Joanne O’Sullivan recently asked us to be guests on her podcast Happy Funny Amazing. The assignment was for each of us to tell her a story. We recorded these stories separately and didn’t discuss with each other ahead of time what we were going to say. Amazingly (and also perhaps somewhat depressingly?) we both ended up telling stories that weren’t particularly happy or funny. Instead they were both about our fears about dying. Sounds fun, no?
If you’re curious you can check out the ep here.
Creative Challenge
If you’re looking for a way to begin again - or just begin - why not start with Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages exercise? You can hear her talk about it here.
The Kicker
We decided to end each newsletter with something fun - a little closing surprise or smile. After writing about beginning again and Morning Pages, we began Googling “Begin Again” to find out first “kicker.” Guess what showed up that we didn’t even know existed?
Only the perfect book for MIDLIFE and BEYOND… from JULIA CAMERON.
WHAT!??!! Mysterious forces are at work…
We are truly grateful to have you along with us on this journey. We have a feeling that 2023 is going to be a fun ride!!!
Also been feeling the need to just binge netflix and not do anything! Nice to be reminded of The Artist’s Way and morning pages :-)
I can relate to the post holiday bloat and lack of inspiration. Good read— thank you!