Art and Mental Health Link Love
A digest of this week's things I loved on Substack that I wanted to say a little bit more about ...
Each week, I want to share with you some of the things from other Substack writers that get me thinking. My niche is the relationship between art and mental health, with a focus on trying to understand how various mental health symptoms impact artistic process, productivity, medium, content, self-perception and reception by others. (And I believe that all of us are artists and all face mental health challenges to varying degrees.)
As I share these links, I’ll share the thoughts I personally had related to my niche. Please note that this doesn’t ever mean that it’s what the original author intended … just that I was inspired by their writing, want to give you my own thoughts from my personal lens, and hope that you’ll enjoy checking out their original pieces as much as I do.
You are invited, welcome and wanted here:
From the past week or so then …
‘s interview with Michelle Hurd of the National Negotiating Committee
About the writers/actors strike included this striking excerpt:
“It gives you a really good understanding of what artists are going through all over the world, what workers go through, what laborers go through, and how they can be systemically and systematically neglected, underpaid, and undervalued. It just keeps going and going. As soon as somebody says yes to something that’s just a little less than what they deserve, the people who are paying them say, “Okay, this one took that. Let's spread that out and let's continue to give them all less and less.” What's so egregious about that, especially in the arts, is that artists love doing what we do. We love to tell stories. We love to create ways for people to escape and be transported. The dirty secret is that we would do it for free if everything else in the world was free. But it's not a hobby. It's not something cute or some little thing that we do on the side. This is a profession. This is a true vocation.”
I have supported myself as a freelance writer for the better part of two decades. In the early days of that work, blogging and social media were in their infancy. I always liked blogging and didn’t much like social media, but I did a lot of both kinds of work to pay my bills. And for years, it was honestly exciting. I got to research and write about all kinds of different topics. There was a freedom in this, in being able to work from home on my own schedule, even if it meant writing about things that I didn’t care about much, even if it meant more and more writing for marketing and writing for search engines and algorithms and less and less about writing for people.
Over those years I also did plenty of “my own writing” including blogs and books and articles about things that I was passionate about. It has always been a balance of paying the bills and doing the creative work. But over the years, my patience with the low paying content churning work ran out. And I thought it was me. I thought it was depression. I thought it was burnout. It was a bit of those things but it wasn’t just that and it’s a lot bigger than me. There’s a systemic problem with gig work, with freelancing and independent contracting … with the ongoing difficulty of supporting yourself as a creative doing truly creative work that you care about.
I thought about leaving this work. Not the creative work. As said in the interview, I will always do that. But the part for pay. I thought about getting a W2 job that would give me paid vacations and let me write on the side. In fact, I’ve thought about this off and on throughout the decades, even getting my Masters in Psychology thinking I would become a therapist and then remembering that I’m a writer. Ultimately, I decided every time to double down on the writing, to recommit to trying to make a living off of the truly creative work. Full disclosure: I’m in massive debt right now but I really love the work that I’m doing.
It’s related to why I started a subscription newsletter (first on Patreon, now over here). It’s why I commit to giving at least ten percent of my earned income to other writers and artists and performers and makers. I hope the whole system shifts, and I believe we can do this one person at a time supporting others directly. But ultimately what we need is systemic change, commitment to funding the arts at a big level, and honoring of the slow amazing process of creativity.
REMINDER: My goal is to find 1000 people who are interested in subscribing to this work at a rate of $100 per year. This shows the world that we as creatives believe artists and writers can and should earn six figures. I practice artistic tithing, meaning that at least 10% of my income automatically goes to support other artists, writers, makers, creatives, performers, etc. So if I meet my goal, we keep at least $10000 of that right in the creative community.
$100 per year feels like a lot. But it works out to less than $2 per week.
RELATED: Keep Going, Writers by of Gratitude Journal
“Seeing my books in bookstores never gets old. My heart gets full every single time. I've been writing books for ten years now, going on eleven. Sometimes it's really hard to believe that I ended up here. There were so many voices along the way that questioned my ability to make writing my profession. I mean, shoot, at one point, I almost believed them. The outside doubt was just as bad as my self-doubt. I almost gave up and listened to folks telling me how crazy I was to bet on myself like this. But like Brandi says, almost doesn't count.”
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of Haver & Sparrow wrote “Creating a writing space without a desk”
which has a lot of little nuggets of writing wisdom in it but mostly is about creating a ritual around writing, something that signals to your brain, “I am sitting down to write now.” She shares:
“What grounds the practice is the personal rituals you choose to begin and end your session whether it’s brewing a fresh pot of tea or reading a favourite poem. While I regularly burn candles in the house I’d never thought to light one intentionally at the start of my writing sessions but now it’s something I do every time. It’s made such a difference to my focus as though my brain now realises it’s time to start working. I also love how portable this advice is: it can be applied to writing in all the different spaces we find ourselves working in, even when travelling, and can be adapted to suit our preferences and beliefs.”
My initial thought was that I know this idea, I love this idea, and yet I don’t do this idea. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Because at the same time as my brain was taking itself on that direction, it also took me back to all of the times I myself have written about the value of ritual in our creative work. Specifically, I thought of how many times I’ve suggested it to people who crochet for healing, including more than one mention in my book Hook to Heal!: 100 Crochet Exercises For Health, Growth, Connection, Inspiration and Honoring Your Inner Artist.
One example comes from an exercise for creating abundance that asks you to intentionally move through the four stages of happiness, one of which is the anticipation stage:
Set the crafting area up to really embrace the project that is about to come. By embracing rituals like lighting favorite candles or laying all of the yarn out in front of you, you really let the anticipation get as full as possible.
So, then, why don’t I do this in my own writing practice … ah, well, it turns out that I do. I have been a writer for as long as I can remember (and a full-time writer for a living for almost two decades) and I’ve had lots of ebbs and flows in my routine but within all of that I’ve developed some habits that are so ingrained I forget that they’re part of the ritual. The cup of coffee as I sit down is one of them. The reading of a passage before I do any writing is another. I do these things without even thinking about them. And the magic of the ritual is no less for having become habitual but it’s a reminder to actually pause as I begin, notice the taste of that first sip of coffee, and read with awareness that I’m beginning my practice. The ritual signals to the brain that I take my creativity seriously, that we’re doing the thing now … in fact, in times of depression sometimes just doing the ritual is all I can do but at least I feel like I did something and eventually it gets me to writing again … but pausing and noticing the ritual adds a richness that reminds me of how much I really do love this work.
RELATED: Doing Nothing by of Scintillae
“We all know Sarah was experiencing burnout, but her schedule and her responsibilities would not allow her to take a vacation at that moment. Luckily, she agreed to dedicate small pockets of time each morning to doing nothing. Sitting in her garden, savoring a cup of coffee, and daydreaming without distractions became her sanctuary.”
… maybe the ritual is simply doing nothing …
RELATED: Rethinking Balance by Karen Davis of
Perhaps doing “nothing” is very much doing something:
“I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to be “in balance”. Yet, when I practice balance exercises - for instance, standing on one leg - what I notice is that it is not a static thing at all. Rather, it’s a constant set of adjustments being made throughout my body. Not static at all, but constantly changing in each moment. If I close my eyes the movements become much more dramatic and I quickly see that I am not standing still at all.”
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of A Narrative of Their Own wrote Voices of Motherhood
which is about a Sylvia Plath play called Three Women which I, myself, have not yet read despite my ongoing deep dive into work by, about, and inspired by Plath. I hadn’t read her in twenty years then suddenly got interested again and am now immersed. She’s a natural for my niche (impact of mental health on creativity).
I do want to note that Kate rightly points out that Plath is
“a writer whose work often comes second to her tragic early death by suicide at the age of 30.”
In my own work, it isn’t her suicide per se that’s of interest but rather how mental heath and creativity interacted while she was alive. As I am with all artists, I’m curious … did the art help her or harm her or neither or both? In what ways did the challenges of depression and overwhelm impact not just when she created but how and what?
I noticed this line from Kate’s piece about Plath:
“Similarly, she saw the connection between the ability to give birth and writing as both creative processes which were inextricably linked.”
And there is something to this that I’m only grasping the edges of right now … something about how writing doesn’t just give meaning to life but is also itself an act of creating new life … and sometimes mothers die in childbirth. It’s an idea lingering in the shadows of my mind as I continue to read Plath’s work, and I hope I can develop further what I mean by it or what it means to me.
of Beyond Bloomsbury wrote about artist Dora Carrington
describing her in a way that immediately caught my attention:
“A bohemian and maverick who liked to play with boundaries, Dora’s personal life was as interesting as her art.”
Her biography includes changing her name, cutting her hair short, and engaging in a variety of love affairs. She fell in love with a gay man (Lytton Strachey) and married him so the two of them could live with another man who loved him. It sounds like they were happy for a time. But then … she began an affair with a man …
“This ended sourly, however, when she became pregnant and, refusing to commit to Penrose, had an abortion. He would be her last affair with a man.”
And not too long after, it seems, Lytton died of an illness, and she fell into despair:
“Two months later, on the 11th of March, and wearing Lytton’s dressing gown, Carrington shot herself. Though she was discovered, and her friends Ralph Partridge and David Garnett were able to say goodbye - she died of her injuries later that day. She was just thirty-eight.”
Immediately, of course, because of the nature of my niche of study, I began to wonder about her overall mental health history (suicide doesn’t always mean depression, but it means mental struggle, I think) and how it related to her art. I found this elaboration on her death from the Spartacus Educational blog:
“His death made her suicidal. She wrote a passage from David Hume in her diary: "A man who retires from life does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good. I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself. Why then should I prolong a miserable existence... I believe that no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping."
I tried to figure out what art, if any, she was creating at the time of and right after his death. I didn’t find an answer. She stopped signing her work early on and was mostly unrecognized in her own time. Catherine Dent’s roundup of The Genius of Dora Carrington in 7 Artworks ends with a 1924 piece. She died in 1932.
From what I’ve found so far, it sounds like she was mostly making:
“her “tinsel pictures,” some of which (according to Rebecca Birrel) she accidentally broke while busy caring for Lytton Strachey during his terminal illness” (- Catherine Dent)
“These so called ‘tinsel’ pictures were made by creating a mirror image of the subject outlined in ink, which was then filled with colourful opaque paints and backed with flattened foils.” - Gabriel Berner
She had been working in this style for about a decade, and from the comment that Dent made it sounds like she must have been still working at the time that Lytton got sick, although I suppose the comment could just mean that the materials and/or finished pieces were around and broken in the process. I’m curious about this … (Although not really related to her work, it made me think of The Glass Delusion in mental health.)
I haven’t done much research into Carrington yet. I’ve seen references to Virginia Woolf writing about her, which has an interesting mental health component, of course. And references that her work influenced artists including Alice Neel and Tracey Emin, both of whom have interesting mental health histories as well. So I’ll put a pin in it for now but she’s on the list to study further.
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wrote The Owl in the Daylight
which explores the impact of loneliness on the writing of Philip K. Dick.
I am always intrigued by these posts which look specifically at loneliness in creative work, something overlapping with my own way of looking at mental health’s impact on creativity. The essay explains how the author lost his twin sister at just six weeks of age, leaving a permanent impact:
“Philip K. Dick's life and literary contributions are inseparable from the loneliness he experienced following the untimely death of his twin sister. The profound impact of this loss permeated his writing, giving rise to existential inquiries and a deep exploration of the nature of reality and identity. Through his works, he invites us to confront our own loneliness and to contemplate the fragile and transient nature of our existence. Philip K. Dick's enduring legacy lies not only in his thought-provoking narratives but also in his ability to illuminate the human condition and our collective longing for connection and meaning.”
The author has a really interesting mental health history, not just in his own “symptoms” but also in how mental health has manifested - and been studied - in the characters of his novels. There’s a lot of debate about his own mental health and different ways of seeing it. Kyle Arnold writing for Publisher’s Weekly puts it well, describing a time when the author experienced hallucinations:
“Was it a psychotic break or a religious experience, and how would one tell the difference? Dick knew that what he called his “divine madness” would come across as mental illness. By his own admission, he grappled with paranoia, and self-depreciatingly called himself a “flipped-out freak.” The paranoia was probably the result of speed. A prolific author who published 34 novels during his lifetime, Dick used amphetamines to maintain his productivity. Friends recall that his refrigerator was stuffed with bottles of amphetamine pills jammed next to pre-made milkshakes. Dick gulped the pills by the handful and washed them down with the milkshakes. He called them his “happiness pills” and “nightmare pills.” When his addiction went into high gear, so did the paranoia.”
So much to explore there. The “diagnosis” doesn’t really interest me as much as the relationship of all of this to his work. A need/desire for productivity in creative work related to substance use related to paranoia which might have then caused or been related to hallucinations that fueled the content of the work. It’s fascinating. And so, another one to add to my list of artists I want to research further in my own work.
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RELATED: From Sobriety by of Eleanor’s Substack:
“A friend also sober, also in recovery and a survivor says sobriety is like putting out fires, one by one, only then the work begins, the bit when I can see clearly enough what lies beneath the impulses that make me grumpy here or snappy there. Everything, and I mean everything, leads back to those formative years, from the womb until the armour was set, and that includes the intergenerational too because trauma only stays as trauma when the burying continues.”
ALSO RELATED: Writing Manipulative Characters with Social Engineering by
a paid post (with seven day free preview) which applies techniques “based on various psychological and social phenomena” that “exploit cognitive biases” to add depth to your characters.
ALSO RELATED: How to Talk to People by of Bad at Keeping Secrets
“For humans, loneliness is as dangerous as smoking, leading to heart disease and hypertension to start. Not to mention that it sucks to feel lonely. Humans are social creatures - adapting chemical reactions to feel good when we connect with others. This newsletter is all about the longing to connect with people - I know the feeling. Do you?”
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of Human Stuff wrote Loose Threads
which is a series of contemplations beginning with this:
“I’ve been thinking about how we say we value authenticity, but what we actually seem to collectively gobble up is the opposite, or at least the top layer of it: After/Overcoming stories, healing memes, emotionally easy narratives, overly-simplified versions of what is muddy and murky underneath. When people share what is real, what is true, what is complex, what isn’t figured out or finished, whether on the internet or in person, we tend to recoil a bit, want it to be neater, want it to be resolved. Yet we rarely live our lives in resolved places — we rarely find ourselves in the After of anything, instead usually swaying somewhere in the middle, wading somewhere in the current, unsure of what is truly next.”
This is a thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I’m reading “Wintering” by Katherine May. I got it because I was in my own long winter season, but I didn’t start reading it until I was emerging from that (am still emerging from that.) Go figure. And really, it’s a finished published book filled with thoughts from her wintering season … thoughts that are polished now and so are the “after/overcoming” stories even though the whole point is about that we need rest and slowness and space in our seasons of sadness and hardship and whatever created our winter.
My most recent winter feels like it began about two years ago when the dog I loved so much, who had a ridiculous amount of trauma, began to really lose her mind to seizures and as a result of a series of mistakes bit me and completely tore up my hands. She eventually moved to my brother’s where she felt safer and had more space, but she passed away from her health stuff a few months later. Since that time I had COVID and some other health stuff, broke my ankle (a challenge living up two flights of narrow stairs with two large dogs and no yard), fell into the worst depression since my twenties … and spent a year with my dad getting sicker and sicker and passing away about seven months ago. It was a hard winter. And I am in absurd amounts of debt because I couldn’t write much during that time.
I did write. Lists. Reminders. Journal entries. Blog posts. This and that. Sometimes. But most of it felt like not writing or not the writing we can share. I don’t even know if I edit myself for an audience exactly. I don’t think I’m too terribly afraid of putting my full self out there. It’s more than in that mess, that muck, the words don’t work, they fail, they fall short, and I don’t want to put them out there because they don’t say what I want them to say. I make sense of myself in the process of writing them but it’s only later that I can actually make them make sense. I admire Lisa’s work that she’s been doing and her sharing of her creative process. She says in a further contemplation in this wonderful article:
“Writing is the place I go to look inward, so naturally my writing tends to be personal and self-explorative. Yet staying stuck in that headspace, in that frame of mind, isn’t something I’m interested in. I don’t want to always be thinking about whether or not I’m doing “well”, or how far I’ve come, or what I'm moving through. I don’t want to waste every waking minute saying hello to myself. My life is the subject of most of my writing, yet I don’t want my life to be all about my interior. I want to think more about the trees in my yard and the conversation I had with a stranger while getting my blood drawn and the way light changes in my living room. I want to think about what changes beyond myself.”
RELATED: Stillness & Might by of The Isolation Journals
First, from Brittany Collins guesting:
“There is no “other side” to some forms of challenge. My story is neither a narrative arc nor a neat lesson learned, but a both/and embrace of beauty and fight, stillness and might—a bow to all that is lost, and all that remains.”
Now, from Suleika herself:
“The limitations that illness imposes—they’re complicated. Relapsing was my greatest fear, and I was devastated when it came to pass, and even more devastated when I learned I would forever be in treatment, forever in the in-between. But my limitations are also showing me a path toward a fuller life—one where I eagerly step off a ledge into thin mountain air and behold the world from that bird’s eye view, where I can be humbled, where everything can be right-sized, where I can remember how gloriously small I am in the grand scheme of things.”
RELATED: Something Warm by of Cuidate:
“And while this time hasn’t been filled with lots of rest and peace,
it’s led me to a place where I realize that it’s up to me.
It’s up to me to choose healing in my life.
It’s up to me to make room for prayer and meditation.
It’s up to me to make the time for rest and play.”
interviewed Lillian Stone who said:
“I'm a humor writer, and I'm surrounded by other humor writers, which is great because we're all anxious little critters. So I feel very supported and understood in my immediate community.”
Humor/comedy is one area of art that I haven’t explored enough of in regards to the relationship between art and mental health. I’ve often heard it said that comics have high rates of depression, anxiety, and substance misuse … but I haven’t really done the research, yet, or talked to any comedians myself. That’s on my radar for future research.
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Sarah Fay of Interviewed Larry Davidson about Mental Health Recovery:
How do you distinguish relapse from the normal depression that goes along with the human condition?
A relapse is disabling. I think it's important to make the connection that the human condition does leave us vulnerable to what you might call depression. Most people may be depressed, but they’re not disabled by it.
This aids in my own understanding of my experience. I usually say that I have recurring depression. Basically, I have periods of major depression (defined as lasting more than two weeks) every year or two. And I’ve had three periods in my life of persistent depression (lasting more than two years.) I expect this to return although I’m reframing it lately as “is this depression or is this life?” Either way, it’s debilitating. Looking at it as a relapse when I’m disabled by it helps add a little nuance to the perspective for me. When I can’t write, among other things, there’s usually something that needs addressing further in my mental health.
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of Culture Study wrote Tenderhearted
which is an interview with cookbook author Hetty Lui McKinnon about her new book of the same name. I don’t enjoy cooking (I wish I did) but I recognize the hands-on creativity that it offers for many people. And I enjoyed the author’s share about the full creative process of the book itself:
“I absolutely LOVE the creation of a cookbook. I am a bit of a publishing nerd. I love every single step of it, from the writing, the photographing of the recipes, collaborating with the art director on the fonts, how the recipes are laid out, the chapter opening pages, how the introduction to the book plays out. I love it all.”
I love that this book is a celebration of vegetables. I love that the author addresses accessibility, meeting home cooks where they are, food as community and so many other things. But especially, I loved this:
“As I thought and planned the book, the backstory of Tenderheart emerged. The story of my dad, who worked at the produce markets in Sydney, and who I lost as a teenager, and the subsequent exploration of loss, of unresolved grief, of exploring family and daughterly love, provided an anchor for the book. A good friend commented that it felt like my dad’s tenderhearted and generous energy runs through all the recipes - this is a very apt observation. In many ways, I consider Tenderheart my ‘vegetable origin story’ which is as complex and multi-layered as all family stories are.”
Having spent a large chunk of my career writing about the mental health benefits of crochet, I have thought and shared a lot about generational crafting and how much is passed from past to present through hands-on making. I haven’t thought about it extensively as it relates to food but of course it does. Of course it does.
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Bogdan Luca of wrote My Kid Could Do That
which is about abstract art and how we view it, why it makes many people uncomfortable:
“It’s easy to be confronted with an abstract painting and feel like you’re missing something, that you don’t get it. You might feel angry that it’s in a museum or that it commands a very high sticker price. But why is this? Is abstract art not serious, is it easy to do, is it not really art? Or is it that we don’t know how to approach it, how to understand it? My feeling is that it comes down to the expectations we bring to the encounter.”
It made me smile because whenever my sister and I go to an art museum together, she stands among the abstract art and says, “I don’t get it.” She very much likes functional things. She doesn’t want pretty gifts without a purpose, for example. And she likes art that represents her reality.
As for me, I am drawn to some abstract art (usually collage or mixed media, rich in texture and color) and of course not to other pieces. But what made me smile about this in relation to myself was a fond memory of fifteen or so years ago when I went to an art museum with my artist friend Anna. She asked me, “why do you always read what it’s about before you look at the piece?” It’s true. I’m a word person. I am more drawn to learning about the meaning of the work, the description of it in words, than looking at the work itself. This is still true for me, but I have never forgotten Anna’s bewildered question, and when I go to museums or galleries now, I always at least try to sit with the art and see what it makes me feel before I dig into what it makes me think. And then to put words to it - mine or others. It’s not natural to me to try to leave the words out but it’s a great practice.
Also in this article, Bogdan shares this thought:
“When I studied in Florence for a year, I visited the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi which the painter Giotto had covered with many beautiful frescos depicting the life of the saint. I couldn’t help wondering what extraordinary impact those images must have had on a normal person of the 13th century. People didn’t have images then as we do now. We are so immersed in visual content that we take it for granted. Back then, there were very few images. Maybe you would only see images in the cinema of your dreams. What would it have been like to enter that church and be surrounded by images of people captured within a visual narrative? Did it feel like you entered the dreams of another person?”
The point there is that at one time in history there was a lot of power in depicting reality through painting and then there came a time when photography could do that and so what people painted naturally became different. I happen to love seeing hyperrealistic painting … painting that is as real or “more real” than photography. And whether you love or hate the use of AI to create visual art, there’s something super intriguing to me about being able to enter a whole bunch of words into a computer and have it come up with an image that I, myself, would never have come up with.
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Tara McMullin of Wrote Beyond Creating Versus Consuming
which relates a bit to Bogdan Luca’s piece in this particular excerpt:
“There are bad paintings, bad music, bad books, bad journalism, bad podcasts, bad movies... But that doesn't mean we throw out the whole medium. We find the art that means something to us (whether it's praised critically or not), and we engage with that.”
The full essay (and it is very much worth reading in full) is about the oft-given advice to spend a lot more time creating content on social media than consuming content … and looks at the distinct possibility that this is a gendered approach:
“Male-coded social media accounts might be expected to "wow" their followers with tips, tricks, and insights. While female-coded social media accounts might be expected to demonstrate care and concern through their constant presence on the apps.” …
“I think it's within reason to say that "wowing" one's followers with tips and tricks scales better than trying to answer every DM, comment, and email with utmost care. And women and woman-identifying people are often tasked with both the “wow” and the care.”
A thought that arises for me: I personally almost always read women’s writing - both in books (especially memoirs) and online. It’s not that I purposely don’t read men’s writing - and some of it I certainly do - but I am naturally drawn more to women’s writing.
Of course, as Tara acknowledges, this is a generalization that doesn’t always apply, but there’s a truth in it that resonates for me personally. And what really resonates is Tara’s suggestion that perhaps it’s not either/or but both/and and maybe even more than that. It’s about creating and consuming and everything in between and everything outside of that. This relates to the theme I’m exploring in my own life that I’ve mentioned before about learning how creativity isn’t just the act of creating but all of the other parts, too - the rest, the taking in of other people’s beautiful work, the daydreaming and churning and procrastinating. It’s not just the minutes of sitting down and “doing” that are the creative work; it’s all of it. So I love what Tara says, quoting in part Samuel W. Franklin:
"To care, to maintain, to collect, to reuse, to copy, to fight, or even to follow" is a good way to sum up ways of participating in social media beyond creating. And maybe when it comes to how we spend our time online, we stop thinking of it as a choice between creating and consuming and start thinking of it as a canvas on which to explore a multitude of human impulses.”
RELATED: Throw Someone a Pep Rally by of Ask Polly:
“Because helping other people achieve their dreams is good for you. It’s good for feeding your own buried ambitions, good for snapping you out of your needy, egocentric resting state, and good for waking you up to the infinite potential that lives inside each human being, including you. Understanding that every person you encounter is full of potential and has unique gifts (that are sometimes a mystery to them) is a route to tapping into your own limitless potential in new ways. It cultivates compassion for others and for yourself, and allows you to see the world as an abundant place full of possibility and promise.” …
“You don’t have to be a sparkly rainbow unicorn with love and optimism blasting out of your horn to do this. You can be a regular old slob, trudging around your dusty house, complaining about all of the sweaty manual labor you have to do out there in the summer heat today. (Oh hey, that’s me! Hi there!)
But when you share with someone, stop and feel it. Notice how good it feels. Remind yourself that this is the best way to be in a world gone mad. Small actions matter. Feel proud and vow to do more, feel more, give more, take more leaps of faith for the benefit of others. These are the small building blocks that add up to a joyful life.”
Go read the whole thing … especially if you’re having any insecurities as a writer.
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of The Clearing did a podcast interview with Marjolijn van Heemstra discussing:
“the “‘overview effect”’, a personal transformation reported by astronauts who have seen the Earth from space. People who’ve experienced this rare view often report an ethical shift taking place, a new sense of mission in their lives. They come to see themselves as guardians of their planet, rather than its passive citizens.”
Marjolijn says:
“you can have the same experience here looking at sunset, taking your time, trying to maybe people find the same interconnected feelings through meditation.”
This reminded me of something I wrote about Van Gogh in The Artist’s Mind:
His letters from this year indicate that life at the asylum was anything but pleasant. He wrote of his experience, “One continually hears shouts and terrible howls as of animals in a menagerie.” The terrifying sounds must have echoed horribly in that empty corridor. One patient he shared space with had auditory hallucinations and van Gogh wrote that he seemed to be responding aloud to sounds in the corridor that no one else could hear, which must have been haunting.
For the most part, van Gogh did all that he could to paint the more pleasing landscapes he remembered from his life before the institution. Whenever possible, he would sit in the asylum’s gardens, painting what he saw there instead of the dull and dreary interior. This endeavor arguably resulted in some of his best work, including Starry Night.
Although perhaps not exactly the same, there’s something to getting out of your own mind and direct experience by looking at the massive sky above you and remembering that we are all connected.
RELATED: From Are we living in reality by of the hyphen:
“During the pandemic, I started listening to audiobooks and podcasts from a woman called Byron Katie. She is an 80-year-old spiritual teacher known for an epiphany she had in a halfway house in 1986. She entered the rehab facility in her 40s, seriously depressed and left a completely different person. She says that she woke up one morning and saw a very different reality for the first time. The reality she saw wasn’t scary at all — she saw clouds and trees and rivers and kindness and nature working in perfect harmony.”
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From Intentional Spaces by of Yoga Culture
Nothing genius of my own to add but wanted to share this favorite paragraph:
“We move through the spaces of our lives like the negative spaces of a giant sculpture. Carving our existence into the world as we enter the void, we interact with textures and surfaces, walls and windows, pathways and placed objects. We navigate. We inhabit. We create within and between and atop.”
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Emerging themes: rest
A lot of the people I read are writing a lot about resting in various forms:
Sara Kuburic of
Jessica Rose Williams
of The Simple Letter wrote Letting Go of the Outcome
Bathroom Floor is a place of rest and intuitive knowing for Alexa Juanita Jordan of
Helen Redfern
of The Red Fern wrote Rest: I Always Need It Before I Think I Do
Sez Kristiansen
of Remembering Wild shared On the Transformational Quality Of Silence including an audio guided meditation
A mindful drawing class with guest artist Peter Giles by
Tasmina Perry
of We Are All Creatives shares the meditative nature of repetitive mark making
For your own moment of rest, you might want to look at the amazing photos of wintertime that Karen Davis of
shared this week.
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Did you read or write something this week related to art/creativity and/or mental health/wellness? Share it with me in the comments!
You are super amazing!
Another great compilation, thank you! It allows me to discover, reminisce, and feel part of something meaningful and truly connected.
Very sorry to hear about the heart wrenching events which contributed to your last hibernation. The struggle of pain and loss, experienced or/and anticipated, by proxy or directly can either paralyse me or prompt me to create.
Thank you for all that you share and for showcasing so many other powerful writers; time is in small supply, and through your newsletter, I can access so much food for thought!