{Originally published 12.19.22 in the newsletter formerly known as Let’s Make A Flow Chart.}
Welcome to Let’s Make a Flow Chart, a newsletter about being creative
A newsletter about sourcing our lives from that magical, brimming wellspring called creative energy.
A not-just-for-artists mapping of creativity—where it chills, sleeps and breathes within us, and what it feasts upon, all in an effort to court it like crazy and hope it has its way with us a little bit more everyday.
It’s a funny kind of fitting that the thing asking to be written about on this
first-day-of-school-threshold is death.
Death and creativity.
Two unlikely characters dancing together like ropes in a game of double dutch. Following one another and slapping the pavement wildly to announce the arrival of the other, over and over, in an ouroboros dosey-doe.
In my experience, devoting oneself to a creative life is also a death stewarding practice.
It requires that I let a part of myself die—who I think I am, and what I think I should be doing with my life, to instead make space for real inspiration and creative longing to work it’s unpredictable magic through me.
Being creative is like a ritual sacrifice, peeling off the layers of logic, plans, predictability, identity, and even likeability (!!!) to offer them up at the altar of death and creativity.
To allow ideas and inspiration to pass through me freely without getting snagged on the “well what will this mean about me if I say or do this thing out loud for all the loudmouths to witness and comment upon?”
It’s a setting yourself on fire to set yourself free.
And so I think about the things I’ve had to let die in order to show up for my creative desires. Take this newsletter for example.
I’ve wanted to start this bad baby for a couple of years, but there were so many stories my ego and insecurities convinced me of that kept sidelining me.
Who wants to read a newsletter, everyone already has too much junk cluttering their inbox! People don’t want long form business they want memes and memes only!
Who are YOU to think people want to read YOUR thoughts, how self-freaking-important!
You know the bit.
So I keep this mantra close by when the inner loudmouths get too loud–
DO IT SCARED
DO IT SCARED
DO IT SCARED
Which is a thrusting of myself over the hot coals of my doubts and fears and learned smallness, into the magical mystery land of UNCERTAINTY. Right into the middle of the double dutch swirl of death and creation.
Will I get slapped in the face and fail miserably or will I have the time of my freaking life? Who can say, do it scared!
So here's a lil seasonal invitation–
at this Winter Solstice time of reckoning with the light and the dark, creation and death–
to consider the nourishing, life-affirming work of death upon our lives.
To consider how death is giving us life by NOT coming for us in this moment. And how what we are letting go of is announcing the arrival of creative possibility.
How death can rearrange who we think we are in order to live more fully in the present moment. AND how death teaches us to go before we’re ready and do it scared.
Which will always be better than not doing the thing at all.
May the light be finding its way to you more tenaciously these days, and may we all be a little less afraid of the dark in the process.
LOL how's THAT for a soft opening to the newsletter party?
The past two weeks have been a wild tornado flurry of holiday markets--one in Atlanta and one in Birmingham. Had a crash course on a very specific kind of art and commerce co-mingling. Met amazing humans, sold many things, and was mostly dazzled into exhaustion by it all.
In the new year, I'm opening up my books for custom quilt and quilt jacket commissions. I'll also have small batch quilt jacket sales, and you fine newsletter subscribers will be the FIRST to hear of those hotties hitting the market. Stay tuned.
Thank you for joining me in the tender uncertainty of starting something new!
If something speaks to you, send me a reply and lemme know what's on your mind.
I'll be back in your inbox on the New Moon in Capricorn, first week of January.
Big love til then,
— Melissa