Feels a wee bit vulnerable to write this: I feel like I’m experiencing a creative renaissance….
I was nervous about Monday night’s storm. Sunday night’s….Holy. Nashville had what is being called a hurricane on land. Seventy mph winds. No joke. Personally, we were only inconvenienced with 12 hours of no power. Others were not so lucky with power outages and property damage. We’re looking over our shoulder here in Music City as a tornado ripped through town early March only to be followed by a pandemic and then Sunday night’s storm. Was it payback for Bro Country? (I stole that.)
In anticipation for storm two, I sat vigil, the back porch door open, the cool air wafting in, the breeze swaying the patio twinkle lights. Grace with her iPad, I with my laptop. Writing. Writing. Writing some more.
Until the pandemic, my writing had been abandoned in the cyber parking lot of my blog. Plus, I hadn’t felt compelled to edit and post iPhone images on Instagram in forever. (Formerly a creative pleasure.) Life was just too busy. I was creating collages a couple of times a month. Since the pandemic began, I’m not. But, last week, these flowers seduced me back to my iPhoneography. I’d planned my day so that I could put aside work for play instead of the usual bleed of personal business to-do’s. And Monday night, in the quiet isolation of the pandemic, I played with them for hours. It felt luxurious and awesome. (Who needs t.v.?)
There’s a gift in these weird times of the great unknown. We’re forced to be quiet. Forced to go within. Some of us are surfacing our demons. (I’d say the most of us. I’ve discovered a bounty lurking in the shadows.) Relationships are being renewed. Or severed. (Some need severing.) Some of us are coming up with old and new ways of expression: painting, poetry, songwriting, sewing, cooking, dancing. That can’t be a bad thing.
I know the process in writing, how the subconscious bubbles up and floats from fingertips, melds into the keyboard and emerges on the page. I know the process in creating art on paper/canvas/board. The subconscious sometimes creates something for which the message is not realized until later. That noisy left brain thing hypnotically lulled to slumber while the right brain floats in an air space of zen while creating.
Monday, while stopped mid-lunch to again capture another stage of death of these decapitated, disintegrating flowers, the rhyme and reason for what my subconscious might be conveying via my sudden obsession occurred to me….These dying flowers are a bit like the pandemic. Old ways are dying. There is sadness in death, but there’s also a renewal, a chance to start anew. A bittersweet beauty. Life was, life is, life will be different going forward….
Will we learn from it? What will we take away?
I call few people genius but Chief Curator of Nashville’s Frist Art Museum, Mark Scala, is one of them. We chat on Facebook occasionally. Like other organizations, “The Frist” closed during the pandemic—soon to reopen. I asked how they were doing. I love his response:
“The most sane people I know are artists. They care deeply while finding a way not to be sucked into the quicksand. Make beauty, make meaning, traffic in metaphor. It may not be the beacon that gets us out of this mess, but in the end, it may be the tapestry of reflection that helps us to see it to the end.”
I love the Frist curator’s response too! It is so true. I have found some creative bursts during this pandemic, and they are key to my well-being. I have journaled and played the piano. I wish I had my colored pencils from the office at home, but an old-fashioned pencil works just as well for sketching, only it’s not as colorful (duh). Our internet & cable TV are not functioning since Sunday’s storm, and it has been interesting how it has changed our routine. We watch too much TV. We watched Dances with Wolves in black-and-white on our VCR, which then gave up the ghost. We were trying to watch Sleepless in Seattle, and the video just kept cutting out. That’s okay. We can watch that movie some other time in DVD format. I may rent some DVDs from Redbox…haven’t done that in a while. But in the meantime I’d rather play the piano or play rummy with John. The latter is not a creative endeavor, but it is a good way to pass the time…and stay humble, as he usually hammers me. We are quite competitive when we play games, but in a good kind of way. We passed on the competitive gene to our daughter but not to our son. I think he’s much happier because he has lower expectations. I’ve learned a lot from both children. I love that they are grown and we can be friends. I often think of you and Grace and the hurdles you’ve overcome, and I admire your tenacity and mama tiger strength so much. I love Grace’s wonderful creativity expressed in her art. She is lucky to have you, and you are lucky to have her. Can you please pass on your curls to me when you get frustrated with them? Maybe I could glue some to my hair. Wouldn’t that be cute!
You are being creative! Yes! So much can be done without television! Thank you for your kind words, Anne. And, for reading!
As an empath, artist, and teaching artist, I’ve found my creativity is wildly up and down during the time of COVID. There are stretches of days when I feel completely uninspired, lacking the energy and flow to produce or even creatively process anything. And then there are days when I walk barefoot under the Sycamore tree in my yard and just dance. As a writer and a dancer, my COVID response has leaned more toward dance than writing, though I’m journaling much more frequently these days, albeit in a documentary style. For me, there is that whole-body release, the release of tension, possibly the release of the diffused trauma of this time, and a dropping into the present moment that comes with dance. For me, writing is from the heart when it flows well, but also from the head. Dance is from the soul. And when I process these days, it is mostly from that soul space from which creative release is wanting to flow.
I did, however, spit this out early on:http://www.nashvilleskyline.org/legacy/poetry/before-the-dandelions-go-to-seed-by-amanda-cantrell-roche/
Loved your content.
thanks for sharing.