The January Creative Challenge - Week 2

The urgent need to nourish the creative heart

Hudson River Landscape in Autumn by Junius Ralston Sloan

Hello and welcome to week 2 of the January Creative Challenge! Last week’s challenge worked out to be a treasure chest of emotions, artistry, ideas and community building. In out Creative Challenges chat, we discussed where our journaling took us, whether we wrote towards or away from the prompt, how it made us feel and what seeds we planted that we would nourish into a garden or a forest of its own.

This week, I would like to open with an excerpt from Mary Oliver:

To live in this world

you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The act of letting go is one that we spend our whole lives perfecting as human beings. Of all things we have in common, loss is an enormous part of the human experience and the grief and the healing that follows it. The gift of art then becomes catharsis. A place you can put those feelings through a pen, a paintbrush, an instrument. We are all born creators, and have the capacity within us to make art.

This gift is what helps us deal with our emotions, grow together and build communities filled with love and hope. There is an old saying that grief is simply love which has nowhere left to go and to exist in this world, to be able to experience love is a powerful, beautiful thing. This is why these creative challenges are all built around community and remembering that core, that source of who we are. To be, to exist as a human being is a brave thing to do. And so, this week’s prompts are all about the sheer courage to let go and be. Two of the most courageous things a person can do.

Remember that in these prompts there is no such thing as a mistake. You do not have to be perfect at art to participate in this, you just have to give yourself permission to create. You are making seeds that you will plant and one day nurture. No seed has to be perfect to be able to become a sapling, it just needs water, soil and sunlight to grow.

As always, you are free to approach these prompts through whichever medium you love. A lot of us journaled last week, but some of us grabbed paintbrushes and others their cameras. The nature of these prompts can be applied to any medium, whether they inspire a song or a short story, a sketch or a sculpture.

If you’d like to join the Creative Challenges I run, you can become a paid subscriber here

There will also be a discussion thread for each prompt in my chats, in case you’d like to discuss how the work felt for you!

Are you ready? Let’s go: