Category Archives for Gratitude & Creativity

Gratitude and Creativity: Go Where Love Grows

I’ve been having what therapists may characterize as ‘emotional breakthroughs’ since becoming ill. One of the most significant is about love. Not the impossibly romantic kind they depict in movies, but the kind where people embrace you warts and all and let you know that they care for and value you always. Because of my growing understanding of that kind of love I’m reconnecting with and growing relationships with people who I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t know them.

Go Where Love Grows

Go Where Love Grows

Some of them are people who, because of the complicated relationship with my mother, I always felt guilty having in my life. Not surprisingly, since I’ve been ill they are some of the people who have been most supportive, especially when it comes to the emotional support needed as I try to cope with the current conditions of my life. These people love me. They have always loved me. The love they have for me is not dictated by biology or obligation. They love me just because they do. And I love them in return not because there is anything tangible for me to gain; not because I feel that I must reciprocate, but simply because I do.

My recognition that this love exists is changing me. It’s opening me. It’s making me feel positive even as I endure the pain of my illness. This love makes me feel less alone as I live every day in my small space because I know that I am not living through all of this alone. Most importantly, as cliché as it sounds, I now know the true meaning of the phrase “go where love grows”, and I hope others can experience this growth.

 

Edison Lighthouse – Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes

Gratitude and Creativity: We Are All Fragile

This poem sprung to life out of a short exchange I had with FutureSquishie<3 about trust.

We are all fragile

 

The Weather Channel – Glass from LIGHTNING?

Gratitude and Creativity: A Small Backpedal

I have to make a small backpedal from an earlier post where I expressed upset about spending time online looking at other people’s creative work instead of creating my own. What I didn’t acknowledge in the post is I do that sometimes because my body and my brain can’t cope or process any other information when I’m feeling pain. I also do it because I’m trying to learn new things, new ways of expressing myself creatively, since I don’t currently have the freedom to go out and explore the world on my own terms.

The proof that I’m learning – even when I don’t immediately open my journal and grab my pencils, coloured pencils, coloured markers, or paints – is that each time I create something new I’m incorporating a technique that piqued my interest enough for me to learn it and show it off. Surprisingly, sometimes looking through the work of others helps to resurface pleasant memories from when I learned, and used to do, similar things when I was young. I loved art classes, but stopped taking them when I got to high school because I had to focus on subjects deemed more serious. Looking through the work of others is reconnecting me to my creative self and it feels good.

This morning, as if to affirm that these thoughts and feelings are true, I found a video online that has one simple message from artist Nina Paley that “all creative work builds on what came before”. It put a smile on my face and it’s exactly what I needed to bring light to this grey stormy day.

 

Nina Paley – All Creative Work Is Derivative