The January Creative Challenge

Feeding your inner artist with tenderness and love

Wild Geese by Tom Thomson

For a few years, a large part of my teaching practice has been to refer to poems that move me and inspire me. One of the poems I keep coming back to is Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

“You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” This is the message I want to start this new year with. The human mind is very good at punishing itself. I read the other day that we have thousands of thoughts a day and many of them are repetitive negative thoughts. And then I did what I always do: I started mentally beating myself up for having so many negative thoughts. This neverending circle of guilt and negativity is precisely what Mary Oliver is addressing in her poem here. We do not have to be anything but living, breathing beings contemplating and digesting the gifts the world already has for us. But to digest, we need to stop and let the world happen to us for a while – a terrifying thought for a lot of us.

Mary Oliver’s work is popular for a reason. She is excellent at getting to the heart of the matter with accessible language that conveys deeply complex emotions. She once said that the job of the poet is to stand still and let the world astonish you. I will expand this and say that it is a gift of every human being to allow this world and all its abundance astonish you.

It is in this spirit that we will begin our January creative challenge. I wanted this to be very fluid which is why I did not put a January 1st, new year, new me pressure to it. We will start from January 5th morning and if you’re joining in later, you’re welcome to start from the beginning!

Whether it is through a sketchbook, a journal, a single sentence or a poem, a song, a piece of music, a craft like knitting or crocheting - we are going to be planting creative seeds all through this month. None of these creative sparks have to be perfect. They are first drafts, first thoughts, first ideas that are the beginning of a journey. We will grow these seeds by nurturing them throughout the year. And by the end of this challenge, you will have planted your very own forest of creative seeds that will grow into a daily creative practice which will let your inner child out and play as much as they need to. Remember the most essential part of this process is having fun and putting aside preconceived judgements. Our discussion threads are more to share our joy of creating, both the highs and the lows. You do not have to good at art or craft or journaling to do this challenge. You must simply give yourself the gift of 10 minutes to 1 hour every day to create something new loosely following the given prompt. It is an opportunity to let yourself be astonished by your own inner world.

Are you ready? Let’s go: