Create vs. Consume
A creative prompt for the consumptive season
Welcome to all the new paid subscribers! I am so honored to have you here. This is the Weekend Edition of Creative Fuel, sent out every Saturday. I’ve been doing these every weekend since moving this newsletter over here at the beginning of this year, so there’s a big archive to explore.
Just a note that this will be the last Weekend Edition for a little bit since we’ll be moving into 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being instead. Can you believe that starts next Friday?
Here we are: the last weekend of November.
In my part of the world, all of the bigleaf maples are now bare, and the water has officially changed to what I would define as “winter swimming.” Cold temperatures yesterday covered the ground in frost, the brown bracken ferns and dark red blackberry leaves particularly beautiful in a glittering layer.
As I was working on yesterday’s essay about holiday consumer season, I wrote something in all caps in my notebook. I decided to use it for today’s creative prompt.
This question of consumption is at an all-time high this time of year. So perhaps there’s no better time to reflect on our relationship to it. Not just the consumption of “things” but the consumption of the world around us.
If you’ve taken a workshop from me or been a reader of this newsletter for a long time you know that I often talk about the in/out of creative process, treating this process like breathing. We can’t only take things in, and we can’t only produce and put things out. We have to have both.