well-seasoned creative space
It began with little pithy quotes printed on my teabags. Things like, “Earth laughs in flowers” (Emerson) and “If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere” (van Gogh).
Then I began noticing the “love notes" on boxes of my pasta & cereal boxes, my bottles of supplements and shampoo, etc.
Like yesterday, I went to make breakfast and noticed this:
The creative idea of utilizing product packaging to uplift and enrich a customer's daily life appears to be a really solid one--at least it makes ME smile and makes me feel somehow more connected to the producer.
And yesterday, this egg carton creed disrupted my habitual (read: mindless) process of making breakfast long enough that my brain woke up a bit and began mentally connecting dots (a favorite pastime of mine) between the dual ideas of creativity and eggs.
It's seems like natural pairing, right? Especially for us women.
I mean, just think about it. We women are born with all of the eggs cells we're ever gonna have for the duration of our lives. This is important to our unique design as agents of creativity--biologically & spiritually.
In fact, from ancient times until the present day, eggs have been both actual sources of creativity and universal symbols of creative potential and fertility.
(Hence the cultural use of egg symbolism to welcome the fertile season of Spring in many a celebratory forms--dyed, chocolate-filled, plastic-to-be- filled, etc.)
One of the BIG IDEAS associated with being a Well-Seasoned Woman (and of most major spiritual traditions) is that what is true in the physical/seen world is also true in the ethereal/unseen realm.
Sooooo, just to make sure we're all getting this, lemme pull these threads together for us. Ready? It turns out that We women are naturally equipped with a lifetime's worth of creative potential.
Whoa. How is this sitting with you?
Perhaps a sigh of relief and renewed sense of freedom to pursue your wildly creative pursuits? If so, then I am doing the dance of joy on your behalf. Truly.
Or perhaps an internal mental protest broke forth. You know, things like: “Oh, I don't use watercolors or sculpt or write, so I'm not creative" or “I really don't get creative ideas at all" or “I'm too busy to be creative; I really just need time to do laundry and take a long bath.”
Let's face it, for most women, that inner critic with its “not worthy not worthy" chorus (aka, the chronic joy sucker) is waaaaaay more likely to show up.
This is where a resource like Eve Rodsky's newly released book, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World might help us begin to reclaim our natural gifted creativity, especially in the Spring, the natural world's season of creativity & fertility.
I'm sharing my top three takeaways from my audible reading of the book, in the hopes that they'll provide some context for what we're talking about here.
We need to have clarity about what our unicorn space is not. It's not family fun time or time invested in adult friendships or self-care practices--all of which are important, but don't meet the unicorn space criteria. It's also not about having to invest time to create a craft room or writer's studio or backyard theater (although crafting and writing and theatrical pursuits might work--keep reading). It's not about a side hustle that drives you to push-push-push. And, it's not about squeezing in 10 minutes worth of knitting or weeding the garden while you wait for the chicken to finish roasting.
We need to get clarity about what a unicorn space actually is. It should be about giving ourselves permission to actively pursue what truly interests us. It should be about pursuing that thing in uninterrupted chunks of time so that a FLOW state (when you've become so consumed by a pursuit that you lose track of time/space) might happen. [Did you know that women are interrupted, on average, every 3 minutes and 24 seconds, according to a study shared in the book?]. Unicorn Space is about investing time in doing what you love/what makes you curious, without its being dependent on our roles of wife, mother, & job title, etc.
We need to develop capacity for being tender & savvy in navigating the obstacles we might encounter in reclaiming our own unicorn space. It might first involve learning to conquer our fears about our own creative potential. It might involve learning to advocate for our own creative pursuits with those who have legitimate (and not so legitimate) demands on our time & attention. It might involve learning to prime the pump of our own creative ideas. It might also mean investing some time into identifying our values and how to align what we value with our creative pursuits and then use those pursuits to connect with the world around us in meaningful ways, which in turn, releases more joy and creativity.
If this sounds like A LOT--I agree. But practicing creativity isn't just a vanity project or a way of killing time. In fact, it is a vital component of living long and aging well--i.e. becoming Well-Seasoned Women.
The National Institute on Aging reports that time spent in creative expression…
Increases longevity
Improved quality of life and well-being
Increased independence
Better cognitive and memory functioning
Higher self-esteem
Reduced stress
Increased social interaction
Eve Rodsky agrees. In an interview with Forbes in November of 2021, Rodsky shares, “I think the most important thing to tell you from the research is that creativity is not optional. The way I'm describing unicorn space is literally linked to your mental health, your longevity and your redemptive narrative for how you heal. It's a very important skill to cultivate. It's a practice…”
Hmmm, it's a practice. This means it's something we do with our bodies (not just hanging out in our mental space which I tend to do a lot). It also means it's something where we take risks, make mistakes & learn from them, and invest the time to grow--because, you know, we're practicing it.
So, dear reader, understanding that we are gifted from birth on with a lifetime's worth of creative potential and understanding that creative expression something to be practiced, let's come back to the questions posed under the newsletter banner:
What new creative potentials in my life are ready to blossom/hatch now? How can I best nurture those potentials?
Whatever comes up for you when you read these prompts (or as you put the questions out into the world for some incubating), do THAT. For at least an hour a week of uninterrupted time. Practice it, knowing it'll most likely be awkward and messy for a time if this is something we haven't been practicing for a long while--and that's okay.
For me, this will look like sitting on my back patio with my journals, surrounded with sticker books (adult ones like this), stencils, a set of colored pens, magazine cutouts and rubber cement.
If you're looking for some ideas of where to begin, you might consider some of these creative pursuits that people I know (and who subscribe to this newsletter!) practice:
gardening
playing the guitar/piano
weaving bracelets
painting with watercolors
doing a long run
assembling & furnishing doll houses
crafting home décor
writing: blogging, crafting poetry, playwriting
repainting/refinishing a piece of furniture
rambling/walking leisurely in nature
inventing & practicing dance choreography
sewing
baking
taking pictures
flower arranging
Just remember, we've got this. Naturally. I mean,
We've got the creative juice. We've just got to let what's inside flow out.
xo,
K
