This woman is filling the creative well.

What is the creative process?

Different for everyone, sure.

For me, it’s connected to daydreaming, filling the “creative well” with sensory, auditory and visual experiences, and then making and doing stuff intuitively.

Mulling, wandering, chewing a bit of grass as I kick a pebble on my walk with my (small/fuzzy/ridiculous) dogs, I think of a new scene that resolves a problem.

Tilting my head to spot a flamenco dancer in the shape of a cloud. Do a doodle of it.

Chasing the aforementioned dogs away from a mysterious dirt patch in the middle of the ball field just the size of a body, I see a crime scene for a future novel and run home to jot it down.

I dream of other lives connected to all the woulda-coulda-shouldas of my own life, a never-ending branching of dimensional worlds connected to choices that may or may not be realities. I jot a poem. It’s bad, but there’s a germ there.

Creativity is connected to that glimmer, that flash, the ink of an idea spreading through the water of consciousness and tinting it something new.

Writing is escape for me, and distraction, and renewal on so many levels, but in addition creativity’s been expressed in my life by spinning beads out of the hot honey of molten glass. Stitching beadwork so tiny and intricate it makes my eyes ache to look at it. Twisting and stringing jewelry out of all the elements I like to create separately.

Crochet—mindless dance of a hook among threads.

Painting, another passion that rears its head periodically with a longing for the brush, the  smell of the paint, the seductive blobs of color like molten jewels.

Drawing–always my first way of capturing and expressing.

Gardening, creating a feast for the senses with God’s help.

Garding is both restorative and creative. Except for the weeding.

Dance, expressing stories through movement.

Working with children—playing, laughing, creating, crying, telling the stories of wounds and fear and ferris wheels too. Playing accesses healing and solutions painlessly.

Art therapy heals painlessly, almost magically

Creativity is not a finite supply of ideas. It’s a natural state of being in which one medium sparks another, one practice ignites another, an actual flow that is unending if you keep moving with it and allowing it to move through you. Today, think of one little fun, creative thing to do. No agenda. No potential sale. Just fun.

Fun ignites passion, and passion creates great work.

Give yourself permission to just have a little fun and see what happens.