Your Creativity is Always Essential
Reflecting on lessons learned after Helene, and the many other times when life has fallen apart and come back together again
Keeping Creative Time
it’s never to late to be the creative person you’ve always wanted to be 💖
“Did you get the bread and milk?”
If you’re answer was anything but yes, I’m not sure how you would have survived the winters in New England where I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. When we lost power due to an ice storm or a Nor’easter (our fancy word for a blizzard), the snow in the yard became our refrigerator, and we heated up canned soup on the wood stove in the living room for dinner.
Today, this question is as much a joke as it is a serious nod to the resources we need to survive the many emergencies, disasters, and losses that befall us in our lifetimes.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, I’d add toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and face masks to that list of essentials. After Helene, I’d include bottled water, gasoline, and cash—in that order—then isobutane and propane fuel canisters, baby wipes, paper towels, paper plates, cups, utensils, batteries, a Starlink, a helicopter, the list could go on.
The me from a year ago, didn’t think much of filling up my gas tank ahead of the storm, or stocking up on the bread and milk. (As of this writing it is the one year anniversary of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina.) After all, I reasoned, I’d lived through Hurricane Bob at six-years-old with my dad, the two of us standing in the driveway with the eye of the storm passing overhead. Then there was Hurricane Irene which devastated parts of eastern Vermont, where I was staying during the storm with my mother, my sister, my toddler niece, and my boyfriend in a Kampgrounds of America cabin that was anything but serene, being only a few miles away from the river where the town’s prized, historic covered bridge washed away.
Last year, as Hurricane Helene made landfall in Western North Carolina, I, a proud and hardened Yankee, didn’t know what I didn’t know about hurricanes. Now, after a year of living with my community—first in rescue mode, then recovery, and now moving toward reclamation—I find myself thinking about what is essential to me in my life in a way I never have considered before.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines something that’s essential as being of the utmost importance. Basic. Indispensable. Necessary.
When something is deemed essential, it means you can’t survive without it. And yet, for a period of ten years, between 2010 to 2020, I did live without many things that are essential to me.
My writing.
My journaling.
My photography.
Focus, self-compassion.
Access to inner guidance. Discipline
or better yet, devotion to a practice other than work.
Creative sanity. At times, basic hope and belief in myself as an artist,
and as a person.
I’ve come to name this time as The Lost Decade. It’s the years I worked as a public librarian, beginning in what was still very much a time of economic recovery from The Great Recession, and ending in a global pandemic after library buildings around the world became shuttered, with their online presence and subscription to Zoom, a new form of essential work. It was also a period where I lived as a high-functioning codependent with an addiction to working all the time.
Like millions of other Americans, my mental health worsened during the pandemic. I stopped seeing my therapist at the onset and was staring at least ten hours a day into a screen while calculating the risk I would take just by going outside to roll my trash to the curb (remember those early days?!). But if I stop and reflect on what actually saved my mental health from full-on despair, it was an awakened sense of curiosity brought about by my journal, my bicycle, and the online writing classes I took with Kathryn Aalto, author of Writing Wild and The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, where I met some of my first internet creative friends—Christy, Marilyn, Marissa, and Susan—who cheered me on in a way that only creative friends know how to do.
If it wasn’t for receiving nourishment from those basic, necessary, essential things that first helped me survive a global pandemic, leave my career as a public librarian, then DIY my burnout recovery, move to a new city and state, live through a devastating hurricane, continue to take risks and start a business in the wake of that, and face the endings and evolutions of relationships I once believed to be static, while continuing to heal my highly sensitive nervous system—I might not be writing to you today!
And I may never have known what I’m really made of: A pint of hardy New England stock with two handfuls of don’t-mess-with-me—I’m from Jersey!— a whiff of California cool, and a faith and belief in myself as an artist that can only ever be, Asheville made.
As my creative teacher Erin Hallagan Clare says, How we live creatively is how we live in general. How we live in general is how we live creatively.
So if you find your creativity has gone missing during your own period of lost or broken time, and you value it as an essential tool, or believe it to be the very essence that keeps you alive—keep reading! Over the next couple of months, I’ll be sharing the essential tools, practices, stories, systems, structures, and people who have been the most supportive and influential to me in my own journey of creative reclamation after life has fallen apart and come back together, which it has done many times, and will continue to do many more times over.
And when it is in a period of falling apart, remember—your creativity is not a luxury or a nice-to-have, it’s one of our most basic tools for stress relief, meaning-making, connection, and survival.
If we only knew how to take care of it.
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and they fall apart. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
—WHEN THINGS FALL APART—
by Pema Chödron,
My Brand New Workshop is Launching in October with Inward & Artward School of Creativity!
🧳 Creative Essentials: How to Care for Your Creativity When Things Fall Apart
🗓️ Six Weeks | Thursdays, October 16, 23, 30 and November 6, 13, 20 with Bonus Creative Coworking Hours on Mondays, October 20, 27 and November 3, 10, 17
🕰️ Class: Thursdays 6:30-8:30pm | Coworking: Mondays 1-2pm
📍Online
💸 Sliding scale $325-$425
Reclaim your power to create and experience joy with essential tools for grounding your nervous system, connecting with your heart, and nourishing your body, mind, and soul in this six-week workshop to support resiliency and growth for creative seekers who are rebuilding after life has fallen apart.
Where You’ll Find Me in the Community This October
🍳 October 5 | Creatives Over Easy : A Monthly Soul Reset
10am-12pm, Story Parlor, Asheville, NC, $10
☕️ October 8 + 22 | 15-Minute Creative Coffee Chats
9:30-11:30am, Cooperative Coffee, Asheville, NC, free
📚 October 21 | Craft Your Commerce Fall Book Club ft. How to Not Always Be Working by Cody Cook-Parrot and a Q&A with the author, facilitated by me!
5:30-7:30pm, Virtual, free
Not in Asheville? No problem! Book a virtual free 15-minute Creative Rx Session, and we can chat about what’s working and what’s not working in your relationship to creativity and work.
Until Next Time
Remember, it’s never to late to be the creative person you’ve always wanted to be
Take care y’all, and thanks for being here with me. Let’s cheer—to time!
P.S. Before you go, enjoy a song from the playlist I call . . . Odes to Time.
<3Faye
Rising Appalachia —“Resilient”—Leylines, 2019.
Keeping Creative Time is a guide to nurturing your well-being as a creative person in a world built for burnout—with Faye, a writer, artist, librarian, and clockmaker’s daughter living in Asheville, North Carolina.
J. Faye D'Avanza, MSLIS
Helping you be the creative person you’ve always wanted to be.
jfayedavanza.com
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a book purchase from one of the book links I’ve shared. ☺️❤️📚