Creative Bones

I Used to Think I Didn’t Have a Creative Bone in My Body.
For those who have seen my work, this often comes as a surprise. But it’s true.

It’s not that I haven’t always been deeply moved by art and beauty.
An appreciation for many kinds of music was nurtured in me from a young age, as was a fondness for flowers, love of landscapes, and the captivating curves and angles of the human form. Being brought to tears by the welcome home of the mountainous magic of the Susquehanna Valley after traveling across the United States on a Greyhound bus.

All of this stirred in me a connection to that which is greater, and a longing to express a kind of understanding that exists beyond words. But somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that mistakes weren’t okay. And since I made a lot of them, I felt like creativity was something that belonged to other people.

I remember walking in my neighborhood in 1999, to ground myself amidst the chatter of impending Y2K doom, when I was stopped dead in my tracks by the vibrant red of Virginia Creeper crawling up the trees in a bleak sea of sameness.

I wondered how I could capture that sense of aliveness, of hope, amidst what looked like death, and carry it into my life in a way I could continue to see and work with. My attempts at doing that didn’t measure up to my expectations. So I let those journals get lost in the shuffle of life.

For years that urge lay dormant within me.
By 2013 my body had had enough. Widespread pain, no energy, and a clinical diagnosis delivered with a cold confirmation that mine was now an unpredictable and lifelong battle with little hope of a return to “normal functioning” (whatever that is!). I remember thinking: if this is just how it is, I won’t live to see my kids grow up.

Something had to change.

I was deeply depressed, but somehow I began doodling in the margins of the mountains of paperwork that were part of my daily to-do list. It all started with a dot. Then a circle around the dot. And whatever lines came after that were always a little different.

What I didn’t know at the time was that that dot with the circle around it was also the astrological glyph (symbol) for the sun. I also didn’t know that in just a few years I would be devoting myself not only to the study of astrology, but also to the study of creative self-expression, and more importantly, getting to know myself through these two ways of being with life on a much deeper level.

Somehow I began to find comfort in this simple practice. And somehow, that was enough to keep me going.
The critical voice always crept in. And it was highly active in all areas of my life, not just in this blossoming drawing practice. But I took comfort that what was becoming a daily evening practice - a healthier way to wind down for the day - gave me something to do with myself while that voice ran on.

And over time, the patterns on the page started to reveal the patterns inside me. Old stories. Old pain that hearkened back to those early days of life. Things I had been carrying for a long time that my body could no longer hold.

It took seven years.

Seven years of the creative process as a companion and a mirror — the thing that made it harder and harder to look away from what I knew. And in 2020, I painted my way into a life that was as vibrant and alive on the outside as I was beginning to feel on the inside.

That feeling of hope and aliveness that had started peeking through the naked trees back in 1999 had been putting down roots in my being all along, unbeknownst to me.

And now, I was finally seeing the fruits of those labors.

If you’re reading this and you think creativity isn’t for you, consider this:

Creativity is for everyone.

Not because you’ll be good at it.

Not because what you make will look the way you imagined.

But because the creative process has a way of surfacing what you already know — the knowing you haven’t quite been able to act on...yet. It doesn’t ask you to be talented. It asks you to begin.

And you can start exactly where I did.
A dot. A circle. A growing trust that whatever comes next has been quietly rooting for you all along.