So sometimes I have these totally aquarian moments (see here if you are curious about what that means) when I think an idea I have is OBVIOUSLY the best choice one could make for an evening. I have been dying to take a hike and paint at the top. Am I a painter? NOPE. Do I care? NOPE. Fortunately, I have two great friends who didn't make this extrovert spend this nature-loving moment alone. We hiked 3/4 of the way up and thought we might lose light so we pulled off the trail and sat down to paint. We were pretty much left alone (other than the 45 year old guy who tried so hard to impress us with his remote control airplane. I have it in me to attract these type of men . . . sadly.)
Both Natalie and Krista had some beautiful landscape stuff going on. Inspired by Giggles (my client who is the best abstract artist), I just started doing crazy, mad brush strokes with all the colors. It seriously looked like a painter's palette before Krista saved it. It was getting to the point where I was so embarrassed that I was trying to hide it from the other girls. But Krista saw it and said, "Oh, I see that girl flying." I shifted my eyes and slowly said, "Yeah . . . it is a girl . . . I mean, it is totally supposed to be a girl . . . " Not true. It was supposed to be a sun. But I smeared it all up because it looked like an attempt by a 5 year old (and not the exceptionally artistic Autistic 5 year old that I know). So I made it into a girl flying. I kind of love it. It probably represents exactly how I have been feeling lately. So that was lucky.
Here is the thing. I love being creative. I fail more often than not at the demonstration of skill, but I don't care. I love it so much. It might be one of the things I love the most about me. I used to stress about it having a place in my life. I would question if it would ruin my love for creative things (like sewing and writing) if I tried to make them my career. What I have found is that the more I have worked with people, the more creative I have had to be. What I love about creativity is that it isn't always about what you can create from nothing. It is more about how you can connect anything. Everything. How does what you know allow you to think about a problem in a different way? I am kind of just rambling about this thing I love about being a human. This is all leading to the way I feel about people. I have struggled reading fiction lately because I keep finding books full of characters that are no where near as ironic, brave, kind, true, complicated, simple, loving, etc as real people that I know. I am semi-addicted to solving people. I love to figure them out. I love to think about what makes them the way they are. With my clients, I love that moment when I can make something so full of fun and adventure and happiness that they learn without even knowing it. I can do that because I know them so well. And I know something like prepositions. And I have to find a way to entice them to care about prepositions. I never would have predicted how creative I would get to be on a daily basis because of the extraordinary opportunity that I have to work with people of all ages. I love art because I love how it can use this same concept to represent something. It can capture experiences that the artist might not have ever had. Even just connecting to a piece of art is a process of creativity. To look at something and connect it to an emotion or an experience or a memory or a concept that you personally have is to be creative with your own story. To imagine it or to see it in someone else's language. This is by far not my most eloquent blog post. It is super scattered and incomplete (insert Trevor's comment: "How can it be this long and still be incomplete?") , but I am so excited and happy to be alive. Way too energetic to calm down and edit this post. I just can't imagine that figuring out the right words to say will make any of it more understandable anyways. If I have learned one thing lately, it is that words are sometimes the least effective way of communicating.
And everyone should watch this talk by Elizabeth Gilbert. I don't care what you think about "Eat. Pray. Love." because it really doesn't matter.
