Instructions for Creative Unblocking
Instructions for Creative Unblocking and Learning from the Creative Process.
As I embark into some new writing projects this summer, the following list contains my learnings about the creative process I want to my future self to remember. Like the application of the earning, this list is a work in progress. So, for the times I am feeling stuck, blocked, fearful or small, dear Clare, please remember…
Creativity is like lifeblood, always flowing with its own pulse and rhythm. Even when you can’t see or recognise it, trust that below the surface it is forever in motion. And just like with a heartbeat or pulse, you can tune into that rhythm with consciousness, attention and pause. Creating is an act of surrender to a deeper beat.
Remember: You create because it is something which brings you most alive to the hidden undercurrents of connection, ideas and relationship. It brings meaning to the ordinary in ways which render everything extraordinary. Life is better in creativity mode.
The beginning of each writing/ creativity session is the hardest part. Make the beginning easy. Lower your expectations and allow yourself to enter slowly. Let kindness be your guide.
Keep booking creative meetings in your calendar, blocks of unmovable time. Even if you don’t write/ paint/ make immediately, keep showing up. Something always gets impatient and shows up eventually too!
If one tool feels blocked, use another. If you can’t write, then paint. If you can’t do that, then dance. If not that, then move. Move in whatever way feels nourishing. The movement begets movement, so everything else can flow.
Remember: your job is not to make ‘good’ work. Your job is to make the best work that only you can make. Whether others think it is good, or not, has nothing to do with your creativity. What matters is that you keep seeking to make your best work yet. Then repeat again and again and again.
Trust the strange imaginings. Trust the voices in your head. Trust how characters show up in the middle of the night to whisper details and twists. No matter how mad it all seems, these are the gems which makes the work all the more distinctive, and mysterious too.
You don’t write poems, you walk into them. Your task is to be ready to catch them at any moment. Then the craft of shaping them can begin.
Remember: creativity is a co-creative process. It’s between you and the source of life itself. When you commit, life shows up too. May the dance always be about to begin.
You are never going to get ‘there’. That’s the point. ‘There’ is an aspiration, designed to keep you learning, growing, changing, exploring, evolving. ‘There’ will always move depending on your capacity. Remaining proximate to ‘there’ is a better destination.
Poetry is the place to figure out the silences. Listen. Then, listen to the silence below the silence, and write from that place.
If you haven’t reached the chaos, you haven’t gone deep or far enough. Chaos is an indicator of the wild life within a project. There are tools to help carry your through. Use them.
Every book, every poem, every photo has an original essence. The craft is to reveal that essence in as light and beautiful way as possible. There will be many attempts to reach it, and each draft can bring your closer. But mostly the essence keeps some of itself hidden- that’s the mystery, which is also the beauty. Keep working your way through the layers.
Time is not linear. What happens in flow can defy natural order. Sometimes you only need five minutes for your best work to happen. And you always have five minutes.
Leave room for the blanks.
Photography is ‘drawing with light’. What gets exposed is a matter of choice, and craft. Light is both an instrument of revelation and restraint. Less is often more. As with images, so too with words.
When in doubt, swim. When still in doubt, walk. If all else fails, just keep showing up to the blank page. It is an ocean and a mountain too. Keep moving.
Nothing will ever be fully finished. At some point you need to decide to stop so new work can arrive in too. Be willing to gift your creativity to the world, knowing there is more to come.
Making your creative work is a love letter to your deepest, most tender self. Keep making. The love letter isn’t finished yet.
To be continued….
Hello. I'm Clare
I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x
New Writing Wild Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in Schull, West Cork.
New date announced: July 23rd and August 27th. Bookings via Arran Street East.
Moments to Remember
Falling in love with photography again, one beauty at a time.
Falling in love with my camera again, and what it helps me to see….
Hello. I'm Clare
I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x
New Writing Wild Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in Schull, West Cork.
New date announced: July 23rd and August 27th. Bookings via Arran Street East.
The Island at the End of my Road
A short trip to Long Island, West Cork.
A short trip to Long Island, West Cork, the island at the bottom of my road. I am so grateful to the Clare who decided to move to such a beautiful place, and to all the inhabitants- human and more than human kin- who make it all possible and serve with a dash of wonder.
Hello. I'm Clare
I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x
New Writing Wild Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in Schull, West Cork.
New date announced: July 23rd and August 27th. Bookings via Arran Street East.
No Now May
In honour of No Mow May, long grass, scattering seeds, biodiversity, rewilding and wrens, a little poem for the occasion. Find out more about the All Ireland Pollinator Plan.
In honour of No Mow May, long grass, scattering seeds, biodiversity, rewilding and wrens, a little poem for the occasion.
No Mow May
I don’t want a lawn,
something tamed and severed
from its own potential.
I want daisies.
I want cuckoo flowers that sing
a capella with the wind.
I want to fall down on my knees
in the hunt for rare bee orchids.
I want bees.
I want the way my legs
disappear among
the long, wet grasses.
I want the rush of it all,
the swoosh of it, seeds scattered
to the sky on each passing footfall
of my breath.
I want to explain the sun, moon and stars
of every exploding dandelion.
I want what the wren wants:
the possibility to shelter,
then to soar.
Find out more about the All Ireland Pollinator Plan and No Mo May
@allirelandpollinatorplan #NoMowMay #biodiversity#rewilding #nature #poetry #poem #pollinators
Hello. I'm Clare
I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x
New Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in West Cork.
Live a New Story (May 27th) and Writing Wild (June 24th) are coming to Schull! Bookings via Arran Street East.
The Secret Worlds of Writing
Writing happens in the confluence of secret worlds. The first is the world of our head, where memory, language, images and experience, together with the internal cadences and rhythms of our inner voice, collide. There is a solitude to this world which, when we allow ourselves the time and space to explore, we find is as vast and rich as any landscape. We speak differently to how we write- how we tell our story on paper, as opposed to telling our story with voice, is a layered, textured encounter. Before utterance, there is the invitation to explore the spaces and places which comprise our inner landscape, and in doing so, expand it. This expansion alone warrants the writing, whether or not we choose to share or even develop what gets written.
You can listen to this piece below- 5 minutes.
The Secret Worlds of Writing.
Writing happens in the confluence of secret worlds. The first is the world of our head, where memory, language, images and experience, together with the internal cadences and rhythms of our inner voice, collide. There is a solitude to this world which, when we allow ourselves the time and space to explore, we find is as vast and rich as any landscape. We speak differently to how we write- how we tell our story on paper, as opposed to telling our story with voice, is a layered, textured encounter. Before utterance, there is the invitation to explore the spaces and places which comprise our inner landscape, and in doing so, expand it. This expansion alone warrants the writing, whether or not we choose to share or even develop what gets written.
From this inner world, ink is a conduit. On paper, as words make our way to our hands, the speed of the written forms, the pace in which the letters land on the page, seem to provide pause enough for new articulations and ideas to form. I’ll forever be an advocate of handwriting for this very reason. The hand-brain connection seems to reach into that private world of the imagination and access ideas from an embodied, often more emotionally nuanced or charged place. A blank page is where the first discharge of this electrical connection of body and mind is made manifest, and those initial drafts often capture the energy of a first encounter. The first kiss of ink to page holds an erotic tension, which can birth worlds. But first, we must we willing to come closer, to make the first move, to offer part of ourselves to the page.
Once we encounter the page, craft also enters. We learn how to be playful with how we place images, and then to re-arrange them. We realise it is all a wild experiment; here we get to conjure elements out of our secret world of the mind, combine with words, and figure out what ones to amplify and what to discard. Through these twin currents of assembly and disassembly, what we choose to keep and what we select to jettison, we are emboldened with a sense of agency. We are both the breakers and the makers, and, as we create these worlds, we too are made. Here is another expansion, which again, whether we choose to share the writing or not, the very act of writing is warranted.
Writing as opposed to speaking has always given me access to ways of thinking, seeing and perhaps most importantly, connecting, which the oral tradition does not. Here, on the page, my world is formed with detail and colour; where past and present converge in an emergent conversation. On the page, even the imaginal world evidences as a tangible, seen world. The pages start to fill. The ink runs low. There is something to hold. Letters as bricks. Sentences as bridges. Words as organic matter.
Then, beyond the first secret world, there is the second secret world: the world of the reader. From page to eye to mind and heart, words are transported in a sacred covenant between writer and reader; an invisible thread that can extend beyond boundaries, time, borders, eras, ideologies, definitions, selfhood. As a writer, what a privilege it is to have ones words carried into the body of another. As a reader, what a magic it is to have access to another's inner landscape. Not all stories have to be shared, or deserve to be shared, for that matter, but the ones that are, become alive again in the reader. Some of those words even get to live on, as mirrors to the reader’s own lives, or maps or counter-maps saying ‘go this way’, or ‘definitely not that way’. Our stories, when offered to another, take up a new residence beyond which we have any control. To share our story is also to birth the potential for new ways of being, for ourselves, for the reader, and perhaps, just perhaps for the places and spaces between. Which is also to say: to write our story, and then to share our story is to birth new secret worlds.
Hello. I'm Clare
I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x
New Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in West Cork.
Live a New Story (May 27th) and Writing Wild (June 24th) are coming to Schull! Bookings via Arran Street East.
Letters from Clare
Stay in touch…
@onewildlife
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