I’ve felt a little guilty for not updating my blog more often. I feel like I owe an explanation to y’all, as much as I owe it to myself to share some vulnerability about my creative journey, and some of my success (and lack-thereof).
Engaging in creative work is difficult on many levels. Not the least of which being, from the perspective of a capitalist society, creative work doesn’t feel productive. Sometimes, that's the point. We spend so much of our lives toiling away at the grindstone to bare our scars to the world as symbols of clout. The sacrifices in time, wants, personal health that we set aside for feelings of purpose to something larger than ourselves.
Creativity offers a respite from this drive to constantly produce. This week, I’ve been home with the kids, and to keep the six-year-old occupied for half an hour, I introduced the practice of collage. We clipped from magazines, glue-sticked and assembled our creations with the Olympics murmuring in the background.
The act of engaging your hands in something that the mind must surrender some but not all of its consciousness to is one of the easiest ways to achieve a “flow state”. Other folks have written so many words about flow state, but this is a way to engage your mind in rejuvenating meditation. Using the scissors to cut out a hot dog from a magazine allows the mind to wander, but in a non-distracting way.
But aside from the mindful practice of engaging our creativity, what other blessings can be unlocked?
Humans crave validation. Validation that we spent our time and effort in ways that are worthy for more folks than just ourselves. Without validation, feelings of selfishness can take over, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence. In an attempt to experiment with validation as it relates to creative work, I started this blog. To share with anyone willing to read, of course in hopes to inspire and amaze, but at the very least to just be witnessed by other bloodbags.
I don’t believe that this is just validation for me, but by consuming human generated creative work, is the viewer not validated in their human experience? I think of creativity as a two-way street between the creator and consumer. Both must put forth effort into understanding the other, but both can be equally rewarded.
As part of my creative journey, I’ve realized merely creating isn’t enough to offset the lapse in capitalistic productivity to justify continuing to create without sharing the work. So to ensure that my creative journey is indeed trodding along, and not stagnating, the next logical step is to offer some of the fruits of my labor. The purpose I’ve been pursuing lately is growing as a creative, to share my ideas and humor with as many people as possible.
The reason I’ve been distracted is I’m challenging myself with bigger, longer-term projects. Last year, I wrote a pilot episode for a comedy television series about a church that revolves around automobiles. Like cowboy churches but for cars.
This year, instead of making the pilot better, developing the characters, or putting in any effort towards improvement, I’ve decided to start an entirely new screenplay project.
Introducing: Lewis & Clark Find Weed in America. In 1803, as President Jefferson was completing the Louisiana Purchase, he was also grooming his secretary, Meriwether Lewis for an expedition to explore this new territory. The main goal for the expedition, historically, was to find an all-water access route to the Pacific. This, of course, does not exist due to the existence of the Rockies– but what if the Corps of Discovery happened upon one of the most lucrative cash crops in history?
Combining stoner humor with an under-explored historical event has been an interesting challenge that I look forward to sharing the completed effort with the public at a later date. I started this project in the fall of last year and hope to be polishing the first draft sometime this fall.
And that’s not all! There are some other projects that I’m working on of varying scale that I’ll introduce as I can, but I wanted to share with y’all some of the creative work I’ve been doing beyond the blog.
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