Midsummer Creative Retreat: Day 4
Oysters, Time Waste baskets, and Cloud Practice
Welcome to the Isles of Curiosity and Wonder for our special digital midsummer creative retreat running June 20-24. The archives can be found here. This retreat is offered to all subscribers of Creative Fuel, but as a thank you for helping to make it happen, paid subscribers have access to the audio version. Thank you to all of you for being here!
Hello friends,
Welcome to Day 4 of our midsummer creative retreat. There’s a very low tide today, so we’re going to go and explore the beach.
As you may have heard, the Isles of Curiosity and Wonder are known for their Tides of Inspiration—sometimes in, sometimes out. At low tide, you have the chance to search in the “idea tidepools” that appear, full of all kinds of wonders as long as you bring an interest in exploring. Low tide is also a great time for checking out our local oyster beds. Oysters in this area live upwards of 75 to 100 years! We consider them some of our wisest inhabitants, their shells telling a story of their lives much like the tree rings on stumps of our native thuja edgicata trees.
The Isles of Curiosity and Wonder is home to two native species of oyster: ostrea accretio and ostrea procedere. There is much to learn from these beautiful creatures. “Consider the oyster!” as M.F.K. Fisher would say. If you enjoy eating bivalves, you can stop by the oyster driftwood bar (yes it is in fact made of driftwood) further up the beach. Please be sure to throw shells back onto the beach as they are an essential part of our local ecosystem.
You’ll want to be well equipped for today’s low tide exploration. The weather for today may get a little blustery, so bring your waterproof boots for mucking around and a wool sweater in case it gets chilly. Blustery weather does promise a good show in the sky, and we encourage all visitors to the isles to engage in a Cloud Practice. More details about Cloud Practice can be found in the official Clouds and Skies Guidebook, available at the general store. Cloud Practice is encouraged at any time of the day, anywhere on the island, and while some assume that Cloud Practice is an art practice, we like to consider it more of a practice of being.
We know that the island has a bit of a different pace than what you are used to—not to mention that there aren’t very many clocks here—and some visitors have been asking what they should do with their leftover time. Back home, we know that many of you are used to maximizing on your minutes and hours, so if you find that you have a lot of leftover time while visiting, please note that all accommodations and public areas on the island are equipped with Time Waste baskets.
The wasted time is disposed of in the compost pile, as we have found that it boosts the essential nutrients. As we have mentioned before, the official Isles of Curiosity and Wonder Compost can be purchased at the nursery, so feel free to fill those Time Waste baskets as need be, knowing that it’s put to very good use.
The more wasted time you put in, the better.
“We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us.” - Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
A few days into this retreat, and with a bunch of reflective questions to ponder, I hope that you are feeling better able to explore and think about your own creative practice. Perhaps in a new way, but also just in a deeper way.
The thing about creativity is that it doesn’t really appreciate overthinking (to the extent that I often consider how much is too much when writing about creative process). When in doubt about your creative process, best to sit down and start working. Or bail on the work entirely and go play instead, or take a nap, explore tidepools, or go about your Cloud Practice.
I do however think that it’s worth considering how creativity works for you, because it shows up differently for all of us. We don’t just have different mediums, we all have different sources of inspiration, different ways of working, different creative seasons.
But there is one creative truth that I think most of us can resonate with: creativity is not efficient.
Creativity runs on its own schedule. Yes yes, of course there are times when it can be, and a tight deadline can help to squeeze out unexpected creative work. But in general, creativity does not have an on/off switch. Even those of us who can identify some of the surprising work that we’ve managed to do when we were working under a time crunch have just as many examples of things that didn’t turn out when we wanted or needed them to. We deeply know and understand the feeling of trying to push something through when it just wasn’t ready.
Creativity is not efficient, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. Creativity is a long game, a process. It is the accumulation of layers of inspiration, layers of knowledge, layers of experience. Every single thing that came before this exact moment feeds it, even all that “wasted time.” After all, in the creative formula, wasted time is time well spent.
This doesn’t mean that you wait around for creativity and hope that it will show up. Instead, it means doing all the things you can in order to fuel it, and when it decides to flare up, you are ready to run with it.
There’s an Oblique Strategies that I love and all it says is “accretion.” The first time I pulled it, I had to look it up.
From Merriam-Webster:
1
: the process of growth or enlargement by a gradual buildup: such as
a: increase by external addition or accumulation (as by adhesion of external parts or particles)
b: the increase of land by the action of natural forces
2
: a product of accretion
especially : an extraneous addition
accretions of grime
Accretion is also a geologic term, the process by which material is added to a tectonic plate or a landmass. Essentially: part of how earth’s continents have grown. In art, it can be used to signify the growth or accumulation of material on the surface of a piece. It’s a finance term too, and while I think financial literary is actually really important for artists, we don’t need to let that ruin the poetic nature of this retreat.
Accretion: layers upon layers, creating something new.
That’s how creativity works too. We’re always growing our creative capacities, adding to our experiences, abilities, and ideas. Creative growth doesn’t just happen through “the work.” Creative growth happens through lazy afternoons, time spent staring up into the sky, reading books and magazines, conversations with friends, the ongoing trials and tribulations of existing as a human being. It happens through pausing on the work, taking a break when we know we need it, stopping in a moment of flow so that we know we have something to come back to. It is tracked in the sketchbooks, the scraps of paper, the unfinished beginnings, the lingering of ideas.
Every single layer informs.
Some questions to reflect on today:
What are your creative layers? Which new layers does this season offer?
How do the layers inform your work?
What contributes to your creative process that isn’t the act of the “work”?
How do you “waste” time? How does this add to your layers?
Like us humans, creativity is not a machine.
It’s not as simple as input/output. We can’t maximize on it, or make it more productive. It’s an ebb and flow—just imagine you’re an oyster existing in those Tides of Inspiration, out on some days, back in on others. All we can do is feed creativity and trust that it will show up when we need it to. When it doesn’t, or doesn’t in the way that we want it to, we extend it some grace. Because sometimes other stuff gets in the way. The kind of stuff that requires all of our attention, and all of our bandwidth.
Eventually we come back to our creativity, a little different, a little changed. One more layer added to the accumulation of layers of inspiration, layers of wisdom, layers of time.
As strong as an oyster shell.
-Anna
ps: you can address any Isles of Curiosity and Wonder musings to hello@creativefuelcollective.com
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