Your creative identity is an unstable lyric!

…should I be sung and unbroken by not saying?

This afternoon I stopped in the tracks of a task to try to learn the nearly indecipherable yet undeniably beautiful lyrics to Cherry-coloured Funk. According to sources, there are no lyrics. And, according to sources, there definitely are lyrics. As in, the artist knows what the lyrics are. Or does she? According to sources, “you can search for Cherry Coloured Funk's lyrics and never find a satisfying version, considering Elizabeth Fraser's idea was to “sing what sounded nice”.

…beetles and eggs and blues and bells and eggs and then blued?

This morning, in a small circle, I sang with some other hearts a “banger” of a song in Sanskrit and we discussed how the word-for-word English translations are of the shape-shifting nature, because the poetry of it is in the Sanskrit. There might be endless translations in English, and all of them might be somewhat right. Maybe all versions of Cherry are also right.

Maybe it’s not as much about rightness as it is about nowness.

I have been thinking of the shape shifting nature of my stories about myself and the way I see myself as an artist. These things are surprisingly easy to notice if you give it one iota of consideration.

For example, consider how you you define your creative self. I am looking for statements that put you in a box, like this: My creative practice is x. I work with x kind of materials. I work at x scale. I am not very good at x. I am more of a x than a y. I am new at x.

Two questions:
1. How long has the statement been alive for?
2. Reality check-in: is it still actually true?

These statements can keep our identity stable and give us restraints that help us create consistent work. Having an identity that feels consistent can be grounding. I suspect that is why we create them. However, what about when you factor in time?

Time is what snaps me out of it. This season, I have been thinking about what art classes and workshops I want to teach, and this feeling came up around how I am newly stepping into teaching, and this had some weight to it. The feeling of newly stepping into teaching had this big-deal energy to it, with importance and spiritual significance. The saucy courage to step into a new kind of becoming!

And then I thought about time.

I thought about what year it is. Apparently it is the year 2026. I thought back to my history of teaching art workshops. I went back through my archive and discovered the first creative workshop I taught was year 2017! That is NINE YEARS AGO.

The lyrics are hereby… unstable.

Can I let go of the special feeling of being new at this, while still having the invigorating life support of always having something to learn? The story I am telling myself about being new at teaching is that I am taking this big juicy step forward into new and unknown soul-territory. It feels sensational and meaningful! Can I drop it? Can I drop that and just design and teach a workshop? Can I simply… offer an offering and find incredible meaning rooted in nothing but the present moment rather than the out of date story?

…we hanged your pass and start being as you in ecstasy?

I want to think about what it means for me to just be a person who has the capacity to lead creative experiences, and to do it more, without it being about my personal journey or status as an artist. (P.S. my late summer + fall workshop schedule will be updated soon).

The story can be flexible. Maybe sometimes it feels like stepping into new. Maybe other times it feels familiar. Right now, it feels like this is not new, but my energy toward prioritizing it as a direction, and the way I want to expand into variety, is.

Maybe there is no definite way to frame any of it. I would like to follow in EF’s footsteps and sing what sounds nice.

…should I be hugged and tied down through this tiger's maws?

For you:

Look at the ways you define yourself, and ask yourself how far that dates back. Locate one example that might point to an alternate truth. More than one thing can be true.

Thanks for reading,

-Kristen