Amidst all of the perspectives on the recent US election results, these words from author Octavia Raheem resonated:
“We are going to need a way to plainly, quickly, and easily identify who is a safe place. All I can say right now is this: I am. I am a safe place.”
It is my highest intention to be a safe place for you, exactly as you are, and to do everything I can to make this community a safe space for you and your brave decision to live a creative life. I will make mistakes and carry on and I am always open to your responses.
Here are 8 in-process thoughts on staying creatively alive right now. No hot takes here — as always an offering through the lens of your creative health and our creative power because this is my practice. If something sparks, let me know.
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1. How we see each other matters
We will remember how we held each other. Psychotherapist Peter Levine says trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of a compassionate witness.
The morning after the election I wore my Kamala hat to drop my kids off at school because I had Ashley Allison’s memorable words in my head about holding our head up high. Another parent I didn’t know just pointed to my hat, looked at me, and cried. We cried together, not even saying much, and then several more parents came over and stood with us bewildered, teary, in shock. We don’t need the right words or the perfect strategy. But just witnessing each other without agenda — especially those most deeply affected by the impending political trauma — can make a meaningful imprint on someone’s journey of processing.
I wish I could sit beside you — to listen to whatever is on your heart. My inbox is always open to you. If you need a space to share what you’re holding, I am here.
May we be a compassionate witness to each other right now, in the midst of our action and strategy. And tomorrow. And the days and months after that.
Also, I’m still wearing the hat btw. Head held high.
2. Hear yourself
In the confusing/terrifying aftermath of a country once again electing a racist, misogynist sexual abuser instead of a qualified female candidate, the chorus of voices telling us what to do/feel/think/how to respond can drown out our ability to hear ourselves.
Yet our creative health depends upon our listening to and obeying our inner voice. Every time you grieve how you need to grieve instead of by someone else’s rules, or take the next action step because you feel called — not obligated — to do so you are regenerating your creative well-being.
Grief is the beginning of a creative process. And just like healing and visioning and birthing anything beautiful it requires a creation space.
The only rule of the creation space is to keep the shame out of the room. Shame is our least effective strategy, because it understandably makes us afraid to create. It drains our creative power and erodes sovereignty and self-trust. It prevents us from accessing internal safety and we can’t be curious or in flow when we don’t feel safe.
No one gets to tell you how to feel or act or respond. No one gets to decide the size or timeline of your feelings or the rightness of your responses. Inside of ourselves is the only true call for what we require in this moment.
When we radically let go of someone else’s strategy about how we’re supposed to respond, we initiate a creative process that is born in trust and begins to generate energy. We can build on this energy. This energy is a place to begin.
3. Creating bravely is an answer
When asked about the answer to a country sliding into facism, the great writer and futurist Octavia Butler responded:
“There isn’t one,” I told him. “No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.
“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
We can choose to be an answer. We don’t have to be THE answer.
I’ve always felt like choosing to live a creative life is inherently linked to being an answer — I keep this list on my desk to help me remember that this means choosing—
- The possibility of the unknown over the false promise of certainty
- A culture of trust and care over a culture of control and harm
- Courage over perfection
- What brings you alive over what makes you fit in
- Imagination over the status quo
- To hold multiple truths over binary thinking
- Curiosity over fear
- Radical love and pleasure over pressure and shame
- To stay hopeful when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard
I imagine, over the last several weeks, there have been moments when you have actively chosen your commitment to a creative life. And it was probably hard AF because it’s easier not to. But you have put your creativity into practice anyway and can I please remind you how essential this is? Choosing to see the world through a lens of love, curiosity, hope, and possibility — even when things feel impossible and devastating — is an act of courage.
As legendary activist and organizer Grace Lee Boggs says, “a revolution that is based on people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.”
Time to exercise.
4. Center your wild dreams
The incredible Buddhist minister and Spiritual Abolitionist Lama Rod Owens wrote this week: “We have to stay true to the dreams that we have about what we want the world to look like, and center that dream and real liberation for everyone.”
Recently I’ve noticed a surge of soul urgency (not to be confused with hustle culture fake urgency) as I’ve been in deep visioning/dreaming mode with many clients over the past several weeks — this is the feeling from within that it may be time to get out of the waiting room on a wild dream. Have you felt this?
It’s essential creative medicine, especially right now, to tend to our dreams and deepest intentions for the future. This helps us unhook from a cycle of short-term reactivity, and apply our creative power and talents to, as Zen Master Norma Wong calls it, our “long arc responsibility” toward a thriving collective future.
5. Quantum leaps (100 hugs)
I recently asked my son how many hugs he thinks he needs on a daily basis. He smiled radiantly, clearly he had been waiting for the day I would ask. “100,” he said, like it was a delicious fact.
My guess was going to be around 9 or 10. I am not a big physical contact person — 10 seems like a lot ???? And yet — this child requires 10x.
Strangely, knowing this feels energizing, instead of a burden. It’s all of a sudden clear to me that this kid is going to expand me beyond what I ever thought was possible. That the way is creative, not logical. And I realize: I cannot meet this moment as my current self, nor through any kind of linear approach. The only choice is a quantum leap.
We’re afraid to uncover the vastness of our needs and visions because we’re already anticipating how impossible it will be to meet them. We are already (understandably) exhausted and over capacity.
And yet. We forget our creative power here.
We think we know how the story ends so we try to solve the problem based on logic or what has been. We forget our nonlinear greatness and our remarkable ability to bet on what is not yet. And, too: the parts of ourselves we have yet to bring forth.
What if it’s a quantum leap? What if this could transform and not deplete us? What if we need 100 hugs?
6. Success = showing up
If you know me you know that celebrating process is a fundamental part of my philosophy (and thoroughly backed by research!) because most of us underappreciate our efforts and magnificence due to the cultural conditioning that success = results and nothing else counts. This narrow way of seeing our story has a significant impact on our confidence, energy, and future progress.
As part of my recovery from over-achieving and perfectionism, I rewrote my definition of success to include “trying earnestly at something I care about.” As we process the moment (and our years and our lives), it may soften us to observe where our achievement orientation hijacks our energy. In what ways are we under-acknowledging the good efforts of ourselves and others? Where are we forgetting to celebrate our progress?
I am in awe of the magnificent people standing on the shoulders of magnificent people showing up fiercely on behalf of the most vulnerable among us. You are a part of this. Thank you for everything you are and do.
7. The size of your love
Everyone is telling us not to despair or to stop hoping or don’t stop hoping or some other contradictory prescription for how to feel but we are all inside of a creative process right now and we need every single human emotion inside of a creative process. Despair and hope are sisters. Most of us are more comfortable with one sister than the other, but they are both part of our truth.
Touching into our despair if we need to — not languishing forever — but greeting her and not trying to banish her away — is so human, and a kind of progress of its own. Our despair reveals the depth of our hearts and our hope is fueled by the size of our love. And that love is the creative dna for what we dream of building.
We need you in your wholeness and we need you in your creative power. So we scoop up our hope in one arm and our despair in the other and in the both/and of it all we find our way through the dark.
8. First the wildness, then the sense
The sound of a cello. A Joy Harjo poem. Anderson Cooper’s grief podcast. A client’s feminist tv show. The Six soundtrack. For me, beauty, art, and stories have been such a sanctuary these last few weeks.
We need what you have to say and how you see and how all of sudden you help us hear god and the music of your work and how you listen the way you make us laugh. We need the beauty only you can create and the stories only you can tell.
As a creator, you offer a space for people to exist inside of the sweeping and inexplicable complexity of their experience — a space for their wildness — before making sense of things logically. First the wildness, then the sense. Keep creating, if it feels right.
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I’ve been on a hiatus from this letter while I’ve been solo parenting, working with my remarkable clients, moving our family to a new home, and navigating some strange health stuff. In the midst of it all, dragging inviting my toddlers back and forth to Pennsylvania to knock on doors. I fully believed that Kamala was going to win, and I had planned a series of letters to you on creative breakthroughs for November. After writing what feels like 20 drafts of today’s letter, here we are.
Creative breakthroughs are still on the way. As I’ve written about before, they are almost always preceded by periods of contraction, darkness, and what feels like moving backward.
This newsletter was birthed as a way to keep our creative spirits alive in the aftermath of the 2016 election, and now our next chapter is ahead of us. You belong here, and we are more committed than ever to our collective progress through the magic of the creative process. I am dedicated to helping you feel fully creatively expressed because 1. this is your birthright and 2. we need your voice to make this place beautiful.
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READING, LISTENING, WATCHING:
- Audre Lorde’s open letter to Mary Daly
- The Plight of Black Women in America by Brittany Packnett Cunningham
- Post-election episode of Sarah Jones’ podcast, America, Who Hurt You?, with Ashley Allison and Maurice Mitchell
- Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger
- Everything Lama Rod Owens posts right now, honestly, especially this video on the power of eldership and playing the long game
- Activist Dolores Huerta interview on Wiser Than Me
- Norma Wong’s When No Thing Works
- Today (11.19) is Trans Day of Remembrance — 7 Mutual Aid Funds helping Trans Americans right now
- Nobody Wants This on Netflix
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From author Rebecca Solnit:
Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
The Wobblies used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
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PS: To all of you readers who live outside of the US, thank you for being here and for standing with us (again) as we navigate through this. We need each other. You are amazing.
PPS: If you need to rest, rest. If you need to rage, rage. If you need to feel hope and despair at once, feel both at once. If you need to put the tv on for the kids so you can cry – even if it’s past the window you have deemed is the appropriate window for your tears — put the tv on and cry anyway. If you need to laugh, laugh. If you need to drive women to get abortions, drive women to get abortions. If you need to make art with people you love, make art with people you love. If you need to scroll, scroll. If you need to write, write. If you need to donate, donate. If you need to organize, organize. If you need to pray, pray. If you need music or poetry or art or kind words, please please please let yourself find refuge in beautiful spaces far wilder than sense-making. And if you need someone to hold you, let them hold you.
We are in this together. I’m here if you need me.
