Creative Seasons
As the daylight grows shorter, I am ever more aware that winter will be closing in soon. Summer in Minnesota always seems to fly by in a blink. It is short and intense and wonderful. I love all of the very distinct seasons here. As I ponder this today and wish I was outside instead of writing right now, I will talk about how the seasons affect my creative life.
As I mark the phenological changes in each season, my creative life evolves along with it.
Summer is probably my least creative season in the traditional sense. I use nature and being outside to heal my brain. When it is warm, I encourage myself to fully immerse in the season. I know that I need it to build up the stores of resilience in my brain to power up for when the long winter sets in and I cannot spend as much time outside. (my lungs cannot always handle the intensity of the coldest days). So I throw myself into gardening and outdoor pursuits like kayaking, hiking, biking, and camping. Garden design can be somewhat creative I suppose but I look at it in more of a mathematical sense than a design sense. I need to balance the soil constraints with deer browse and limited ability to water and need for pollinators so I always examine these things for every plant. I make extensive notes for each season and often have the next year’s garden plans outlined as this year comes to a close. Each day I work myself until my body cannot take anymore. I find every moment completely satisfying that I can spend with my hands in the soil. Little time is left for making art or sewing or writing. I do try to keep up with my journaling but find that even that is often forgotten in my rush to get everything done with the season’s short deadlines.
As fall sets in and the garden tasks and outdoor pursuits become more weather dependent, I find myself with more time to think and create. I make plans for the winter ahead and become more diligent about making my days more well-rounded creatively. Sewing is the first creative pursuit that I prioritize. Then work more writing into my schedule culminating in NANOWRIMO each November. I try to be more diligent about documenting the seasonal changes and spend more time outside journaling to replace my time spent gardening.
As the season progresses into colder and colder days and winter marches in, I move my journaling practice into my little unheated greenhouse. It warms on sunny days but still feels like being outdoors. I snowshoe every day that the weather allows. I set monthly creative challenges for myself and schedule daily studio time. For example, this winter I am:
Illustrating my garden journal
Recreating my nature journaling class
Editing and publishing my Organizing book
Working on the second draft of my fiction novel
Hand quilting my EPP triangle quilt
Spending a month focusing on photography and learning more about my equipment
Finishing my grant work
Sewing button down tops and shirt dresses
Spring is the time when winter merges with summer. I finish up my winter projects and start my summer ones, all depending on the weather which can be quite extreme.
While I do all of this, I need to be very mindful of not overworking myself. I have a severe brain disorder and have to carefully balance the activities that I do each day to keep my brain’s disease at bay. I have to limit things like working on a computer to an hour or less. I have to avoid social media and online places that are toxic. I cannot spend much time with other humans. Interactions beyond my immediate family leave me incapacitated for weeks at a time, unable to focus on much at all beyond parsing every word that was said. But I can talk about this in more detail some other time…or maybe never as it seems like mentioning these sorts of things brings out people’s need to give “advice” which is almost entirely unhelpful.
When my brain became too incapacitated to work a regular job anymore, I struggled to figure out what to do with all of my time. I had always worked in management, earned a graduate degree while parenting three children, was involved in volunteer work and my children’s activities and suddenly much of that disappeared into the hole of a severe brain disease. As time went on, I developed my creative seasons to help me keep my brain stable and my hands busy with a sense of purpose for my life, as simple as it is. Finding contentment in the simple things is what I try to do every day while providing structure and consistency. The seasons help for variation since I am basically home bound. It took me years to get to this point of reclusive relative stability. My days are structured to the hour and the variation is subtle providing the steady rhythm of sameness that I need.