Create: begin; stay with it…if necessary by tying yourself to the mast, the chair, the desk, the tree, the cactus – wherever you create.  Clarissa Pinkola-Estes

When I’m stuck, eventually I write about it.  You’d think I’d know when I’m stuck by my age but there are so many other things to call it that get in the way of understanding that as a creative, if you don’t create, you are stuck.

I’ve been stuck.  I’ve called it overwhelm with the move and husband’s accident (today we hear if he can do away with the crutches.  I am every so hopeful!).  Looking back, had I thrown some of that ovewhelm and angst into making *something*, it would have been helpful and not left me feeling so isolated.

Toward the end of these last 3 months of overwhelm I have started writing blogs again, pulled out and old journal and bought a new one and started working in them – at least once with crayons (which to me are probably the biggest medicine for getting unstuck.  Really.  Nothing entices my inner child – she who holds all creativity – like a huge box of crayons.  I have 3.)

I’ve been participating in Writer’s Village University on-line writing classes for almost a year.  I don’t think of myself as a writer, but looking back over years of blogging it seems not untruthful to finally add that label to my other creative sources – but writing isn’t journaling (that which is not necessarily open to the public – though some have no problem with doing that) and journaling is writing that leads me home to myself.  I haven’t done it in writing yet, but I’ve started it in my vision journal with pictures and that helps because I’m visual.  But there is a part of me that needs to think “out loud” on paper – order the swirl of random thoughts into words and sentences and paragraphs to see where I really am.  When I can do that I will know I’m well on my way to healing.

Get out of the house.  I am an introvert, but even introverts should leave the house now and then.  Socialing on line is awesome – some of my best friends are there, but new home means new opportunities to meet new people and see what they add to your world.  Yesterday I wandered out to the local community college and it was good.  Today I am going back to an old network for lunch and an old friend (this move put me closer to where she moved a few years back) for dinner.

Take aways for creatives who are stuck:

1.  Make something.  Anything.  Put squares on a page and scribble a word or a tangle or a quote in each one
2. Try something in a genre that isn’t your creativity of choice
3. Crayons – I don’t care how old you are or how silly you think it is.  Put crayons on paper – do an abstract of color blocks if you must.  It isn’t about the product.  It is about the process.
4. Journal – whatever comes into your head, put it down.  You never have to read it again.  Or you can read it again and highlight words and phrases and thoughts that jump out and resonate with you.  Then journal on those.
5. Get out of the house if you are an introvert.  Stay in the house and be quiet if you are an extrovert. See what happens.

Here are some of my older blogs if you want more:

Sanctuary (a guest blog with Andrea Hylen)

8 Paths to the Wylde.   Excerpt: If we are gasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, the ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong at the waterspill jucture between the headwaters and the tributary…Wild Woman is the river beneath the river, when she flows into us, we flow…”

“8 Paths” is a long, good, blog.  I’m glad I rediscovered it for here.