One word. One story. One small invitation to live creatively this week.

Each Monday, I choose one word as a lens for the story and ideas that follow. Sometimes it’s something I’ve been learning or noticing, sometimes it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about. My hope is that these few minutes help you see the world a little differently and carry that perspective into the week ahead.

This Week’s Word

“Subtract”

A few weeks ago, I found myself with something I’m always wishing for: a little time to create. The problem was, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to make. I wandered around my studio for a while, feeling a little frustrated that I finally had the time but zero inspiration.

Eventually, on a whim, I pulled a handful of old paintings out of the closet. I had started them about five years ago, but somewhere along the way I stopped liking the direction they were going. At the time, my solution had been to cover most of what I’d painted with thick layers of white paint, and then I stashed them away and forgot all about them. Now, I had no emotional attachment to them at all. I could experiment without worrying about ruining anything.

Instead of trying to figure out what I could add to them, I grabbed some rubbing alcohol and a paper towel and started taking the white paint away.

It wasn’t nearly as easy as that makes it sound. The white paint had been sitting there for years, thoroughly cured, and it took a surprising amount of time and effort to get through it. At first, not much seemed to be happening. Then the white gradually began to get lighter, and a hint of the old blue started peeking through. I kept working at it and eventually reached the bright blue layers underneath.

I had no plan for what I wanted the paintings to become. I wasn’t trying to restore them to what they’d been; I was just working intuitively, taking away a little at a time and waiting to see what would emerge.

And somewhere along the way, I started to see the paintings differently. These were paintings I’d pulled out because I honestly didn’t care if I messed them up. Now I really like the way they look. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them next, or whether I’m going to do much of anything at all. But I might be emotionally attached to them again.

The whole experiment made me think about how often our instinct is to add.

When a painting isn’t working, add another layer. When a room doesn’t feel right, buy something new. When we’re trying to solve a problem, find another strategy. When life feels like it needs changing, add a new habit, a new goal, a new plan.

Sometimes adding really is the answer. But sometimes the thing that makes the biggest difference isn’t what we add, but what we’re willing to take away.

If you think about it, subtraction is a critical aspect of creating. Writers cut words. Photographers crop images. Gardeners prune branches. Artists scrape back paint, erase marks and remove layers. Sculptors, woodworkers, and printmakers all create by taking material away. Creating isn’t simply a process of accumulating more and more until something is finished. It’s also deciding what stays, what goes, and what might become visible when something else is removed.

I don’t think the lesson here is that less is always more. Sometimes a painting truly does need another layer, or a problem needs another idea. Adding and taking away are both part of the process. The trick is recognizing that we have both choices.

These paintings reminded me that when something isn’t quite working, maybe the question isn’t always What else does this need? We can also ask, What might happen if I take something away?

Quote

“It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting.”
-Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

Austin Kleon

Weekly art, writing, and creative inspiration from the author of Steal Like an Artist and other bestsellers.

For the Week Ahead

We tend to look for what’s missing - what else we could add or change to make something better. But sometimes there’s already something good there, and adding more isn’t what it needs. You might be surprised by what you find.

One More Thing…

I’ve already started thinking about this year’s Christmas ornaments (yes, in August), and lately I’ve been drawn to the idea of making something inspired by St. Lucia Day. I first learned about the tradition as a little girl through Kirsten, my American Girl doll. I loved Kirsten and her stories, and for some reason the St. Lucia celebration has stayed tucked away in my memory all these years.

I don’t know yet exactly how that inspiration will translate into this year’s ornaments, or if it will at all, but I’ve been having fun thinking about it. There’s something I love about an idea from childhood unexpectedly resurfacing in my creative life all these years later.

Until next week,

Emily

Looking for more? Visit emilygeleske.com for art, essays, and encouragement to notice beauty, embrace your creativity, and create a life that feels like your own.

One word. One story. One small invitation to live creatively this week.

Each Monday, I choose one word as a lens for the story and ideas that follow. Sometimes it’s something I’ve been learning or noticing, sometimes it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about. My hope is that these few minutes help you see the world a little differently and carry that perspective into the week ahead.

This Week’s Word

“Creative”

I’m always surprised by how many people tell me “I’m just not a creative person.” Usually it comes up when I tell someone I’m an artist, or when the conversation turns to making things or trying a new project. The statement comes out almost like a disclaimer - it’s their way of lowering expectations and taking some of the pressure off.

That always catches me off guard because I genuinely believe we’re all creative. It may look completely different from one person to the next, but I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t have that spark in them somewhere. So I wonder if what people really mean when they say this is I’m not artistic.

We tend to use creative and artistic almost interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Making art is one expression of it, but there are so many other ways it shows up in our lives.

Most of us immediately think of painting, writing, music, filmmaking, fashion, architecture and design. But what about the person who is really good at solving problems? Or the scientist figuring out how to test a new idea? Or the inventor who envisions something that makes life a little easier? Those things require imagination and innovation, too.

The same is true for things we do in everyday life. Designing a home that feels welcoming, putting together a gathering, using what you’ve been given to care for others - there’s thought and imagination behind all of it, even if we don’t usually think of it that way.

I think that’s why it bothers me a little when someone is so quick to say, I’m not creative. You may not paint or write or make things with your hands; you may not think of yourself as artistic at all. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have those gifts…you just may not have recognized them for what they are.

Quote

“There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t.”
- Brené Brown

For the Week Ahead

This week, pay attention to the ways you’re already using these gifts, especially the ones you might normally overlook. Think about the things that come naturally to you, the things other people ask for your help with, or the things you enjoy doing even though you’ve never considered them particularly creative.

Instead of dismissing those things because they don’t look like painting or writing or making art, start giving yourself credit for them. And the next time you’re tempted to say “I’m just not creative,” stop for a second and ask yourself if that’s actually true.

One More Thing…

My husband and I watched Young Washington last weekend, and it was kind of the perfect combination for us—he loves history, and I love a good period drama. The movie follows George Washington as a young man, long before the Revolution and before he became the leader we all know from history. I didn’t know much about this part of his life, and I loved getting a glimpse of the experiences (and mistakes!) that helped shape the person he eventually became.

The cast was fun, too. William Franklyn-Miller, who plays Washington, was new to us, but he’s surrounded by some very familiar faces, including Mary-Louise Parker, Kelsey Grammer, Andy Serkis, and Ben Kingsley.

Of course, it’s a movie, not a documentary, so there are some liberties taken with the history. By the time it was over, I was already curious about what really happened and what came next. Before long, I found myself down a rabbit hole, reading more about the history and looking for other movies and series set during the same period. If you like history but would rather learn about it through a good story than a textbook, this one is definitely worth checking out.

Until next week,

Emily

One word. One story. One small invitation to live creatively this week.

Each Monday, I choose one word as a lens for the story and ideas that follow. Sometimes it’s something I’ve been learning or noticing, sometimes it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about. My hope is that these few minutes help you see the world a little differently and carry that perspective into the week ahead.

This Week’s Word

“Routine”

Last Monday was the first day of school, and after a couple of months of slower summer living we are settling back into a more regular routine.

My husband and I both work year-round, so our schedules don’t actually change that much when school is out. Still, there’s a sense of freedom that comes with the season. When classes are out, the morning rush isn’t quite as urgent. There are fewer schedules to work around and fewer places everyone needs to be at a specific time.

Our family has been doing some variation of this since my son started school when he was four, but this year is different because he’s a senior. Knowing it was his last first day of school has made me pay a little more attention to this routine that’s been part of our lives for so long.

I’ve also been thinking about routine itself and the way we sometimes treat it as the opposite of creativity. Creativity sounds spontaneous and interesting and exciting. Routine gets a reputation for being repetitive and predictable, maybe boring even. But I don’t think they have to be opposites. Sometimes, a little routine is exactly what gives creativity room to happen.

It sounds almost counterintuitive, but having a little bit of structure can actually make it easier to be creative. When we know what our days look like, we can plan ahead and find space for the things we want to do: painting on a Saturday morning, getting a run in before the day begins, tending the garden after dinner, sketching during a lunch break at work. Creativity doesn’t always need an entire free afternoon. Sometimes it just needs a designated place in our lives.

Creativity doesn’t only belong in the time we set aside to paint, write, or make something. We can bring it into the ordinary parts of our days, too - even the things we have to do rather than the things we want to do. There are small choices we can make that turn a responsibility into something a little more enjoyable or an everyday moment into something a little more beautiful.

Quote

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
-Annie Dillard

For the Week Ahead

Think about the routines that make up your life right now. Is there something you’ve been wanting to do that you could intentionally make a little room for? Or is there something you already do every day that could be made a little more enjoyable or beautiful?

The point isn’t to add one more thing to your schedule or make your routine more productive. Just look for one small way to bring a little more creativity into the life you’re already living.

One More Thing…

I’ve followed Marian Parsons, better known as Miss Mustard Seed, for almost as long as she’s been blogging. She’s an artist, author, and longtime home and DIY blogger whose work has gradually expanded to include more painting and a broader focus on creativity - basically, a lot of the things I love. I have and adore her other books, and she has a new one, Move Slow & Make Things, coming out September 1. It’s about slowing down, making room for creativity, and seeing the world through the eyes of a maker, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. It’s available for preorder now.

Until next week,

Emily

Looking for more? Visit emilygeleske.com for essays, original artwork, and ideas for creating a more beautiful, creative life..

One word. One story. One small invitation to live creatively this week.

Each Monday, I choose one word as a lens for the story and ideas that follow. Sometimes it’s something I’ve been learning or noticing, sometimes it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about. My hope is that these few minutes help you see the world a little differently and carry that perspective into the week ahead.

This Week’s Word

“Saturate”

I don’t know about you, but I love a good summer thunderstorm (as long as I don’t have to drive anywhere). A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my computer working on a blog post when I heard the first roll of thunder. The rain started a few seconds later, so I stopped what I was doing and stepped out onto the front porch to watch for a few minutes.

It wasn’t raining especially hard, as far as Florida thunderstorms go, but it was steady. The air was warm and thick with humidity, and I could hear the rain hitting the roof and pavement. Water streamed off the edge of the roof and rushed down the driveway toward the gutter. Every so often, lightning flashed somewhere off in the distance, followed by a low rumble of thunder. Drops of rain ricocheted off the concrete and splashed onto my bare feet and legs.

I stood there for several minutes, just watching and listening. I wasn’t thinking about the half-written blog post waiting for me inside or trying to find some deeper meaning in the moment - I just love thunderstorms, and I wanted to experience this one. Eventually, I’d had enough and wandered back inside, dried off my feet, and picked up where I’d left off.

Since then, I keep coming back to the idea that a creative life is about so much more than the time we spend making things. We tend to think of inspiration as something we have to go out and find, but I’m starting to wonder if some of the best inspiration comes from simply living our lives and paying attention to what we experience along the way.

That doesn’t mean every experience has to become something. I wasn’t standing on my porch thinking about how I could turn that thunderstorm into a blog post. I just wanted to watch the rain. But I think there’s something important about letting ourselves really take in the colors and sounds, places and seasons, people and conversations, and all the ordinary moments that make up our lives.

We don’t always know what will stay with us or what might show up again later in something we create. Maybe we don’t need to. We can just let it all soak in and become part of the way we see the world. And when we do create, some of those experiences will inevitably come with us.

Quote

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
- Robert Henri

For the Week Ahead

This week, forget about looking for inspiration. Instead, just focus on having experiences.

Go somewhere because you’re curious. Listen to a song you love - or maybe to one you’ve never heard before. Stand outside for five minutes when you hear thunder. Notice a color simply because it’s beautiful. Let yourself enjoy the ordinary things that fill your days without asking whether they’re useful or what you could make from them.

You don’t need to turn any of it into something. Just experience it. Let it soak in and become part of you. Someday it may find its way into something you create, or it may not.

Either way, your life will be richer for having really lived it.

One More Thing…

Last summer, my go-to Starbucks order was an Iced London Fog Latte and a ham & Swiss croissant. This summer, I’ve completely switched gears. I can’t get enough of the Strawberry Açaí Lemonade Refresher, and their Grilled Cheese is ridiculously good. I’m obsessed.

If we happened to meet up at Starbucks this week, there’s about a 99% chance that’s what I’d be ordering. Consider this my recommendation to try both before summer is over.

Until next week,

Emily

Looking for more? Visit emilygeleske.com for essays, original artwork, and creative inspiration.

One word. One story. One small invitation to live creatively this week.

Each Monday, I choose one word as a lens for the story and ideas that follow. Sometimes it’s something I’ve been learning or noticing, sometimes it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about. My hope is that these few minutes help you see the world a little differently and carry that perspective into the week ahead.

This Week’s Word

“Attention”

A few weeks ago, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone. I’d tried moderation and time limits before, but for me it had to be all or nothing.

I didn’t quit social media altogether; I can still check Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest from my computer if and when I want to. The difference is that it isn’t available every minute of every day.

Since taking it off my phone, I’ve logged in maybe a handful of times. I check my notifications, catch up with the handful of people I actually enjoy following, and close the browser tab. The whole thing takes less than five minutes. Most days, I don’t even think about it.

I expected to miss it, but I don’t.

And I’ve realized how many tiny moments of my day had become opportunities to scroll. Without even noticing, I’d reach for my phone - not because there was anything I needed, but simply because it was there.

Weeks later, my thumbs still navigate toward the place on my screen where Instagram used to be. It’s pure muscle memory. But now there’s nothing there, and in that moment I get to decide what happens next. It’s a tiny interruption in an old habit, and every time it happens I’m reminded that I have a choice. And I choose to look up instead.

The biggest surprise isn’t necessarily that I have more time. It’s that I have hundreds of tiny moments back. They used to disappear into scrolling without me even noticing. I hadn’t realized how much of my day belonged to someone else until it belonged to me again.

Quote

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”

— Anne Lamott

For the Week Ahead

We live in a world that’s constantly asking for our attention. Every notification, headline, email, advertisement, and app is competing for a few more seconds of our day.

I don’t think creativity comes from avoiding inspiration; we all need things that fill us up. But there’s a difference between seeking inspiration and being constantly bombarded by input. If every spare minute is filled with other people’s ideas, it becomes much harder to recognize what is truly yours.

Maybe the most creative thing we can do isn’t consume more, but better protect our attention.

One More Thing…

I’m curious...what’s something you’ve enjoyed lately that you can’t stop recommending? It could be a book, a place, a podcast, a recipe, or something completely unexpected. Hit reply and tell me about it - I really do read them.

Until next week,

Emily

Looking for more? Visit emilygeleske.com for essays, original artwork, and creative inspiration.

One word. One story. One small invitation to live creatively this week.

Over the past year on Substack, I’ve loved writing longer essays about creativity, art, and living a more beautiful life. They’ve become a place to think out loud about the things I’ve been noticing, learning, and wondering about along the way.

I’ll still be sharing those. But this season of life has me thinking more intentionally about what I want to make space for. Between family life, a full-time job, a developing studio practice, and my son beginning his senior year, I’m increasingly aware that these ordinary days won’t always look the way they do now.

I don’t want to be so busy writing about a beautiful life that I forget to live one.

So instead of a new long-form essay every Monday, I’m creating a different rhythm. Each week, Studio Notes begins with one word - a lens for the story and ideas that follow. Think of it as a few quiet minutes to pause, notice something you might have otherwise missed, and begin the week with a small dose of inspiration.

Longer essays aren’t going anywhere. I’m just giving them more room to breathe. I have a feeling they’ll be better because of it.

This Week’s Word

“Notice”

A few weeks ago I made a quick overnight trip to Sarasota to spend time with my parents. On Sunday morning my dad and I took a walk along the beach, and as we walked, I kept catching myself looking down at the sand.

The high tide had scattered seaweed across the shoreline, arranging each strand a little differently. Every few steps, I noticed another abstract composition. Some resembled loose brushstrokes. Others looked like expressive lines or carefully placed marks. Each one felt like a tiny work of art that would disappear as soon as the tide returned.

I’ll admit that I stopped more than once to snap a few pictures. As I walked, I couldn’t help wondering how much we overlook every day…not because there isn’t anything there, but because we’ve stopped expecting to find something worth noticing.

Quote

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

— Mary Oliver

For the Week Ahead

The world is endlessly interesting.

We don’t always have to go looking for something extraordinary. Sometimes we simply have to remember that ordinary things are worth looking at.

One More Thing…

This weekend reminded me that inspiration doesn’t always arrive when I’m sitting in my studio. Sometimes it shows up on an ordinary walk with my dad, when I happen to look down instead of straight ahead. I hope I remember that more often.

Until next week,

Emily

P.S. Since this is the very first Studio Notes, I’d love your feedback. If there’s something you especially enjoyed—or something you’d love to see included in future editions—just hit reply and let me know.

Looking for more? Visit emilygeleske.com for essays, original artwork, and creative inspiration.

They’re not necessarily bad, just the kind of mornings where you didn’t sleep quite enough, hit the snooze button too many times, or your brain just hasn’t fully woken up yet.

Today was one of those slow starts.

It’s summer now, so the house is quieter in the early hours. My son sleeps in since school is out. My husband works from home, so he doesn’t have an early start. I’m the first one up.

Tea instead of coffee (I quit drinking coffee over a year ago when it stopped agreeing with me). Peaceful solitude instead of urgency and rushing.

I move carefully, trying to be as gentle with the house as possible. I tiptoe through the kitchen while I get my lunch together, and I wait a little longer than I probably should before going back to get ready so I don’t wake my husband too early.

During the school year, life runs on a tighter schedule. Everything is built around getting out the door on time. Gotta be at school by 7:00. That means leave by 6:45, 6:50 at the very latest. Coffee going by 6:00, make sure the teenager is up and moving by then.

But in the summer, everything stretches out a little more, and there’s room to breathe. I’m starting to think that these slow beginnings are their own kind of creative space. I’m thankful for the few extra minutes to decompress, to not have to race to get ready. I can sit by myself, open the blinds to see the light growing brighter, and mentally prepare for the day. Sometimes I watch the squirrels, other times I just sit with my cup of hot tea and enjoy the silence.

These moments aren’t for making anything, they’re just for noticing. They help me see things more clearly before the day gets going and my attention is scattered. When life is a little quieter, my mind has room to wander. That’s where some of my best ideas come from.

Not because I’m trying to create anything, but because I’m finally still enough to notice.

You can find more of my writing and artwork at emilygeleske.com.

Who will you be on vacation?

Most people probably didn’t give it a second thought. I’m sure they were focused on getting through security, finding their gate, and getting to their destination. But I’m always looking for writing ideas, so the question grabbed my attention and has stayed with me for the last six months. Now that summer is here, it seems like the perfect time to finally write about it.

If you think about it, the airport was the perfect place for this ad. Airports are places of transition. People are moving between one chapter and the next, leaving one routine behind and heading toward something different. For a little while, they occupy an in-between space, focused not on where they’ve been but on where they’re going.

As I thought about it, though, I realized this isn’t really about vacation or even travel. Plenty of people pass through airports for work, family obligations, or difficult circumstances. Simply traveling somewhere doesn’t automatically make us more relaxed, creative, or adventurous. Part of what creates those changes is stepping outside our usual routines and making space for a different way of living. When we do that, we often reconnect with parts of ourselves that have been pushed aside by everyday life.

Think about the person you tend to be on vacation. Maybe you’re more relaxed or more adventurous. You might be more willing to try something new. You could spend more time outdoors, lose track of time over meals, stay up later than usual, or wander through places with no specific destination in mind. You might read more, notice more, photograph more, or simply see the world around you in a different way.

We often think those changes happen because of where we are. We tell ourselves that we’re more relaxed because we’re at the beach, more present because we’re in the mountains, or more creative because we’re somewhere beautiful.

But what if those qualities were already there? What if vacation doesn’t create a different version of us, but simply gives us enough room to rediscover them?

Now that it’s summer, I’ve been thinking about that question again - not in terms of travel plans, but in terms of identity.

Who do I want to be this summer?

It’s an easy season to think in terms of destinations. Summer bucket lists, vacations, road trips, and weekend getaways fill our calendars and our social media feeds. It seems as though everyone is heading off on some kind of adventure. But behind all of those plans is a deeper set of questions: How do we want to spend our days? What do we want more of? Which parts of ourselves have we neglected during the busier seasons of the year?

Maybe this is the summer you spend more time outside. Maybe it’s the summer you keep a sketchbook on the kitchen table, read books that have been on your list, tend a garden, take evening walks, or finally try a creative project that’s been sitting on your heart for months.

The specifics will be different for everyone, but the question remains the same: Who do you want to be?

What I really like about that question is that it shifts the focus away from achievement and toward intention. It isn’t asking what you’ll accomplish this summer. You don’t have to commit to how productive you’ll be or how many goals you’ll check off a list. Instead, it’s asking how you want to live.

The longer I think about it, the more I believe there’s a deeper idea hiding underneath:

How can we keep being that person when we get back home?

The truth is that vacations must eventually come to an end. Suitcases get unpacked and we go back to our regular routines with full calendars. It’s so easy to slip right back into the habits that made us feel rushed, distracted, or disconnected in the first place.

So what if we paid closer attention while we’re away, and instead of only remembering where we went, we paid attention to how we felt?

When we look back on our favorite vacations, it’s worth asking what we actually loved about them. Was it the destination itself, or was it the slower mornings, the extra time outdoors, the conversations around the table, or the freedom to follow our curiosity without feeling guilty about it?

A lot of times, the things we miss most aren’t the places, but the rhythms.

While we may not be able to recreate every part of a vacation once we’re home, we can intentionally bring pieces of those rhythms back with us. We can take a walk after dinner, sit on the porch with a cup of tea, or give ourselves permission to linger with the people we care about. We can make time for the activities that make us feel most alive.

So maybe that’s the real gift of summer. Not that it allows us to become someone different, but that it reminds us of who we want to be.

So as this season begins, I’m returning to the question I saw at the airport. It’s not, “Who will you be on vacation?” but, “Who do I want to be?” And even more importantly, what can I do today that will help me keep being that person even after vacation is over?

Hurricanes can happen year round, but this is the time of year when those of us in the South (especially Floridians) start paying a little closer attention to the weather and stocking up on bottled water, non-perishable food, batteries, and toilet paper (because it’s a post-pandemic world and you just never really know anymore). We pull out the flashlights and weather radio that have been in storage for the winter and make sure important documents are together and easy to grab if we need to leave quickly.

Then there are other things that are also needed but don’t require as much advance preparation. Clothes for a few days, medications, chargers, and extra items for small children or pets can usually be put together pretty quickly. The same goes for books, journals, puzzles, and other forms of entertainment in case the power goes out.

For me, that includes my art supply travel kit.

It’s not something I pack specifically for storms; it’s just always ready to go. I bring it with me almost everywhere in my day-to-day life in case I have a little extra time. Over the years, I’ve used it during my lunch break at work, waiting in the car at school pickup, sitting at baseball practice, and on road trips and vacations. I’ll swap materials out here and there, but the core items stay pretty much the same.

I use a small canvas bag that holds just the basics: a small sketchbook, a Micron pen and a mechanical pencil, a few paintbrushes, charcoal, a wooden skewer for mark making, a small watercolor palette, and some paper towels. It’s not elaborate or precious, but it’s full of simple tools that are easy for me to pick up and use without a lot of planning or effort.

While this might not look like typical hurricane prep, it is an important part of how I take care of myself in moments like this. How do I want to feel in this kind of unpredictable situation? What can I do with my nervous energy? When circumstances seem out of control, it can be helpful to have ways to stay connected to ourselves while we are handling the logistics.

It’s also worth noting that the priority here isn’t necessarily to make finished work. Even a few lines in a sketchbook or playing with color for a few minutes can shift how I feel.

I can’t bring my studio with me if I have to leave home, but I can bring a sketchbook and a few favorite supplies. Sometimes that’s enough to bring about a small sense of normalcy when I’m off my regular routine.

Creativity is one of the ways I make sense of the world, so it’s comforting to know that I still have a way to observe, make, and process what’s happening around me.

Maybe that’s why this little art kit feels just as valuable to me as some of the other things I’d pack. Not because it’s a requirement in the same way food, water, or medications are, but because it helps me stay connected to a part of myself that I’d want to bring along wherever I go.

What would you pack if you had to leave home quickly?

And what’s one small thing you’d want to bring that isn’t necessarily practical, but has everything to do with how you move through the world?

Grief has a way of subduing everything…even the things that usually make you feel most alive.

Coming back to the things you love, like creativity, after life has shifted in some way can feel almost impossible. It’s like you have no motivation for it, or the ideas just aren’t there anymore, or you’re standing in front of your work but not quite able to begin.

But I’m reminded yet again that you can’t wait until you feel the inspiration return. Sometimes you have to just get back to it, even if it’s the last thing you want to do. You have to find a way to fit it into the new version of your life.

It can be something as simple as pushing paint across the page.

For me, it’s almost like jump-starting creativity. Even without a plan, especially if I’m just working intuitively and experimenting, something in me begins to relax and embrace the process. One small action leads to another idea, then another. Before you know it, you’re on your way again.

Yesterday I used a silicone wedge to push black paint around on a few floral pieces I’d already been working on but wasn’t happy with. There wasn’t really a goal in mind; just doing something (anything), kind of seeing what would happen if I did something drastic instead of trying to “fix” things in a precise way. And to be honest, black was a fitting color for my mood lately. It felt good to be doing something creative again.

This morning I woke up with the idea to try the same thing using blues and greens on top of the black. I squeezed the paint directly onto the canvas, moving the colors around and letting them blend and flow into one another. When I wanted more blue, I added it. When I felt like there was too much, I applied more green.

And somehow, without forcing it or overthinking it, the piece started moving closer to what I had envisioned all along: a bright garden of flowers with dappled sunlight and shadow. Whatever happens next doesn’t really matter as long as I keep showing up.

I think a lot of us assume creativity returns like a lightning bolt. It’s often depicted as a sudden rush of inspiration or clarity, or a ‘eureka’ moment. But most of the time, it comes back by doing something or taking action.

In my experience, difficult seasons of life don’t erase creativity - they just tend to mute it for a while. Beginning again doesn’t need to be a big production. Start wherever you can and do what feels natural. And most of the time, it looks much simpler than we expect…like a hand pushing paint across a canvas, and carefully finding its way through.

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour.

The Creative Health Cartography Workbook is a self-guided framework for understanding how your health shapes your creative life. Built from twenty years of research and interviews with more than one hundred artists, writers, and makers, it works through six domains of creative practice with reflective exercises, composite real-world stories, and a six-archetype pattern system. Available as a PDF download and in print.

The word sustainable has been absorbed into productivity culture in ways that have stripped it of most of its meaning. In that context, it tends to mean: how do you maintain output over a long period? How do you keep the engine running? How do you avoid burning out enough to keep producing? The frame is still fundamentally about production. The question is only about its optimization across time.

The sustainability conversation that actually helps creative people is considerably different. It centers on how to build a creative practice that can genuinely fit and support a life, across all of its conditions and changes, in ways that give back as much as they ask.

The difference between sustainable and enduring

Enduring is what happens when a practice continues past the point where it is still working. The creative practice held together by sheer will, maintained through depletion, sustained by discipline when genuine capacity has been consumed: this is endurance rather than sustainability, and the two are often confused because they can look similar from the outside. The person is still showing up. The work is still happening. What is invisible is the cost.

Sustainable is different in quality rather than simply in duration. A sustainable creative practice gives back as well as asks. It is built around the person’s actual rhythms rather than an idealized version of them, which means it has flexibility built in for the variation in capacity that is a normal feature of human life. It can absorb difficulty, change, loss, and the ordinary disruptions of a life moving through time, and continue in some form because it was built around the actual conditions of the life rather than a fantasy of better conditions.

The practice that works with the body’s signals rather than overriding them tends to be more durable than the practice that demands output regardless of what the body and nervous system are reporting. The practice that has genuine flexibility for low-capacity periods, that treats them as a natural feature of creative life rather than a failure to be corrected, tends to sustain itself across seasons and years in ways that the rigid practice cannot.

The most practical thing to be said about sustainability: build the practice around who you actually are. The real body with its real rhythms, the real schedule with its real constraints, the real relationship to creative work including the complicated parts. The aspirational self who rises at five and works with perfect discipline before the demands of the day arrive is useful as an occasional achievement and damaging as a daily standard. The practice built around the real life tends to be smaller in scope than the imagined ideal and more durable across time. Smaller does not mean less serious. It means fitted to what is actually there.

What the research shows about creative longevity

Research on the people who sustain creative practices across decades, the makers and writers and musicians and artists who continue doing meaningful work into their sixties and seventies and beyond, points toward patterns that run consistently counter to the productivity narrative.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on what he called autotelic experience, the experience of engaging with work for its intrinsic rewards rather than external validation or outcome, consistently shows that intrinsically motivated creative engagement is more self-sustaining than extrinsically motivated production. The person who makes things because the making itself is rewarding, who has developed what Csikszentmihalyi describes as a genuine love of the process rather than a dependency on the outcome, tends to sustain the practice through difficulty in ways that the person driven primarily by recognition or achievement does not. The intrinsic motivation survives the fallow periods and the rejections and the shifts in the cultural conversation in ways that external motivation struggles to.

Carol Dweck’s research on mastery orientation versus performance orientation adds another dimension: people who understand their creative practice as ongoing development, as a relationship with the work and with their own capacities that continues to grow and change, tend to sustain engagement under difficulty in ways that people primarily oriented toward demonstrating competence cannot. The performance orientation produces brittleness when difficulty arrives. The mastery orientation produces curiosity, which tends to be considerably more durable.

In my interviews, what I see most consistently in people with genuinely long sustainable practices is a combination of flexibility in form alongside stability in commitment. The practice has changed across time, sometimes substantially: different forms, different scales, different relationships to audience and market and medium. What has remained consistent is the relationship to the making itself, the quality of genuine interest in what the work is doing and where it is going.

What is built around actual constraints

The practical question is this: what is the practice built around? If it is built around ideal conditions that have to be created before the real work can begin, the practice tends to be fragile. The ideal conditions will not always be available, and when they are not, the practice has no access to what it needs.

A practice built around actual constraints, around the reality of a body that has specific needs and rhythms and limits, around a schedule that includes the genuine demands of a whole life, around an energy pattern that has high periods and low periods and a predictable relationship between effort and recovery: this practice can function across a much wider range of conditions because it was designed for the conditions that actually exist.

The constraint is information. Building around it produces something more genuinely sustainable than building against it and spending years wondering why the ideal keeps failing to arrive.

What the workbook offers

The Creative Health Cartography workbook’s central question is what is actually happening in your creative health, across all areas, and what does understanding that open up?

This is a sustainability question at its core. A creative practice cannot be truly built on incomplete or inaccurate information about what your life and body and creative needs actually require. The mapping is the precondition. Understanding the actual terrain of your creative health, the rhythms and the constraints and the patterns of capacity and depletion, is what makes it possible to build something that can last.

The workbook gives you a structure for that understanding. How you use the information you uncover is entirely yours.

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour. Follow the full tour at createmefree.substack.com. If you liked this essay then you might also like:

Create Me Free

Energy and Flow: Working With Your Mental Health Rhythms

Have you ever noticed how your creative energy ebbs and flows, sometimes feeling like an unstoppable river, other times a stagnant pond…

Read more

a year ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Kathryn Vercillo

For this tour, Kathryn is offering 20% off of workbooks, creative health maps and navigation sessions. The promo code (WorkbookTour20) works for all of these:

Print Workbook

NOTE: For the print copy, I am only able to offer 20% off on the signed-and-shipped-by-me copies and only shipping to United States addresses. The link for that is: https://tinyurl.com/signedCHCworkbook

(Alternatively people can purchase on Amazon, unsigned, at full price: https://amzn.to/4vLtCV0)

Workbook PDF: https://tinyurl.com/CHCworkbook

I have a theory about how a first dog is a little bit like a first love. You give yourself completely without really considering the eventual heartbreak. You build routines, memories, and attachment so gradually that it simply becomes part of who you are. In the beginning, you are mostly thinking about companionship, joy, and all the years stretching ahead of you. You are not thinking about the day you will eventually have to say goodbye.

Jack was my first dog. My husband gave him to me as a birthday gift in 2006 before we were even married. In so many ways, Jack was part of the foundation of our adult life together. He was there before marriage, before our home, before our son, before we really knew what our life together would become. He is even the reason we ended up moving to Mount Dora.

So much of our life story formed around his presence without us ever realizing, and I think this is part of what makes loss so complicated. You’re not just grieving the animal or person themselves, but the ordinary daily routines, memories, and pieces of your own identity connected to them. Mix in the emotional rollercoaster of happy memories alongside the lows of grief, and it can become difficult to even describe what you’re feeling.

In my post from last fall, Honoring Jack: A Creative Act of Love, I wrote about some of the things we wanted to do with Jack as we acknowledged his time with us was growing short. Looking back, I think those acts were partly about preservation, but they were also about attention. We knew this season would not last forever, so ordinary moments suddenly felt incredibly significant. I wanted to be fully present and able to experience them while he was still here.

I think that sense of urgency naturally led to creativity. By this, I don’t necessarily mean making “art” in the traditional sense, but intentionally preserving, remembering, documenting, and honoring. I wanted to capture all the moments, make all the cute pawprint keepsakes, and hold onto every little piece of daily life for as long as I could.

Now that Jack is gone, I’m realizing how strange and surreal grief really is. I’ve experienced loss and death before, but not quite like this. The world (and everyone else) keeps moving as normal, while your own life feels completely different. Your world is turned upside down. Ordinary routines suddenly feel heavy, almost impossible. You notice the empty spaces, the silence where there used to be familiar sounds, the physical absence of your loved one, and the moments when you still expect them to be there.

I haven’t felt particularly creative lately. Some days are good and I feel almost normal; other days I’m tired, emotional, and feeling scattered. At the same time though, I’ve noticed that the biggest moments of grief are when I reach for one of those mementos of daily life.

So much of what we think of as creativity can also be considered an act of remembrance: We take photographs because we want to hold onto a moment. We write because we are trying to understand what we feel. We paint, garden, cook, scrapbook, sew, decorate, preserve, collect, serve others, and tell stories because something inside us wants to say that this matters.

When we lose someone or something we love, creativity gives us somewhere for that love to go. Sometimes that looks like making something directly connected to the loss. Other times we find ourselves drawn to completely unrelated projects, if only because the act of making helps us move through the heaviness. It gives our hands and our minds somewhere to go when grief threatens to overwhelm us. This doesn’t have to look profound or artistic, either - whatever you do can be as small and simple as:

• Writing down memories before they fade.

• Printing photographs that have been sitting on your phone for years.

• Planting flowers.

• Cooking a favorite or meaningful recipe.

• Making a playlist.

• Framing an old handwritten note (or pawprint, in this case).

• Sitting with paint, fabric, clay, or paper just to keep your hands busy.

In Jack’s final days, I became almost desperate to preserve pieces of him. Pawprints pressed into clay, fur collected and tucked carefully away, photographs and videos of ordinary moments, little collaborative art projects together, and memories I was afraid I might forget.

At first, I wasn’t sure why I felt so compelled to make and collect these things. But then I realized those physical mementos were connected to my fear of forgetting the little things: the routines, the memories, and the depth of how much I loved him (and still do).

I think it is normal in our grief to want physical reminders of the people and animals we love. It’s proof that they were here, that the relationship existed, and that these ordinary moments mattered.

In these 11 days since losing Jack, I’ve become especially aware of how much love lives inside small everyday details - the sound of paws on the floor, the shadow at the door when I came home from work, the way he curled up in the same spot every evening. It’s so weird to think that we built these routines so gradually they became almost invisible while we were living them.

Grief has a way of highlighting those ordinary moments in painful detail. I miss them terribly now.

And maybe that is part of creativity’s role in loss - it helps us preserve the little pieces of life that feel too meaningful to simply let disappear.

I do not think creativity removes grief - of course not. If anything, it can make us aware of and feel things even more deeply. But it does give us somewhere to place those feelings and allow our memories, love, and sadness to exist together.

Nothing about loss is softened by creativity. He is gone, and I miss him terribly. Nothing I create is going to bring him back. But that instinct to preserve things has helped me notice how much of him remains in our memories, our ordinary routines, and in the way ordinary life still carries his absence.

My husband says that the depth of our sorrow reflects the width of our love, and I think that’s beautiful. Grief is painful because our love mattered so very much. Maybe creativity is one of the ways we can continue expressing it, even when someone we love is gone.

The Creative Health Cartography Workbook is a self-guided framework for understanding how your health shapes your creative life. Built from twenty years of research and interviews with more than one hundred artists, writers, and makers, it works through six domains of creative practice with reflective exercises, composite real-world stories, and a six-archetype pattern system. Available as a PDF download and in print.

The word sustainable has been absorbed into productivity culture in ways that have stripped it of most of its meaning. In that context, it tends to mean: how do you maintain output over a long period? How do you keep the engine running? How do you avoid burning out enough to keep producing? The frame is still fundamentally about production. The question is only about its optimization across time.

The sustainability conversation that actually helps creative people is considerably different. It centers on how to build a creative practice that can genuinely fit and support a life, across all of its conditions and changes, in ways that give back as much as they ask.

The difference between sustainable and enduring

Enduring is what happens when a practice continues past the point where it is still working. The creative practice held together by sheer will, maintained through depletion, sustained by discipline when genuine capacity has been consumed: this is endurance rather than sustainability, and the two are often confused because they can look similar from the outside. The person is still showing up. The work is still happening. What is invisible is the cost.

Sustainable is different in quality rather than simply in duration. A sustainable creative practice gives back as well as asks. It is built around the person’s actual rhythms rather than an idealized version of them, which means it has flexibility built in for the variation in capacity that is a normal feature of human life. It can absorb difficulty, change, loss, and the ordinary disruptions of a life moving through time, and continue in some form because it was built around the actual conditions of the life rather than a fantasy of better conditions.

The practice that works with the body’s signals rather than overriding them tends to be more durable than the practice that demands output regardless of what the body and nervous system are reporting. The practice that has genuine flexibility for low-capacity periods, that treats them as a natural feature of creative life rather than a failure to be corrected, tends to sustain itself across seasons and years in ways that the rigid practice cannot.

The most practical thing to be said about sustainability: build the practice around who you actually are. The real body with its real rhythms, the real schedule with its real constraints, the real relationship to creative work including the complicated parts. The aspirational self who rises at five and works with perfect discipline before the demands of the day arrive is useful as an occasional achievement and damaging as a daily standard. The practice built around the real life tends to be smaller in scope than the imagined ideal and more durable across time. Smaller does not mean less serious. It means fitted to what is actually there.

What the research shows about creative longevity

Research on the people who sustain creative practices across decades, the makers and writers and musicians and artists who continue doing meaningful work into their sixties and seventies and beyond, points toward patterns that run consistently counter to the productivity narrative.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on what he called autotelic experience, the experience of engaging with work for its intrinsic rewards rather than external validation or outcome, consistently shows that intrinsically motivated creative engagement is more self-sustaining than extrinsically motivated production. The person who makes things because the making itself is rewarding, who has developed what Csikszentmihalyi describes as a genuine love of the process rather than a dependency on the outcome, tends to sustain the practice through difficulty in ways that the person driven primarily by recognition or achievement does not. The intrinsic motivation survives the fallow periods and the rejections and the shifts in the cultural conversation in ways that external motivation struggles to.

Carol Dweck’s research on mastery orientation versus performance orientation adds another dimension: people who understand their creative practice as ongoing development, as a relationship with the work and with their own capacities that continues to grow and change, tend to sustain engagement under difficulty in ways that people primarily oriented toward demonstrating competence cannot. The performance orientation produces brittleness when difficulty arrives. The mastery orientation produces curiosity, which tends to be considerably more durable.

In my interviews, what I see most consistently in people with genuinely long sustainable practices is a combination of flexibility in form alongside stability in commitment. The practice has changed across time, sometimes substantially: different forms, different scales, different relationships to audience and market and medium. What has remained consistent is the relationship to the making itself, the quality of genuine interest in what the work is doing and where it is going.

What is built around actual constraints

The practical question is this: what is the practice built around? If it is built around ideal conditions that have to be created before the real work can begin, the practice tends to be fragile. The ideal conditions will not always be available, and when they are not, the practice has no access to what it needs.

A practice built around actual constraints, around the reality of a body that has specific needs and rhythms and limits, around a schedule that includes the genuine demands of a whole life, around an energy pattern that has high periods and low periods and a predictable relationship between effort and recovery: this practice can function across a much wider range of conditions because it was designed for the conditions that actually exist.

The constraint is information. Building around it produces something more genuinely sustainable than building against it and spending years wondering why the ideal keeps failing to arrive.

What the workbook offers

The Creative Health Cartography workbook’s central question is what is actually happening in your creative health, across all areas, and what does understanding that open up?

This is a sustainability question at its core. A creative practice cannot be truly built on incomplete or inaccurate information about what your life and body and creative needs actually require. The mapping is the precondition. Understanding the actual terrain of your creative health, the rhythms and the constraints and the patterns of capacity and depletion, is what makes it possible to build something that can last.

The workbook gives you a structure for that understanding. How you use the information you uncover is entirely yours.

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour. Follow the full tour at createmefree.substack.com. If you liked this essay then you might also like:

Create Me Free

Energy and Flow: Working With Your Mental Health Rhythms

Have you ever noticed how your creative energy ebbs and flows, sometimes feeling like an unstoppable river, other times a stagnant pond…

Read more

a year ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Kathryn Vercillo

For this tour, Kathryn is offering 20% off of workbooks, creative health maps and navigation sessions. The promo code (WorkbookTour20) works for all of these:

Print Workbook

NOTE: For the print copy, I am only able to offer 20% off on the signed-and-shipped-by-me copies and only shipping to United States addresses. The link for that is: https://tinyurl.com/signedCHCworkbook

(Alternatively people can purchase on Amazon, unsigned, at full price: https://amzn.to/4vLtCV0)

Workbook PDF: https://tinyurl.com/CHCworkbook

This week, I’m honored to share a guest post from poet-cartoonist Jason McBride about haiku, mindfulness, and the practice of paying attention. His reflections beautifully capture the connection between creativity and observation and the way artistic practice can help us become more present to the world around us.

I hope this piece inspires you to slow down, look closer, and notice something new today.

Attention is the lifeblood of the arts. No matter what your preferred medium or discipline is, art always comes down to you sharing what you’ve noticed in your life and world.

But we live in a noisy world where it’s easy for us sensitive souls to get overwhelmed. It’s easy to miss the small details. How do you learn to better pay attention? Like any other artistic skill, attention can be practiced and improved.

Attention is linked to mindfulness. Often, people use meditation as a shorthand for mindfulness. However, meditation is only one tool for building mindfulness, and it’s not a tool that works for everyone.

The core of mindfulness is not breathwork — it’s noticing what you notice. It’s easy to sail through life in default mode. Our brains are programmed to filter out any information not essential to our survival. However, we often do a poor job of teaching our brains what types of information we want to pay attention to.

Your artist brain is hungry for the minutiae of life. It wants to see the spots on the caterpillar, to hear the way the wind sounds blowing through the weeds and debris in the vacant lot, and to smell the difference between spring and fall.

If paying attention is a skill that needs to be practiced, how do you learn to pay attention? How do you build mindfulness? What does it look like?

When you have a measure of mindfulness, you notice the food you are eating instead of mindlessly snacking throughout the day when you’re stressed. You notice the creeping anxiety that comes with certain work interactions, instead of coming home tired and cranky and being unsure why you’re in such a bad mood.

My favorite way of practicing paying attention is to take a haiku walk. This is where I wander around outside, usually where there is some nature, and write a haiku or two as I walk or after I finish my walk. I’ve been doing this creative practice for ten years, and it has transformed my life. It has taught me to pay attention in ways I never had before.

Haiku is the poetry of observation. In traditional Japanese haiku, the poet writes about their observations of the natural world, within the context of the changing seasons, in seventeen syllables. English language haiku splits these seventeen syllables into three lines, the first and third lines having five syllables and the second line having seven syllables.

Writing haiku gives me a reason to notice what’s happening outside my loud, cluttered brain, as I walk outside. It switches my brain from default mode to observation mode.

The constraints of the haiku form also force me to think more deeply about what I have observed so that I can capture the essence of the experience.

Even writing a single haiku a day will change the way you view your surroundings. It connects you with the natural world. Writing a haiku is low stakes.

The point of writing the haiku is not to become a haiku master, although, fair warning, writing haiku is addictive. The point of writing haiku is to give yourself a formal way to practice paying attention. It gives your artistic brain a reason to operate in artist mode instead of default mode.

Another advantage of this practice is that it forces you to go outside. The act of moving and changing your physical environment increases your mindfulness.

Writing a haiku is a simple task. Anyone can put together three lines by counting syllables. There’s no need to rhyme or worry about meter. You can even skip the syllable counting if you like and just write a short poem that can be read in a single breath.

Haiku is also a discipline that makes it easy to see your improvement after just a few days of writing.

When you use haiku as a mindfulness practice, as a method for paying attention, there is no need to share them with anyone else. But you should go back and reread your work. You will find patterns in both the changing of the seasons and in your moods and the topics you focus on.

You cannot walk and write haiku for long without seeing your powers of observation sharpen. You will begin to notice more as you do other activities.

If you take this practice seriously enough, you may even find yourself, like Mary Oliver, wondering at the magnificent dramas of creatures that you had once been completely ignorant of.

As I look back on my poems from the past several years, I’ve noticed that I write about the return of the great horned owl to the woods by our house every fall, and the one year the owl did not return, the year of our massive wildfires, its absence was conspicuous. In the past few years, I’ve noticed a different owl calling from the woods; a screech owl is competing with the great horned owl for territory. Sadly, the invasive screech owl seems to be winning.

This spring, I’ve been walking a new route by the Willamette River and have discovered groups of mallard ducks and Canada geese with their ducklings and goslings in a slough. I never realized how much there was to notice about the differences in the way these creatures parent and the similarities in how their offspring develop.

The poems and observations from these walks have prompted me to learn more about the ecology of my area and helped me feel more deeply connected to my community. While I may have once just seen ducks, I now see wood ducks, mallards, Muscovy ducks, bluebills, and many other species of ducks, some of which live here all year round and some of which only sojourn in our waterways during the winter.

This noticing keeps me attached to the present and doesn’t allow room for my mind to wallow in anxiety about the past and future.

Some people will find focus in listening to their breath as they sit perfectly still. I find focus in the feeling of my feet pushing off against the ground and the sounds of birds as they paddle around a pond. While some may use the stillness of transcendental meditation to quiet their racing thoughts, I use the activity of walking and writing haiku to center my attention.

As an artist who lives with ADHD and an anxiety disorder, mindfulness is not a luxury. I must maintain high levels of focus and awareness to thrive in my roles as a work-from-home father and freelance writer/illustrator.

My haiku walks have given me the space to practice paying attention and have helped me make mindfulness a way of life.

If you are looking for an alternative way to learn how to pay more attention, try writing a haiku about what you experience as you move about in our wondrous world.

But be careful, writing haiku might change your life forever!

Jason McBride is a poet-cartoonist. He writes the illustrated snail-mail/email newsletter Weirdo Poetry, where he explores the people, places, things, and ideas that make life weirdly poetic.

I’ve found that some of the most freeing moments in my studio come when I let go of all expectations, when I walk in without a plan, a palette, or even a clear idea of what will happen, and simply allow curiosity to lead. Sometimes I pick a color and explore it. Sometimes I flip through old sketchbooks, copying shapes or textures just for fun. Sometimes I simply observe simple things like the way light falls across the table, the texture of materials under my fingers, the small details that often go unnoticed.

It’s in these unplanned, untethered moments that creativity breathes. Surprising color mixes appear, shapes and marks form without conscious effort, and tiny discoveries feel like little gifts from myself to myself. There’s joy in letting go, in experimenting, in failing…or in doing nothing at all. These moments remind me why I started creating in the first place.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, pressured, or unsure how to reconnect with your own creative spirit, this post is for you. I explore why showing up without a plan can be transformative, how embracing imperfection opens doors to fresh ideas, and why simply allowing yourself to be in your creative space can be enough.

(Read the full post on my website to dive deeper into the unplanned moments where creativity truly comes alive, and discover simple ways to bring that freedom into your own practice.)

It doesn’t usually happen in any obvious or dramatic way; it’s more subtle than that. Days get full, energy gets used elsewhere, and slowly, almost without noticing, making things starts to feel like something that requires more space than you currently have. Something you’ll come back to when things settle, or when you finally have the time and energy to do it properly.

But that moment doesn’t always arrive in the way (or the timeframe) we expect it to.

So instead of waiting for ideal conditions, I wanted to offer something simple you can step into as you are right now. A small way to begin again, without needing to reorganize your time or your life first.

This isn’t about finishing anything or doing it “well.” It’s just to get you sitting down again and making something - anything - small, somewhat imperfect, that exists for its own sake.

I put together a Mini Creative Challenge for this week with a few simple starting points you can return to whenever you need a way back into making.

You can read the full post here: A Mini Creative Challenge for This Week

Then the teacher drew theirs. A messy scribble. At the time, I was shocked. That wasn’t a line - how could it be? And yet… somehow, it also didn’t feel wrong. That messy, unpredictable mark opened a tiny door in my brain, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Up until that moment, I thought there was only one way to do things. And suddenly, there was another.

Looking back now, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about creativity, I see it clearly. Life and art aren’t just about neat, straight lines. Sometimes the best moments - the ones that surprise us, shift our perspective, or teach us something new - come from letting go of control and trying something different. From making the scribble. From noticing what happens along the way.

That’s the lesson I carry into my work, into my art, and into life. And it all started with a simple, messy line on a third grade chalkboard.

Read the full story on the blog →

I tried pressing, steaming, adjusting, and smoothing, but nothing seemed to work. Each attempt made me more frustrated, each wrinkle more glaring. And then it hit me: this wasn’t really about ironing a suit at all. It was about noticing when perfectionism sneaks in - and how easy it is to get caught in a loop of frustration and self-criticism.

Instead of trying to wrestle the jacket into submission, I paused. I took a breath, looked at what I could actually control, and set a tiny, simple goal for myself. I focused on the parts that would be most visible and let the rest go for the moment. The result wasn’t flawless. There were still wrinkles, tiny ones, that only someone staring closely would notice. But it looked good enough. My son was happy - he looked great. And I felt calmer, lighter, and more in control than I had a few minutes before.

That small moment, standing there with a suit that wasn’t quite perfect, reminded me something about creativity and about life, how the pull of perfection can freeze us in place, and how noticing the spiral and taking even a small step can help us move forward.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or trapped by the pressure to make something flawless, this story might feel familiar. In the full post, I share a few simple ways I broke the spiral, and what it reminded me about starting, experimenting, and moving forward, even when things aren’t perfect.

Continue reading the full post on my website.

Spring doesn’t always arrive all at once. Sometimes it shows up in quieter ways: a shift in the light, a softer morning, the sense that something is beginning again. Here in Florida, the change can be especially subtle, but it’s there if you’re paying attention.

With that shift often comes a change in how we create. Not fully formed ideas or clear plans, but small sparks of curiosity, the urge to try something new, or the feeling of being pulled in a direction you don’t quite understand yet.

I’ve been thinking about this as I begin a new series, Creating with the Seasons, where I explore how creativity shifts throughout the year. This spring installment is all about beginnings - not finishing or perfecting, but noticing what draws your attention and allowing that to be enough.

It’s a season for trying things, following ideas, and letting them take shape in their own time. Even small moments can be the start of something meaningful.

In the full piece, I share a few gentle ways to work with this season, along with reflections to help you notice what’s beginning for you. You can read the full article at www.emilygeleske.com.

And if this way of noticing and creating resonates with you, I’ve also created a guide called Romanticize Your Life. It’s a gentle extension of these ideas — an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and bring more beauty and creativity into your everyday life.

Over the holidays I got sick. In January I was in a car accident that totaled my car and left me with a neck injury. An MRI revealed multiple herniated discs, and suddenly my weeks were full of therapy appointments, doctor visits, insurance calls, and all those miscellaneous administrative tasks that need to be dealt with while life goes on

Then came the car situation. I had a rental for a few weeks before we were finally able to go car shopping and find a replacement. The buying process was relatively quick and for a brief moment, it felt like one piece of the chaos had been resolved. But not long after bringing the new car home, it had to go back to the dealership. A ‘funny noise’ turned into a complete engine replacement, weeks in the shop, and another loaner car. The day after we finally got it back, it had to get towed back to the dealership again for a full inspection and repair (luckily, it was just a hose that hadn’t been reconnected properly).

During that time, I also had an unexpected visit to the ER with inconclusive test results. At work, shifting leadership dynamics added another layer of stress. One thing seemed to arrive before the previous thing had fully settled.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, my creativity quietly went offline. I hadn’t made anything for months - since before Christmas. At first I didn’t think much of it, but after a while, I started to miss the part of my life where I regularly sat down and made something. The absence was noticeable, but I was too drained to do anything about it. Between appointments, work, and the mental load of navigating all the unexpected things life had thrown our way, I simply didn’t have the energy to sit down and create.

My mom and I had signed up months earlier to attend a workshop called Experiments on Paper with artist Jeanne Oliver in Franklin, Tennessee. As the dates drew closer, I found myself feeling both excited and nervous - excited to step away and spend time making art, but nervous that I was too out of practice.

We arrived in Franklin eager to see Jeanne, meet the other students, and dive into some much-needed creative time.

The studio itself was beautiful - an airy loft with lovely old wooden floors, exposed brick, and lots of natural light pouring through the windows. The tables were covered in paper, paint, vintage papers, and all kinds of materials waiting for us to explore.

Experimentation is where I thrive. I’m much more comfortable exploring and playing than sitting down to execute something highly technical or refined, which is exactly why this workshop appealed to me in the first place.

Still, when the workshop began, I realized almost immediately that I was rusty. My brain knew what it wanted to do, but my body didn’t quite cooperate. My hands and arms felt stiff. My movements were cautious. The marks I was making felt overly careful and cautious when what I really love about creating is looseness and expression.

There were moments during the workshop that had me convinced I’d never be able to create something worthy again, but there were also little sparks of hope that maybe I hadn’t lost my creative instincts after all.

One of the most memorable came during a lesson on making TetraPak prints. At first, the process sounded a little overwhelming, with lots of steps, tools, and techniques that felt like a lot for my brain to retain in the moment. I almost skipped it, but I’m so very glad I didn’t.

Once I started working through the process, it turned out to be really fun. I liked the result I created, and more importantly, it felt like something I could incorporate into my own process back home. I remember holding a piece of TetraPak in my hands, feeling the contrast between smooth cardboard and the texture of the design I was carving into it. For a few minutes, all the stress of the past months melted away. I wasn’t thinking about any of it; I was simply making marks, noticing details, and enjoying the process.

The real shift, though, happened after I returned home. Over this last weekend, I had some free time and finally felt pulled to get my supplies out and start experimenting again. The looseness I love about creating began to return. My hand moved more freely. My marks felt more confident. The part of me that loves exploring and playing with materials started to wake up again.

Piece by piece, something inside me loosened.

Ideas started showing up again; not because I forced them, but because I gave myself permission to play.

And in that moment in my kitchen, I realized that what I had been missing all these months wasn’t talent or inspiration. It was space. It was time away from the constant hum of responsibility and problem-solving. It was the simple act of sitting at a table with paper, paint, and a willingness to experiment.

Workshops are wonderful because they create a container for creativity. You step away from your routines and immerse yourself in making. But real life doesn’t always offer that kind of dedicated time. So the question became: how do you carry that feeling back into everyday life?

You can’t do it in a big, dramatic way. It comes in small, consistent moments.

It reminded me of something I’ve been talking and writing about for years: the idea of the 15 Minute Creative. Creativity doesn’t require hours of uninterrupted time or perfect conditions. Sometimes all it needs is a small invitation. Fifteen minutes with paper and paint, experimenting with marks, and trying something imperfect just for the joy of it. Ironically, after months of not creating at all, I was reminded again how powerful that simple idea can be.

Creativity rarely returns through pressure or expectations. More often, it returns through curiosity. So sit down, get out your supplies, and try something just for fifteen minutes. Sometimes that’s all it takes to remember the spark was never really gone. It was simply waiting for fifteen quiet minutes.