Often the challenge of creating, presents itself when we can’t get out of our own head. Regardless of the decades of meditation and all other practices used to calm the mind, or “turn off” the mind, there is a place that hits you like a brick wall and you know you can only move forward when you’ve let go enough for the bricks to crumble before your eyes. Frequently, I wish I was that artist who felt they would explode if they didn’t create, and perhaps in my own way I do, for the ache that presents itself when I go too long without allowing the creative flow to move through me, burns like solar plasma in my cells. A deep, sensual burning that cries out for release, urging me to give in to the beauty of this aching need, a force much bigger than I pours through my instrument of choice. Each time I allow creative force to flow through, it becomes easier to reach, and simultaneously the pieces of me that fight it become more vibrantly exposed.

With bits exposed, whether judged as sacred or profane, there is nowhere to hide. Vulnerability demands our presence, it beckons us near, viscera showing, naked for the world to see…

And yet creativity is not something that we can think our way through. No matter how much the world tries to tell you thinking, and the powers of the intellect are superior, intellect is not going to help you paint a picture. It is not going to help you write a book it is not going to help you do anything but think. Don’t get me wrong thinking is important, knowledge is important and knowledge helps us to become better artists, especially knowledge about our craft or about the topic with which we desire to address.

Sometimes the power is in doing! In that moment, we can only be ourselves and do what we feel is real for us, for our art. There are been many years where I have sat and dissected the difference between being and doing, and it is in our beingness that the doing can happen. I know that may sound convoluted and somewhat trite, but the reality is we will always find reasons to be pulled away from our creations. The world is full of distractions, hell, our mind is filled with distractions, but we do not have to respond to any of those distractions. We can simply focus on the flow of creation that is calling us to be present to its expression, and translate that to the best of our ability with the medium of our choice.

And so, our challenge for this new year is to be, to do, and to express, without censure, without fear. We owe it to ourselves, and to the world, to express our creativity, in the face of fascism, in the face of fear, in the face of authoritarianism, because when it comes down to it, the only thing we are promised is this moment… Our brain might try to convince us that our art is stupid, no one will like it, or that there are far too many terrors in the world to waste time on creating. Believe me when I tell you, creating art is resistance. Refusing to be swallowed by fear and doubt, and doing our best to find something beautiful in the depths of our despair and confusion is resistance.