Hello friends
I sat down this morning to write this post but it just wouldn’t come. I was blank, empty and distractable, huffing with impatience. I’d been in the studio a lot at the weekend, catching up on time lost to my recent trip to Fife and Edinburgh. To be honest, I felt a bit stale. Tired, and not in a good way. Just a bit flat.
I gazed out of the window, looking for inspiration. It was a pleasant morning, sunny and breezy. Everything was green, blue and white. Maybe I just needed to get outside. Go for a walk. I had enough sense to know that some air and light and wind and sea would sort me out.
So, I grabbed my camera and took myself up to a favourite place to walk, along the clifftop path to Marwick Head, where there is always plenty of air and light and wind and sea to be had.
I felt a bit transgressive, skiving on a workday morning. As I parked up and hoisted my camera, a neighbour’s washing snapped and cracked in the wind, a line of inflated pants and shirts doing the hokey-cokey. The sight made me smile. I felt better already.
And then I remembered a beautiful question someone had asked me after my talk at Making Waves – Breaking Ground last weekend:
“What do you do when the creative stream goes underground and you can’t find it?”
I hesitated. What do I know? And then I took a breath and said something along these lines:
“Go outside. Move your body. Go for a walk or a run. Breathe. Listen. Observe. Let go of the notion that creativity has to come from you, or from some deep well of angst. Entertain the possibility that it might be easy. That it might be your birthright.
Because creativity isn’t a monologue. It’s a conversation. You see something in the world that calls a response from you and you answer.
When you’re feeling stuck, it’s because you’ve lost track of the conversation, gone too far inside yourself. Go out and listen. Pick up the thread of it again.
It doesn’t all have to come from you. It’s not even about you.”
Hitting my stride, I nearly laughed out loud when I remembered saying this. I’d needed a dose of my own medicine, for sure.
And as I puffed my way up the green slope towards the cliffs, a bit overdressed in my jacket, I felt the wind pick up, snatch my hair, rumble in my ears. It cooled my hot face. I held out my hands as I walked, fingers splayed. I could feel the air streaming between them, eddying and whirling. It tickled, very gently, as if tiny silver minnows were slipping through my fingers.
I remembered that I was immersed in something alive and muscular, swimming in an invisible ocean of air. I sucked in lungfuls, feeling it rise and fall in me like a gentle swell. Soft banks of white cloud glistened in the sunlight and my eyeballs danced with faintly glittering tendrils as I took in the wide vault of brightness above and all around me. Yes, the air is alive and I’m alive in it and with it.
I reached the clifftop and the wide, sun-bright sea horizon opened up before me like a big symphonic crescendo that just makes your heart feel full up right to the brim for no reason you can explain.
If you could bottle this feeling…
Maybe that’s all my paintings are. A way to bottle this feeling, so that someone else can uncork it whenever they want and get a salt-tanged whiff.
I spent a good while watching the light and dark dancing across the sea surface, as the last of the summer’s seabirds wheeled and banked just off the cliffs. A fulmar hovered just beyond the cliff edge near me, like a kite on a string, making tiny adjustments in the updraft, then performed an in-flight reverse to plonk himself deftly back on his narrow ledge.
I’d been focussed inward too much. I’d lost the thread. I hadn’t been listening. It was all right here, waiting for me to notice again.
As I made my way back down the hill, I felt myself start to hurry, eager to get back to the studio, to the painting that’s my current conundrum, feeling like I had a hunch now how to finish it.
Eager, too, to get back and share with you the reminder I’d needed to give myself, knowing that the writing would come now, quickly and easily.
I know not everyone has a sunlit clifftop nearby to walk along. But it doesn’t take much. As
has so beautifully shown us, the world us waiting for us everywhere: a weed flowering in a cracked pavement, the glint of rain-slicked roof slates, a patch of sunlight sliding down the wall.Back in the studio now, two paintings I just finished at the weekend sit alongside the one that’s still an unaswered question.
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
Come and help me finish ‘Wave’! You are warmly welcomed to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.
That’s all for this week!
Sam
Oh Sam, thank you so much for the mention. This is still a lesson I must learn over and over, noticing when I've locked myself up tight, for whatever reason, and then going outside and just OPENING. All love to you x
Thanks for taking us on this uplifting walk with you, Samantha! 💙