I firmly believe that the more creative you are, the more creative you are. When you’re a creative person, your default is creativity. Your default is flowering. Your default is fecundity. But. There will be obstacles.

In White Ink, Hélène Cixous says, “Fecundity is the creative person’s natural state. The more pertinent question is that of what inhibits it. Why does one get periods of broken productivity? What causes these interruptions? Productivity, it has to be said, has no reason to be broken except through adverse, exterior circumstances........But there are also private accidents, internal dramas, personal tragedies.”

And though this book was published in 2008, the quotation will likely speak to many of us, here in the year 2022.

Creativity is a fragile thing, but also: creativity is a fire that keeps our soul alive. Sometimes there are just embers, but sometimes there is a roaring and crackling fire. It’s all in us. Creativity is amazingly fierce and strong and persistent.

There is a poem by Catherine of Siena that ends:

The wings we have are so fragile
they can break from just one word, or
a glance void of love.
I wanted to live in that cloister of
light’s silence
because, is it not true, the heart
is so fragile and shy.

I used to be so disciplined with my rituals and reading these words by Twyla Tharp have reminded me to get fierce again about them. Fierce rituals! Yes.

“A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day.

The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started.”

— Twyla Tharp

So the question is, who/what is your Bach fugue?

I think, though maybe I’m wrong, that at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people had trouble writing because they didn’t want to write about what was happening per se. We were too “in it” for one thing. It was tricky at the beginning. But now we’ve been steeped in it for two years. We know some things even as we don’t know how things will play out. But we can write about now. On Twitter someone posted a poem by Constance Hansen on Four Way Review that took my breath away. It’s a prose poem that starts off:

“I watered the plants. I plucked their dead leaves. I fed the children and dog. I asked the coffee to raise spirits. I made no beds. I made an inadequate donation to a parentless child, survivor of the car wreck that killed my friends. I paid with my thumbprint. I sent another friend money who sent another friend flowers to celebrate a new baby. I pressed C to confirm my vaccination appointment.”

Honestly, the ending…..wow. Highly recommend getting over there to Four Way Review to read it. Not only is it an amazing work, but gets me re-thinking the how of how the heck do we write at this time. At least this is one wonderful possible way that is real and fierce and in the moment and heart squeezing on many levels.

So, all that said, I want to continue to inspire you and help you draw out your creativity, and not just because I legit received the message (in the photo above) in a fortune cookie. Which is why I created my Beauty School on Patreon. I’ve been in the business of inspiring others to create on this blog and in other spaces for ohhhhh 30 years now, in one form or another. But it feels like now is the time to take this to a whole other level :) So let’s do this thing.

Why should you subscribe? Maybe you would like to realign and reset your soul toward beauty and would like some prompts and food for thought to help you in that endeavour. The world is a difficult place right now and beauty can be hard to find and hard to make space for. Join me at my Beauty School patreon and I’ll help you make space for beauty. Maybe you’ve been reading Transactions with Beauty for years and want to share the love for what you’ve already received. Maybe you would like to support the creative life and work of someone (me :) ) whose work you have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy. I’ve set the monthly donor tiers at 3, 5 and 10 dollars per month. So for as little as the cost of a hardcover book per year, or more if you so choose, you can join my Beauty School. Thanks for considering!

— Shawna

May 18, 2022