S3 E18: Feeding Your Creativity in the Winter Season
We don’t have to expect ourselves to constantly be actively producing creative work - creative projects have seasonal cycles, too. But even in the dormancy of winter (literal or metaphorical), you can still feed your creativity, and this phase is just as important as the others. In this episode I share many ways that you can consume, digest, and “fertilize the soil” to pave the way for your next project.
What’s feeding your creativity right now? What’s inspiring you? Tag me on Instagram @rebecca_hass and we can share ideas!
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The Build Your Seasonal Self Care Survival Kit Workshop has already happened live, but the recording is still available to buy for a few more weeks! (sliding scale: $5-30)
Join me to learn my favorite tips for replenishing your energy throughout this unusual holiday season, and you'll leave with a personal menu of self care practices to support yourself in times of depletion and celebration!
Sign up to get the recording at coachingforcreativewellness.com/holiday-workshop
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RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
MORE FROM REBECCA
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, and welcome to Episode 18 of Being A Whole Person. Today we're going to be talking about beating your creativity during the winter season. Speaking of caring for yourself in the winter season, and holiday season, which we are in the midst of in the United States: on Tuesday, I gave a workshop called Build Your Seasonal Self Care Survival Kit. It was super fun, and I recorded it. So, if you missed it, and you still need some support during this holiday season, this workshop is going to help you build your own personal menu of your go-to self care actions that will help you during the winter, or during this part of the winter. Your menu can change over time. I go through the seven types of rest, and all of the self care actions that might come with all these different types of rest, and then we made a big master list of everything that sounded good, and then narrowed it down to the curated menu.
So when you're feeling overwhelmed, you know exactly what to do to take care of yourself, you know exactly what usually works, and you just have that list ready to go. It might sound simple to do these self care actions, but it isn't always that simple when you're overwhelmed, and you don't necessarily have the wherewithal to think about it. That's where the menu is gold. This is going to be available to buy as a recording for another few weeks, probably about until Christmas time. It'll be on a sliding scale just like the workshop was, between $5-30. Same link, I'll put that in the show notes. If you need some extra support, I'd love to help you out.
So, the winter season and creativity. Creativity and creative projects have a seasonal cycle, too just like plants in nature. Your trees, most trees don't grow all year long, or they aren't blooming all the time, because all this stuff goes in cycles. It can't possibly be growing actively all the time. I like to think of creative projects the same way. I don't know where this seasonal metaphor came from. I know I've heard this in other places, so I don't know who to credit. But spring is kind of the giving birth to the idea, planting your seeds, getting your project started. It might involve some gathering of resources, researching and learning. It's the beginning.
Then summer is growing, working on the project, kind of the middle phase, possibly the messy middle phase, and learning from your process, and continuing onward.
Autumn is like harvesting, completing your project, and then enjoying the fruits of your labor, being proud of yourself.
Then, winter is the dormant caterpillar cocoon, maybe caterpillar goo phase. You know how caterpillar's when they're in the cocoon before they become a butterfly? They're not actually solid for a little while, they’re goo. They might be in kind of a dormant, not well formed phase, kind of a death and rebirth, nourishing and restoring.
All these things can happen at any time of year. Your creative winter might not correspond with actual winter. But because there's all these seasonal cues of darkness and cold giving us less energy sometimes, often those winters can coincide. So that's kind of how I'm going to talk about it today. When you have health problems, or a stressful situation with someone in your family, if you're going through severe burnout, that can feel like a metaphorical winter where you personally have less energy.
So the energy of winter is asking us to do less. It doesn't have to mean doing nothing. It can just mean doing less. I'm going to do an episode more specifically about this in two weeks. But this is a time when you can think about setting boundaries on your work time to give you extra time for creative projects, or whatever you want to be doing.
If you're a person who likes to stay busy, and you have trouble stopping work, if you set a boundary like an end time for your work every day, this can really open up more time for other types of creative projects that maybe you couldn't even fit in before. Like, now I have set a boundary on work time at sunset, because I know I don't really work very well afterwards. And, you know, sometimes I have to work a little bit after 5pm, sometimes in the evening, too, but my ideal is to set that boundary. That means the whole evening is for whatever I decide it's for. I've been doing a lot of weaving lately. I've been doing like macramé yarn garland, like lots of fun little craft projects that if I were working all evening, I wouldn't want to do that, because I wouldn't have the energy or the time.
Doing less can also mean just doing a small version of something. But if you truly don't have the energy, then resting is great. Being connected to your creativity doesn't have to mean actually doing something or producing something. Like I said, things don't grow all year long. You might not be in a fertile creative phase, all year long. It's normal. That is how it works. Maybe your creative seasons don't match up with the seasons outside, like maybe you get really inspired to do more in the winter, because you're inside. That's cool, that's great. But you might find a period of time where you have less energy.
Think about this like fertilizing the soil. That's a really important part of the process when you're growing stuff, right? If you have bad soil, you're probably not going to get good plants. Your life experience is a key part of the input that you're taking in. That gets digested and eventually becomes your creative output. I know it feels like we're not doing a lot of living and experiencing lately, and that's fine, that's normal. Also, if you don't have the energy for many adventures, or if you prefer not doing as much stuff outside of the home, which is smart right now.
But, this could also mean consuming other art. It could mean consuming more art inside your own artistic discipline. Like, if you're a musician, you might go down a YouTube rabbit hole of some awesomely inspiring videos that really just make you want to practice. You might go down an Instagram rabbit hole of visual art that really inspires you. Of course, you might want to limit the consumption if you're not in a creative winter, because you don't want to be influenced too much by others' work, and you want to let your own voice come forth. But when you're not in the active creative phase, this can be a great time to just take in stuff that's cool and inspiring.
This can mean learning of other kinds too. It can mean reading books that you enjoy, whether they relate to your art or not, like a great story might inspire you in some way that is not apparent right now - exciting ideas that give your mind something to chew on. Like, I love learning about space. I read recently The End of Everything by Katie Mack, which is about the end of the universe and five different theories on how the universe will end, which like just tested the limits of my brain power and my understanding of astrophysics, which is very limited - just enough to kind of make my head explode in a really great way, and make me feel filled with wonder and awe and feel very expensive.
I've been really enjoying using the Seek app by iNaturalist to identify plants in my neighborhood. I've been excited by this ever since I discovered it because, having lived in California for about a year and a half now, I'm still getting to know a lot of the foliage that just wasn't around when I lived in Minnesota. So it's really fun for me to identify these plants and actually get to know what they are, and just appreciate the colorful greens and colorful flowers. It's a visual delight in addition to being fun to learn about.
I also just discovered the Kaleidacam app, which is a kaleidoscope app for the iPhone. I spent like half an hour playing with it recently, because it's so fun to just point your phone at whatever and see it made into essentially a kaleidoscope. So stuff like that, that maybe doesn't translate into creative output in any way that you can see right now is still feeding you.
No matter what season I'm in, I'm always reading tons of books right now and listening to tons of podcasts. Besides that space book, right now I'm reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, which is a fun novel. I'm slowly working through You Belong by Sebene Selassie, who's a Buddhist teacher. And I'm also slowly working my way through Ross Gay's Book of Delights, which is just a set of essays that he wrote about things that delight him. I love hearing about things that people are excited about, and seeing people's delight and things. So this is like, the perfect thing to be reading right now, or anytime. Thank you to Laura Holway, past guest on the podcast, for the recommendation. She wrote about that in her newsletter, which is always a gem. And I'll link to that if you want to sign up for it.
As far as podcasts go, I listen to so many different types of podcasts, some of which are learning about things related to business or my career, or like astrology and tarot. But as far as the mind expanding type stuff, I really love science podcasts that make me excited about learning like Ologies, which is just a science podcast where they have a different “ologist” on every week, so you can learn about whatever it is. Once again, hearing people talk about things they're excited about super cool. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is pretty fun, a comic book writer and an astrophysicist, talking about cool space stuff. There's all kinds of stuff I could mention, and go on and on.
If you like this kind of thing, let me know. I could do a bigger what I'm reading and listening to kind of episode in the future, because it could definitely be a full episode. I think most artists and creators love learning, and we always have a huge list of things that we want to learn, and do, and learn how to do, especially people who are very multipassionate. I think there's a lot of overlap in multipassionate people and artists, just in general.
So if you look at it like, right now you're just at the buffet, and you’ve got a sample plate, and you can just have little bites of whatever seems cool. That might be a great way to approach being in a creative winter, or the actual winter, because these little bites of things that intrigue you and feel good, are the things that are going to sustain us through what might be kind of a hard winter, too. Sometimes you might feel like you're dabbling too much, or not focusing in on any one thing, but I think there's a place for sampling.
This phase won't last forever. It all is going to feed your creativity, whether you realize it or not, and giving yourself this rest time to consume and digest is a key part of the process.
So how are you feeding your creativity this season? What are you reading? What are you listening to? What's inspiring you? I'd love to know, if you want to post about this episode on Instagram and tag me @rebecca_hass, that'd be really fun. That's always in the show notes, too. I'll repost and we can inspire each other with our different ideas. So until next time, I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you then.