LIST OF REFLECTION QUESTIONS AND CREATIVE PRACTICES
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
LOVE
DEBORAH
When in your life have you been emotionally and physically arrested by something so beautiful, or terrible, that it stopped you in your tracks? Did you pay homage to this moment by creating something? Might you now?
When has love required great courage from you, the courage to stay present, to not look away?
What moments in your life have you experienced the greatest openness of your heart? Have any of these moments shown up in your art?
JENNIFER
How has fate intervened with unusual or odd events that led you toward the road of your own creativity? When have you been given big shoves or sly winks that were meaningful to the development of your own creative voice and vision?
Someday you will be on your deathbed (may it be a comfortable one and far off in the future). What can you do now to ensure you won’t have any creative regrets then?
Reflect back on a time when love has been the fuel that’s stoked your creative fires. What were the circumstances? Did you create out of longing? Out of unrequited love? Out of love lost or love newly found?
DENNIS
What is required of you to be able to say, “This is good enough”? You may wish to think about some specific creative projects as you reflect on this question.
Has it happened that the mess required in creating something new has been too much for you? Was the mess not able to be eliminated post-creation? Might the mess have added to the finished product in a way that surprised you?
Recall what event or circumstance in your life drew the curtain back to reveal your own originality. What was your initial response to this moment? Was your trust in it enough to give you the courage needed to break ground on a creative endeavor?
NATURE
DEBORAH
When or under what circumstances did you hear, touch, smell, taste, or see something that pulled you down into a deeper sense of awareness or consciousness, that revealed another level of being? Describe the sensations you felt in your body, as well as your revelations.
Do you make it a practice to “disconnect in order to truly connect” to your creativity? How might you disconnect even more?
What is the relationship between your body and your creativity? Do you connect with it before you create, through practices like breathing or meditation or any form of mindfulness? Do you find yourself more connected to your body while you are creating, or do you lose it during your most creative moments?
JENNIFER
I speak a great deal about the healing power of nature in this essay, about how nature reminds me of my place in the family of beings. In what ways is nature healing for you? If you are in need of healing right now (and aren’t most of us now and always?), how might you turn your attention to nature for healing?
“What was in it for the flowers?” I asked in my essay. What are your thoughts about this? Have you ever felt a sense of nature’s delight in your attentiveness? Have you experienced the joy of a true encounter with nature that feels truly reciprocal?
How have you hallowed nature in your creative work? Would you welcome the opportunity to do that more? If so, how might you find, or make, the time to do so?
DENNIS
When I was at the campsite, I felt many emotions like wonder, joy, opening, sympathy, and power, and all of these appeared to me like grace. When and where have you been graced by nature? What were the emotions that attended your experience?
I write about “creative moments when one allows the life in the everyday to capsize for a while so that other life forms can voice their presence into the soul.” How are you doing with capsizing your everyday life? Are you allowing enough time to overturn the mundane and enter the Sacred in order to cultivate more creative moments?
How do you understand the experience of solitude? What or who does it call up in you? What does solitude remind you to remember?
THE MUSE
DEBORAH
Is there a city or town you have grown close to over time? What was or is your affection for it? Was it, for instance, a favorite place, or is it the people you know who live there? Track the path of affection that may have sprung up immediately or grown over many years.
When you visited or toured a new city or town, what small details about your explorations helped you to feel the place’s deep charm and attractive magic? If you have kept a photo album of your visit there, revisit it now. What did you take photos of? What inspired you when you were there?
I opened my piece by discussing how for me, it is easy to be “mused” by nature, and how peculiar it’s been to be mused by the city. Your experience may be different—perhaps you’ve always been mused by the city but going out in nature doesn’t do much to stir your creative juices. Using the seduction analogy, perhaps you have a “type” that you typically court for creative inspiration. What is your type? And what might be gained from opening yourself to being mused by other types?
JENNIFER
Light a candle and in front of that single flame, write out the story of your muses, those who have been both aspiration and inspiration to you.
In my piece, I discuss how muses hold up a mirror, helping us to see something in ourselves as worthy and strengthening our ability to creatively express ourselves in the world. These muses say, “You were here, and I saw you, and others saw you, and we all saw you as precious, saw you as strong, saw you as gifted, saw you as worth being seen.” Who in your life has held such a mirror for you? What have they seen in you that’s made a difference in your life? Have they been properly thanked or acknowledged?
Have you served as such a mirror for someone in your life? Is there someone in your life now who could use some mirroring, someone you could reach out to and remind them of their gifts, to let them know you see them and honor them?
DENNIS
One of the ways the Muses may enter our lives is through our dreams, because it is often during sleep that we are the most porous to otherworldly visitations. Do you record your dreams? Try it for two weeks to see what images, plots, plans, and desires surface through them. Even just keeping a notebook by your bed will signal to the Muses that you welcome an inspiring dream. If you already write down your dreams, what do you see as the connection between this practice and your creativity? Is your creativity, for instance, a form of dreaming when you are awake?
I end the essay by discussing our ordinary lives as sources of amusement, but only if we resist falling asleep or becoming semiconscious. Instead, I suggest we experience our daily round “musefully, musically, and authentically with full awareness.” My practice of staying aware and awake to creative inspiration is to always carry my notebook and pen in my pocket. Do you have such mindfulness practices that allow you to capture musings when they arrive? If not, can you imagine creating one?
When do you feel most creative, open, porous, and ready to receive rather than administer? In other words, what’s your version of 4:00 a.m.? And are you showing up for your date with the Muses then?
SUFFERING
DEBORAH
It’s a very human longing, to make meaning out of mess. Make a list of four or five times in your life when you suffered the most. What meaning did you make then or do you make now of your suffering?
As creative people, part of how we make meaning out of mess is to make something tangible out of our suffering. For each of these four or five times, what did you make out of your suffering? It could be something you made while you were in the suffering, in the immediate aftermath of the suffering, or years, even decades later.
The phrase “the suffering artist” is a common one (over 36 million hits on Google, as of this writing!). What is the relationship between your suffering and your creativity? Are you more creative during times of suffering, or less? I ask because while I’m suggesting we create out of our suffering, I’m also aware that for many people, suffering may stifle creativity, at least during the darkest part of the night.
JENNIFER
In what ways have you been wounded by your mother and your father? Have you found ways to turn that wounding into creative works?
What alleviated your suffering when you were a child? Music, literature, film, art—which creative works have redignified your “worst-stung heart”? Is your creativity now connected to and/or an homage to that?
What are the “irritants” from your childhood and how can you mine them to excite, provoke, stimulate, and arouse your creativity?
DENNIS
I write about the “placement” of suffering, how suffering can place us somewhere new if we can endure it. Have you experienced the kind of suffering that has moved or migrated you to a new place, a new locale or location, a new state of being, or a new attitude?
Sometimes we create art out of suffering, to help alleviate it or express it, as I did with my poem “They Were Carried by the Wind.” But we should acknowledge too that sometimes our art-making can create suffering. Have you ever suffered in an act of creating something? Was it worth the ordeal, or not? Think of when your suffering and subsequent art-making has less appeased you than it has afflicted you.
As I mentioned in my essay, “When I suffer, I seem to have more courage, more desire to risk something, feeling perhaps like ‘what the hell, just go for it and scrap the critics for now.’” Has suffering ever emboldened your creative practice in this way?
PRACTICE
DEBORAH
Think of a time when you completely ignored your urge to create. What happened? How did you feel? What was the consequence? And also, what was the gift (what did you learn?) that showed up after your neglect?
Are you familiar with the practice of personifying? Have you ever tried it before? Are you moved to learn more about it or try it now?
In my dialogue with my creative impulse, I was told, “An impulse or feeling in your body is the key to unleashing storms of psychic and creative energy.” How does your creative impulse show up in your body? What emotions attend its arrival and its departure?
JENNIFER
If you haven’t already done so in a systematic way, now’s a good time to practice creative management. If it doesn’t sound mortifying to you, take stock of the status of all your creative projects. Organize them like popcorn kernels (never going to pop, poppable, almost ready to pop, already popped), or find another way of sorting them. When you do this, what do you notice? How do you feel? Do you feel creative flooding? Do you feel excitement to finish any projects or bring them into fruition?
What is your relationship with yes, when it comes to your creativity? When do you give yourself permission to say yes? Who supports you in saying yes? Who (besides yourself) challenges you and makes saying yes difficult? When you get in your own way of saying yes, what sorts of psychological justifications do you wrap yourself in?
In this essay, I bandy about quite a few terms. What is your relationship to them? Do you experience more creative blocking, or creative flooding? What are your strategies for creative management? Do you have creative control? How does creative discipline manifest in your life? Do you prefer thinking of having a creative practice rather than a creative discipline? Do you work best under self-imposed or other-imposed deadlines, or like me, are you more productive when you self-impose an other-imposed deadline?
DENNIS
In my essay, I attempt to reimagine creative resistance in a positive light, as functional to the work rather than as “a negative state that must be overcome by some positive force, attitude, energy, stamina, or perseverance.” Perhaps it is the work itself that wants to go a different direction, and I’m in its way. Thinking about a time when you’ve faced and been frustrated by creative resistance, how might imagining it in a positive light transform your relationship to that blockage? Might it offer a path forward to becoming unblocked? What might happen if you ask the work itself, “What do you want from me here?” then sit quietly for a few minutes so that the work gains some space to guide you to its own impulses?
What is the moment of being inspired like for you? Offer an illustration of the circumstances that conspire to create the rush of inspiration that leads you to create. What are some metaphors that may capture that state for you? (You may want to visit Lu Ji’s poem “Inspiration” to read some of his metaphors for inspiration.)
When I’m blocked, I find “recontacting the natural order is a promising way to come to some bargain with resistances that end-stop the creative process.” My “nature of choice” is riding my Harley through the Texas Hill Country. What is your nature of choice? The next time you are facing creative resistance, instead of strong-arming yourself by trying to wring any moisture from a dry sponge, what might happen if you gave yourself permission to recontact nature for renewal? Could you “bargain with resistances” this way and come back refreshed to your project at hand?
THE SACRED
DEBORAH
What is your relationship to unworthiness as an artist or a creative? Do you relate to thinking you or your work is not good enough?
In this essay, I explore the moment when I begin to ask myself, “Why do I write? Why do I create?” The answer for me was “because it felt holy, because it brought me closer to the mysteries of Creation, because I longed to be in an intimate conversation with divinity.” How would you answer the question, “Why do you create?”
Is there any part of your creative process that feels sacred to you or particularly divine or that puts you in touch with divinity?
JENNIFER
Where is your temple of creativity? Does it live in your workplace? In your studio or office or den? In your workshop or garage? In your backyard or kitchen? What’s one thing you can do to make it a more spiritual or sacred place?
I suggest the term creativeology, where we experience everything as an expression of creativity, and we find and make art everywhere. Try this simple act: every evening when you write in your journal or reflect upon your day, note what you did that day that was a creative expression or artistic act. Think outside the box—you’ll surprise yourself with how much of your day is spent creating!
When, in your creative practices, are you most able to breathe deeply (remembering that breath comes from the Latin word spiritus), and when is breathing a labor, not necessarily of love? Is there a way to increase the former and decrease the latter in your creative process?
DENNIS
In my essay, I share my belief that “the Holy Grail can appear in an infinite variety of forms, forces, and presences if we are able to see through the eyes of humility and grace.” What is the Holy Grail for you in your creative life? What is it you are seeking? Is it recognition from a parent (like my father giving me the pen) or a trusted mentor (like Barbara inviting me to submit my poems)? Is it having your work recognized publicly (like having those two poems published)? Is it creating something entirely original as van Kaam suggests? Is it having an experience of the transcendent through creativity that makes your creative life meaningful, à la Campbell? What is your Holy Grail?
No one escapes being thrown from his or her horse, as Paul reveals to us. It is a moment in which, among other things, the Sacred breaks into our life to perhaps throw us to the ground. Learning to be grounded through such violence will not be pleasurable, but it will be memorable and effective. Describe when you have been thrown from the assumed world you have lived in in order to rethink and enter a new way of being present to yourself and to the larger world.
There is such power in the opening sentiment of Dawna Markova’s poem, where she states that she refuses to die with her life unlived. Revise this sentiment with the word creative in it: “I will not die with my creative life unlived.” Then, write about what this means to you, in prose or poetry.
ART
DEBORAH
In my essay, I write, “As artists, we are always looking for what stirs us, and colors can be one way in, one way to stir and awaken the mysterious tides of our creativity.” What color is currently stirring your imagination? If none come to mind, then close your eyes and see what appears. You may wish to experiment with color meditation—again, with eyes closed, concentrate on that particular color. Take an internal “color bath” and allow that color to wash over and open up your imagination for five minutes or so. Then, begin to create.
I share with you times in my life when I was captivated by specific colors, such as blue and yellow. Think back through your own history and write about your love affairs with various colors. One easy way in is to think of all the bedrooms you have had a hand in decorating, or any trends in your home decor choices. Think about clothing, think about car colors, think about elements in nature you are drawn to, and if you’re a visual artist, think of course about the colors you have used in various stages of your work.
Are there any colors you are really averse to right now? What are your associations with that color(s)? It may be easy to think of negative associations, but what about positive ones? Is there anything positive about that color that you can engage within your creative life?
JENNIFER
Scanning your creative history, what have you created that could qualify as an ekphrastic response, both in life and art?
What’s interesting to me about the literal definition of ekphrastic art—“making words from images”—is that it’s a whole-brain response. That is, the right brain is typically seen as our image processor, and our left brain, our word processor. So when we view ekphrastic art, those images side by side with those words, we are having, at least symbolically, a whole-brain experience. Do you favor your left brain or right brain when it comes to your creativity? Do you think more in words or in images? Is your creative output more skewed toward words or images? What might it look like to “balance your brain” by bringing in more of your opposite inclination into your creative practice?
I end my essay by contrasting two different movements within the call and response to art. I label them alternately, breathing in and breathing out; cooking and eating; collecting and writing (though you could substitute any creative verb here for writing, like painting or building or designing or your creative activity of choice). Where are you currently at in your call-and-response cycle? Are you breathing in more than you’re breathing out? Have you been cooking more than you’re eating? Collecting more than you’re creating? Is there a shift you might need to make? A different balance you might want to strike?
DENNIS
I shared my love of reading other writers on their own creative processes—I find it inspiring and conducive to reflecting upon my own process. Do you have similar books written by practitioners of your creative practice of choice? Perhaps you might want to purchase some, or check them out from the library, and allow them to inspire you and aid in your own reflection.
I listed some of my favorite James Hillman quotes on writing. Do you have a place where you collect inspiring or illuminating quotes from other creatives? You can find these in books and, of course, on the Internet. Do you have any in your creative space? Would it serve your work to surround yourself with some?
Was there a piece of literature or a film or a painting or a poem (insert your creative product of choice) that quickened your creativity when you were young (let’s say in the first two decades of life), that opened you up to the possibility of being a writer, a thinker, a painter, a director, a musician, or a graphic novelist, just to name a few? What opened up for you through that work? Might I suggest you revisit it now if you can—you may understand its impact on you differently now because your current vantage point is much more inclusive.
CREATIVE PRACTICES
LOVE
The Immortality Project—Jennifer
Fashioning Something Anew—Dennis
NATURE
The Essence of Slowing Down—Deborah
Touching Your Own Nature through the Natural Order—Dennis
THE MUSE
Being Open to Seduction—Deborah
Creating an Altar of Appreciation—Jennifer
Enthuse, Infuse, and Reuse—Dennis
SUFFERING
Sifting Suffering for Gold—Deborah
Return, Restore, Repair—Jennifer
PRACTICE
Forging a Relationship with Your Creative Impulse—Deborah
Code of No, or No Commandments—Jennifer
Opening Doors from an Oblique Angle—Dennis
THE SACRED
“Without Approaching, Approaching”—Deborah
When Creation Was Divine—Dennis
ART
Awakening the Unconscious through Colors and Seasons—Deborah