Thoughts on Creativity + Inspiration

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Hey friends, I don’t have any very big news or anything to tell you this week, so I just thought I would talk about creativity and inspiration. I know that the poll that I’ve put on here a couple of times, like the survey thing, a lot of you have answered, the most common answer has been in terms of what you’re interested in seeing from me is creativity and inspiration and art, photography + self-portraiture. That kind of thing, so, I just wanted to talk about what creativity means to me and how I find inspiration, if you’re interested.

So for me, creativity is something that all humans have inside of them. I also would argue that most living beings like, human and non-human can be creative. There’s a bug. I think this is a kind of ladybug, maybe like the larva or whatever… maybe, let’s see if it’ll like I don’t want to get too distracted, put it on the leaf. Okay, so I believe that humans and non-humans have the capacity to be creative.

I know, it’s probably easy for you to imagine humans being creative so my argument for non-humans being creative is… have you ever seen a spider web? Have you ever seen a plant that has grown around things that maybe it shouldn’t even be able to grow in that place at all? Have you ever seen a bird’s nest? Have you ever seen a flower? I feel like maybe creativity is our ability to, build and create things. Whether they’re useful to us, or not, whether it’s for a purpose, or just because we felt like it. 

I feel like, we are all so capable of creating a number, you know, any number of wonderful things. Maybe it’s capitalism and white supremacy and colonialism and imperialism and patriarchy and all of those things that has like, infiltrated some of our minds and hearts and made us feel like we’re not creative or we’re not worthy of creating something or we don’t have time to create something or what we create isn’t good enough. And I’m here to say that that’s a lot of fucking bullshit! Like life has existed for… I don’t even fucking know how long. Thousands, ten thousands, millions of years. Like the first single-celled organisms that ever existed when there wasn’t even land here is was just like all water. Their like breath their breathing, their like, their ability to sustain themselves, like stay alive, is why there’s so much oxygen in the atmosphere right now, the reason that we are able to be alive, like It’s kind of mind-blowing. 

When you really think about everything that it took for us to be here in the first place. Like a whole lot of things had to happen first, a lot, like a fuck ton, like millions of years of things had to happen in order for us to be here right now. And if that isn’t creative, then I don’t know what is. I feel like life, like the existence of life itself is creative. So if you ever feel like you’re not creative or you can’t create something or what you create isn’t good enough, please watch this video and let me tell you that you are creative.

Your work is good enough. What you create is important, whether you share it with other people or not. That part doesn’t matter. Social media makes us think that we have to share everything with everybody, but social media hasn’t been around for that long and artists have been around since…. forever. People were drawing on cave walls before we were even like living in houses. We are creative. We are alive. Therefore we are creative. So, I hope you remember that. 

And I also wanted to talk about inspiration, so if that little talk isn’t enough for inspiration for you, I invite you to go outside and just sit under a tree somewhere, and listen and see what you notice… either inside of yourself or outside of yourself. Whatever is available to you. Use all of your senses. What do you see, what do you hear, what do you smell, you taste, what can you touch? 

And how do those things move you? How do you feel when you experience those things? What do those things make you want to share with other people, or what do those things make you want to remember in yourself for yourself? 

I feel like inspiration can be anywhere. It can be the physical world around us. It can be our emotions and the things that are inside of us. It can be an experience that we have with a friend. It can be an experience that we have with a non-human friend. 

Yeah, I really feel like creativity is everywhere, so inspiration is also everywhere, and honestly, I don’t always have inspiration when I create. Sometimes it comes as I’m creating, you know what I mean? Like, sometimes it’s the act of like, getting my camera out, setting stuff up, figuring out. You know, where do I even want to point the camera? What I want to take a picture of? Do I want to be in the picture? If I do, how do I want to feel or look, or pose, or what things do I want to have around me when I’m in the picture? Sometimes, like the act of starting to create brings the inspiration to me or the inspiration maybe reveals itself to me as I’m in the process.

So you don’t necessarily have to have an inspiration before you start. I don’t think, my opinion. I’ve been doing this for over… over 11 years. Yeah, there doesn’t always have to be purpose. It can be just because you are bored and want to do something that’s not staring at a screen and like mindlessly scrolling, which is sometimes why I take photos. Maybe you just want to allow yourself to feel and sometimes the only way to do that is to be in front of a camera, and capture it… that’s definitely something that I experience. Sometimes you want to remember how you felt or how you looked for who you were with, and those are wonderful reasons to create. 

Yeah, I hope if you have felt like you are not creative or like you don’t have inspiration, I hope this video helped, even though it’s very vague. But also like kind of specific at the same time. Yeah, that’s just, that’s how I feel about creativity and inspiration. I feel like they’re always around us all the time and we are able to tap into them simply by our existence, so I hope this helped you. I love you. I hope you have a wonderful day and I’ll talk to you soon.