I talk a lot about the importance of the human imagination. But honestly, why does it really matter?

Why should you bother understanding and developing your own imagination? Sure, it would probably increase your creative ability but for most people, that sounds very nice, but doesn’t feel all that critical.

Especially considering the dumpster fire of political and environmental emergencies we are all facing at this juncture in human existence. Emergencies that are global and structural in nature, and the solutions for which feel out of reach for the average person.

But that dumpster fire is exactly why developing our imaginations matters so much.

Love is the Soil

The human imagination is nothing less than the interior doorway to the divine spark that lives inside each of us.

It is also one of our primary tools for expanding our capacity to love—to see beyond our own experience, to feel into other lives, to envision what we cannot yet see.

This matters because even when we figure out how to recapture our democracy, or manage to develop alternative economies or new governance structures that are inclusive and more balanced, or even if a handful of people create regenerative agricultural technologies that help the rest of us survive the 6th extinction, we’re going to limp along as a species until we learn to truly love at scale.

Because love is the soil that all the social change we hope to make must grow in.

The good news is that each of us has been equipped with an imagination that can serve as a portal into that capacity to love at scale. Which means that each of us can contribute to the success of any real global structural change just by committing to the project of love.

And you don’t need money, resources, or any kind of privilege to do it.

You just need willingness.

We can, each of us, use our imaginations to help shape what comes next—by developing our capacities to love more deeply, more widely, more fully.

How it Can Work

One of the most powerful ways our imaginations expand our capacity to love is through connection—imagining as another.

Another word for this use of the imagination is, of course, empathy. We put ourselves in another’s shoes and we imagine ourselves as them. We see someone fall, for instance, and we literally wince.

This is a simple but powerful example of love and imagination working in tandem—something most of us have done since we were very small children.

But empathy is just the beginning of imagining connection. The empathy we feel for another is imagination’s ground zero invitation to explore how the giant capacity of connection works, the first turn of the doorknob on the portal to our oneness.

All we have to do is start with ourselves and move out in any direction.

We can, for instance, imagine our own hearts as radiant, generous, and accepting. And we can imagine this radiance as an offering to the world right around us.

We can then use our imaginations to consciously expand that sense of connection—our empathy—to our family, friends, and local community. And from there, to whole hosts of people we might never know.

We can then expand that empathy we feel for humans to our fellow animals. We can then extend beyond other animals to insects and plants. To rocks and soil. Fungus and microbes.

To the elements like water, fire, and air.

To stars.

We can use our imaginations to expand our empathy across time to our yet-to-be born human descendants and our long-gone ancestors. We can expand our imaginations to consider all futures and all ancestries—including the ancestral past of the desks in our offices, or the trees in our neighborhoods, or the rocks we unearth when we dig the soil.

We can do this anywhere. For however long. Whenever we think of it.

The more we use our imaginations like this, the more deeply we re-connect ourselves to nature and the web of life. The more we connect ourselves to the web of life, the more we remember who we are, where we come from, and how vast our “immediate family” actually is.

And that in turn, changes the baseline for how we’ll start to imagine everything else—our perception of what safety looks like. Or freedom. Or equality. Any and all of it.

This is what the human imagination is capable of.

This is what your human imagination is capable of. And mine.

Each of us was born with a powerful imagination that connects us to the world around us so easily and naturally, that many of us think we don’t even have one. Our imaginations are like a hidden talent or gift we don’t recognize, so it lies mostly dormant inside us, atrophying.

But what if we each decided to acknowledge that gift and treat it like a precious musical instrument we used to know how to play—maybe way back before we were born—and start tuning it?

Believing that every time we choose to use our imaginations to expand our capacity to connect and love ourselves and others, we are part of helping all of humanity heal itself—even a little bit.

Because when humanity learns to, in the words of de Chardin, “harness the energies of love and discover fire for a second time,” we’ll stop wounding everything else around us.

And it’s as simple as starting with the idea of imagining as. Imagining into. Imagining with.

That’s why I’m always inviting you to take the power of your imagination seriously.

To marvel at your own potential to be a part of something big.

Civilizationally big.

To step into your unique, imaginal power and say, “I’m in.”

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Every spring, my art practice takes a back seat to my work in the garden.

My dye kitchen converts into seed-starting kitchen. My fingernails are an abomination (okay, that stays the same), and my hands throb at night from so much digging.

But in the last two seasons, there has been more of a through line between my gardens and my art practice than in the past because I’ve started to grow my own dye plants.

I love both the alchemical and devotional aspects of literally growing (some) of my art supplies because it creates an unbroken line between the earth and my fiber artwork. It connects different parts of myself and gives me a seductive taste of the wholeness of life that is always available but often invisible.

This is something I imagine that humans who lived before the convenience and fragmentation of modern industrialized society must have experienced more naturally—just from necessity. Because even though there was division of labor, average people still had to make so much of what they used in daily life.

It reminds me of a passage from the book Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. Two of Galileo’s daughters were cloistered nuns (because they were born to his mistress and therefore “unmarriable”). One of them was also his intellectual peer. Galileo and this very smart daughter constantly wrote letters to each other about his work and the big ideas he wrestled with. My favorite parts of these letters, however, were the little nuggets about everyday life in the seventeenth century.

For instance, in one of them, she’s basically like, “Um, could you give me back that basket that held all that stuff I sent you last week because if you don’t, I’ll have to weave myself a new one.”

I was so struck by that reality. If you want a way to carry things, well, you’ll have to weave yourself a basket.

For most of human history, materials were few and precious. People knew how things were made because they often had to make them themselves—whether they liked it or not. Creatively using your hands was literally necessary for survival.

But now, we are living in an unprecedented time of automation where innate individual creativity isn’t a necessity for survival. As a result, the creativity we’re born with has atrophied for most people and they conclude that they’re simply not creative.

This, in turn, has impacted our entire social perception of creativity as either a kind of luxury—something pleasant to experience for self-expression if you have the downtime or resources—or as something used by a tiny minority of people—scientists, inventors, designers—that is then experienced only as a finished result by the rest of us to passively consume.

Of course, there are many advantages and blessings to living in modern society where we have easy access to so much human innovation—it’s just usually other people’s. And while all that might be convenient and often truly amazing, we’ve paid a heavy price for it.

I also don’t idealize the past, but I do deeply appreciate all my opportunities to experience the feeling of integration that comes from creating something from start (planting a seed) to finish (dyeing a piece of cloth.) It makes me crave more of that type of experience and reveals a hunger inside myself for the wholeness offered up by nature that the pleasures and conveniences of modern life don’t seem to provide—at least on the surface.

Because I do think we can lessen the fragmentation of our modern lives by finding ways to use the many miracles of modern living to serve that hunger for wholeness—if we bring that intention to it. My grow lights, warming mats, and electricity, for instance, are as much part of this unbroken line as the seeds are.

I think this is work worth doing. Whenever I experience those moments of connection and wholeness, it’s like a feeling of relief I didn’t know I needed. And each of us can create that kind of integration for ourselves in our own particular ways.

In the meantime, here are a few photos of my garden beds and dye plant “works in progress.” I’m thinking of these as my “before” pictures; hopefully in August and September, I’ll have some wonderful “after” shots of my full-grown plants to show you.

AND, after digging up all those rocks, we decided to adopt a bonded pair of kitties last week. How cute are these two?

So cute.

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What interests me most in art-making is the magical moment of transformation—when the materials you are using and the ideas or emotions you’re carrying finally meld together to become a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

And that only ever comes through in the doing.

Even when I start with a pretty clear idea of what I want to make—the truth of what I’m trying to say will always emerge as something different from what I planned.

And excavating that truth only happens when your idea (or emotion) has a chance to interact with your materials.

Only then will what you’re trying to express finally reveal itself to you. And sometimes, that takes a long time because transformation is a mysterious alchemical process that can’t be explained; it can only be experienced.

Lying in bed half asleep last night, I drowsily imagined a cooking metaphor for this phenomenon. My idea is the eggs sitting in the carton. My first attempts at expressing that idea are those eggs, raw and beaten, in a bowl. The resolved work of art at the end is the finished omelet.

You never want to serve raw eggs to your guests, you always want to give them an omelet. Finished on the inside, but not overdone. Cooked to just that moment when the egg shifts from runny rawness to perfectly cooked—transformed from inedible to perfect.

This metamorphosis can be both subtle and elusive. It takes attention and a surrender to process to achieve it, and when it works, it provides its own unique satisfaction.

Which is why I thought it would be a good experiment for us to practice together in the next Creative Change Makers call, using the civic grief we’ve all been carrying as our touchstone.

Because having a starting point that is both deeply personal and culturally significant helps us feel our way into such a process. And using an already existing form, like the cootie catcher, gives our feelings somewhere to land—a “container” to hold our “content.”

Transforming Feelings into Art

We’ll start the workshop with a free-writing exercise to explore the civic grief that we’re all carrying right now—whatever that looks like for you. Raw eggs in the bowl. Not for sharing, just for knowing.

Then we’ll pull the best bits from that writing and work them into the form of a cootie catcher—finding which feelings want to live on the outside flaps, which belong in the folds, and which might be exactly the right thing for someone to unfold and read at the end.

It’s an experiment in marrying content and form. In finding out what your feelings actually want to become.

In a way, this is what I do every week with this newsletter. I always start with a sense of what I want to talk about, but most of the time, I only find out what I really mean, feel, or think, by writing about it.

By pouring the raw eggs into the pan and trying to make an omelet.

I think of it as a searching process. I send a call out into the ether, and listen for what answers back. Then I do it again.

I write something sort of right, so I can move forward in my search, and then circle back to see if I can make it truer. Always asking, “Is this what I mean? Is this what I mean?”

And almost always I unconsciously write the same thing three or four different ways until I finally find the words that say what I mean. And then I delete the rest.

When it works out, there’s a big return: Clarity. Release. Resolution. Each time is different. And each time feels like a gift from the doing.

And that’s what I want us to do together on the Wednesday Zoom call. To seek transformation. To take the heaviness of our time and turn it into something new.

Think of joining this call as a willingness to experiment. Because this workshop is not about finishing. It’s about exploring and immersion. It’s about paying attention to yourself, your feelings, and your creativity. It’s about the magical process of doing.

Whether you think your particular catcher “works” in the end, or even gets finished, is actually beside the point. The point is to try to make something true and honor your experience through the creative process. To see what shifts. What changes. What pops up unexpectedly. What, perhaps, even heals.

Let’s make something together and see what happens.

If you’re a paying or founding subscriber, the workshop is free. There’s a link in the header at the top of this email!

If you’re a free subscriber and want to join us, you can sign up for a year or for a single month—whatever works best for you. Here’s the link to consider your options.

And if you want to come but can’t afford either right now, for whatever reason, just let me know, and I’ll send you the link.

I hope to see you Wednesday June 3 at 9am Pacific, 10am Mountain, 11am Central or Noon Eastern.

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P.S. After watching my video last week, a reader (Hi Mike!) sent me a link to a poem that felt like a great example of exactly this kind of transformation from raw emotion to art. Fair warning: it lives on an art auction page, but scroll down for the poem. Worth it.

I decided to make a short video about it because it’s an important part of why we make art, and yet, I don’t think it gets talked about very much.

I’ve also decided to use the next Creative Change-Makers meeting to explore this transformation process, using the structure of the cootie catcher toys that many of us made together back in April.

The meeting is on June 3rd at 9am Pacific, 10am Mountain, 11am Central and Noon Eastern.

I’d love it if you could join us.

It’s free for paid or founding subscribers—if that’s you, there’s a registration link at the top of your email or you can DM me for the link.

If you are a free subscriber and would like to join us, you can click here to review your subscription options and decide if you’d like to upgrade.

Also, you don't need to have attended the April meeting to participate—the catchers are easy to make and I'll bring everyone up to speed quickly.

And finally, if the video resonates, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment and share your thoughts about grief, transforming feelings into art, the 250th anniversary of our country, or anything else that came up for you when you watched the video.

As always, thanks for watching or reading—it means the world to me that you are here.

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Two eggs.

One round, swivel-headed mother owl sitting, rearranging herself, and sitting again.

My hands reach out to touch the screen. I trace invisible hearts all over her owl self with my finger. I’m in love with her perfection.

I check the webcam almost daily. Time passes.

Suddenly, two eggs have become two damp balls of fluff. I gasp. When did that happen? I don’t even see any remnants of shells.

Every day, Mama sorts and arranges the damp balls of fluff beneath her.

Every day, she stares up at the opening of the owl box and then back down at the tiniest version of owls I’ve ever seen.

It looks like waiting but is probably just being.

I start to wonder how she’s feeding them. And then, at some lucky point, I get a glimpse of two talons throwing in a dead mouse.

The days pass and this routine continues— Sitting. Re-arranging. Feeding.

Until it doesn’t.

I open the webcam tab and she’s gone.

Two tiny damp balls of fluff cling to each other in the center of the box. My heart is in my throat. I stare to see if they are breathing.

They are.

I return a couple of hours later. They’re still alone. Still breathing.

Where is she? I feel like I can’t go to bed until she comes home.

I brush my teeth and check again.

Okay, she’s back. With a mouse.

I watch as she feeds her chicks. They eat voraciously, they pass out. She rearranges herself.

It’s the new rhythm.

She leaves.

She hunts.

She returns.

Dead baby rabbits line the corners of the owl box.

Damp balls of fluff slowly become two small birds.

My hands reach out to touch the screen.

I am in love with their perfection.

Weeks pass.

I come and go.

Mama comes and goes.

The two owlets cling to each other.

The bigger one always seems slightly on top of the smaller one—like it’s wrapping itself protectively around the other one’s shoulders.

Sometimes I worry the bigger one isn’t sharing the food deliveries. I check the body of the smaller one whose head is often down and slightly underneath the stronger one—yup, still breathing.

More days pass. Or is it weeks? They are becoming teenagers now, but always, when she is gone, they are touching.

One unit.

She is gone for what feels like most of the time now. I haven’t seen her for days.

And then, checking my email, I happen to hear a new rustling across the tabs in my browser. I click over just in time to see mama has come back with dinner. The box is starting to look small as they crowd together.

I click back a few minutes later. They’re alone again.

They now have more true feathers and look more like adult owls—that astonishing round-headedness and those heart-shaped faces.

I say to my husband, “They are always, always touching. They are never not-touching.”

The day after I say that, they are no longer touching.

Something has changed. Why aren’t they touching? It feels so abrupt. I’m not ready.

A few hours later, I click back. The smaller one is now alone—trying to wrap herself around herself.

No mama. No sibling. I suck in my breath.

Now what?

The owl box looks cavernous as she sits alone in the center.

I check back at midnight when I can’t sleep. Still alone in the darkness.

The next morning, alone.

Hours go by. She doesn’t seem to move.

I wonder if she’s waiting or just being.

I come back in the early evening and I see . . . no one.

No wait, there’s a tiny talon digging into the wooden sill of the box opening in the top left corner of the webcam window.

“It’s your turn,” I whisper. Oh God.

I choke up as I watch that tiny talon open and close and open and close as you hop and rearrange yourself in what feels like preparation to take that final big leap.

What will you do?

How does this work?

I write for a few hours and keep an eye on the tip of your talon. I see a breeze moving the feathers above your claws. You lean back and I see your wings opening out and closing again like you’re thinking about it.

The lingering on the sill goes on for hours.

And then suddenly, you hop back inside and start rummaging around.

You look older than this morning. More self-possessed somehow.

As the evening fades and it suddenly becomes dark, you’re back on the sill—I can only just glimpse the very tip of your talon.

Are you getting up the gumption this time? Or just being?

Is there an instinctual internal clock that tells you when?

Or does nature use hunger to help you make the leap?

Is this the moment you just lean into the air and let go?

Nope. You’re back inside again.

You poke around in the nesting for bits of food. You scratch an itch, settle down, and close your eyes.

I watch you breathe.

You are perfect. I trace invisible hearts all over your tender face.

I keep reminding myself that whatever happens next—good or tragic—has happened a thousand million times—to owls, to humans, to every living thing.

I know that.

But my heart.

My heart.

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I think “Blind Patriotism” is really good, and since I love talking about art that excites me, I made a whole video about all the reasons why I think this sculpture is so successful.

If you’ve never heard of Banksy, that’s okay; I give a brief bio of him at the beginning of the video. I’ll be curious to know what you think of him.

Or, if you are very familiar with Banksy and are well-versed in art history and contemporary art, I’d ALSO like to get your thoughts because I’m sure you and I will have a lot to talk about.

If you’re not a video-watcher, there’s a transcript you can read if you’re interested.

Also, I’d LOVE it if you would leave a comment or hit the heart if you enjoyed the video.

Thanks for watching or reading. It means the world to me that you are here.

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Back in the late 80s, I was a guest at what should have been my own college graduation, but I had taken a semester off the year before to move to California, thinking I was going to transfer to UC Berkeley.

Once I discovered Berkeley wasn’t all that different from UMass, I decided to just go back East to finish what I’d started. Which is why I wasn’t graduating when I “should” have been, but accompanying the parents of a good friend to watch the ceremony.

As a member of the Radical Student Union, I thought I should make good use of my time at this very large event, so I was helping other student activists by handing out stickers promoting the rights of gay people to be foster parents as well as to be legally able to adopt—something that became a case in the Massachusetts Supreme Court a few years later.1

Back then, the gay rights symbol was a pink triangle and this particular sticker was basically a big pink triangle with a slogan on it. I knew that most people at that event probably didn’t know what that symbol represented, and I also knew that the idea of gay rights was still a new one in that liberal but very Catholic state, so I decided to be light on the particulars and strong on cheerfulness.

I faced myself outward toward the hordes wandering into the stadium, stickers in tow. As people walked in, I’d ask, “Would you like a sticker?” and then, smiling hugely, I’d announce, “It’s FREE!” as I peeled off a sticker to put on their lapel.

I got A LOT of people to wear those stickers that day, and I loved it. You might be thinking that perhaps my methods were a little fishy, and maybe they were. But in my mind, I was pitching for the complete personhood of everyone under the law, and it felt like a righteous cause.

And my friend’s parents, whose eldest son was gay, were sort of giggly as they watched me do this—because they, like me, knew that most people weren’t so clear about what that sticker meant. And at that time, there was still a lot of stigma in many parts of the country about being gay, and I think it felt good for them to see people who weren’t gay be publicly willing to promote gay rights—and that made me happy as well.

The Personal Touch

I remembered that event last Thursday evening when I was finishing up folding a bunch of Resistance Cootie Catchers for the national Fall of Freedom May Day event.

Several of us from the Creative Change Makers group had decided to participate in this event as a decentralized group, putting resistance cootie catchers out in our local communities. Our plan was to offer them in some public space with a little sign inviting people to take one, play with one, or share one.

That was still my plan, but as I was folding on Thursday night, that bolder twenty-one year old kept popping up in my mind. I thought, why not also try handing them out directly?

So Friday morning I filled a reusable grocery bag with my catchers, lifted my chin, and headed out the door.

Offering anything directly to a stranger feels riskier than surreptitiously plopping a bowl somewhere, and I was nervous. So I decided to start with a sympathetic audience, and brought them to the tail end of a small May Day protest that I knew was happening in the center of town.

These activists were all receptive and happy to take a free catcher, and that felt good. Several also mentioned they’d be willing to put theirs out in public somewhere, so I felt like I was increasing my army a little—which also increased my confidence.

I then drove to a big local coffee shop, nervously walked up to the first table of women I saw, smiled and said cheerfully, “Happy May Day! Would you like a Cootie Catcher? It’s FREE.” I handed one to the woman nearest to me and she took it.

“Oh wow, I used to make those!” she said as she realized what it was.

Looking at her face, I could see her filled with nostalgia. “Right?!” I said. “It’s just like when we were kids, but I’ve turned mine into a zine.” Relieved, I smiled again and walked away.

Then I approached a very serious young woman working on her laptop. “Happy May Day!” I said. She looked up, confused. “Would you like a cootie catcher? It’s FREE.” I handed her a catcher and . . . her face actually lit up. She too, remembered making these catchers. I was starting to feel emboldened.

Once my bag of single catchers was empty, I went to my favorite coffee shop to ask the baristas if they’d be willing to put my bowl of free catchers out for their customers, but. . .they were closed for May Day—yay! Just another reason they’re my favorite coffee shop.

So instead, I took my grocery bag holding my full bowl of catchers to the town library. I sat in a chair next to a small table and carefully lifted out the bowl, placed it on a table, and rearranged the catchers just so. I looked around to see if anyone was watching me, but of course they weren't. I snapped a picture and headed out the door.

Later, I decided to swing by the library right before they closed to check to see if anyone had taken a catcher and to perhaps retrieve any that still lingered. But when I arrived, both the bowl and the catchers were gone. I don’t know if people actually took them one by one or if the librarians confiscated the bowl and the catchers altogether.

Form and Content

Afterward, as I thought back on the day, I was very glad I had decided to approach several people directly, because it taught me something important.

As an artist, I am obsessed with the relationship between form and content. And it was fascinating to me to see how the cootie catcher form—a paper toy that so many people had personally made as a child—created a greater reception for my content. People were willing to look. Willing to read. Willing to take something from the hand of a stranger.

While I had already understood that intellectually, now I knew it in my body.

I’m also still glad that I put out a full bowl of catchers in a public space without saying anything, I just wish I had lingered for a while afterward to see what might happen.

It always takes a little courage to stick your neck out in public. But every time you do it, it changes you. And every time you take action, it leads you to more action.

For instance, the reason I could see the possibilities in the cootie catcher form is because I had been spending months teaching people how to make different kinds of tiny signs. So when I saw how my now-friend Amelia Williams was making cootie catchers filled with her poetry—it clicked. I knew that particular form could be our next tiny sign format. Our next zine format.

My action led to more action. My creativity led to more creativity. This is how it works.

What’s Next

I like the idea of continuing to explore the cootie catcher form with different types of political content and connection.

So for the June Creative Change-Maker’s call, I’ll be offering a workshop on creating a personal reflection within a cootie catcher toy. Less factual zine and more personal letter.

We’ll explore how we might use this nostalgia-filled form to get as personal as possible—even if that means we still keep it anonymous to feel comfortable enough to do this.

I think our theme for that call will be something like “Love Letters to a Nation,” or “What I wish for my country” or . . . something along those lines.

We’ll do a few writing exercises to dig down into what matters most to us, and how we can communicate that to a stranger through anonymous but heartfelt cootie catchers. And I’ll teach you how to design the catchers so that your letter makes sense in the toy format.

My hope is for us to be able to put these out in our communities over July 4th weekend as a deeply personal counter narrative to the boatload of “Up is Down” “Corruption is Honesty” “Fascism is Democracy” that will be pervading the airwaves.

It’s happening on Wednesday June 3 at 9am Pacific,10am Mountain, 11am Central, and noon Eastern.

Come make something with us.

In the meantime, here’s a few photos from some of the Creative Change Maker participants who also put resistance cootie catchers out in their communities on May Day.

And if you want to download either cootie catcher template, click here. (Just scroll halfway down the page…)

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What does it take to let yourself imagine something that the dominant culture insists is impossible?

This is what I asked myself after seeing the documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy at the Taos Film Festival—a film I almost didn't go to because I was afraid of having my heart ripped out. I even gave myself permission to leave early if it got unbearable.

Going in, I thought it was a movie about the environmental costs of war, but really, it was about the massive impact of the whole military industrial complex on climate change. And for someone who considers herself informed, it was a shocking reality check about how little I actually knew.

For instance, I didn’t know that the US military has a carbon footprint larger than any other institution on earth.

If the US military were a country, it would rank 47th in greenhouse gas emissions from fuel usage alone—out-polluting each of the roughly 150 countries ranked below it.1 And that statistic doesn’t even include the fuel used to power aircraft and ships operating overseas—which represents the largest share of military emissions.2

I also didn’t know that the Department of Defense manages 568,000 facilities covering 27 million acres across 4,790 military sites worldwide. The human and environmental costs at many of these installations are staggering.

For instance, the island of Okinawa—which is basically the size of Rhode Island—has 32 American airbases. Thirty-two! And aside from literally razing local forests to use the soil to fill in delicate coral reef areas around the island to support those bases, the activities of our military have also severely contaminated the drinking water of at least 450,000 Japanese people who live there. And not just their drinking water—also the drinking water of the US service members and private contractors who reside at the bases themselves.3

In fact, US service members all over the world are exposed to contaminated drinking water from military activity—including on bases inside the United States.

I learned from the documentary that from 1953 to 1987, Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune bathed in and drank tap water contaminated with harmful chemicals at concentrations from 240 to 3,400 times current safe levels.4 This was known for years before military families were informed. There’s even a local cemetery nicknamed “Baby Heaven” because of the number of stillborn infants who are buried there from military families.

And what’s happening in the oceans is just as heartbreaking.

In 2003, Congress amended the Marine Mammal Protection Act to give the military legal permission to harm and kill protected ocean mammals in the course of testing and training with sonar. According to the Navy's own environmental impact statements, sonar training disrupts the natural behavior of up to 2.8 million marine mammals every year — affecting their ability to migrate, breed, nurse their young, and feed.5 (And I’m leaving out the gory details of what that looks like.)

And even when the US first publicly pledged to lower our heavy climate footprint, our government made sure to have the emissions from our military activity exempted from US climate numbers, starting with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. And when that rule “changed” in 2015, all it meant was that reporting military emissions became “voluntary’—so of course it doesn’t happen.6

Even though we have environmental laws and policies in place, the government quietly makes exceptions for almost all military activity, ensuring the true damage goes unreported and remains, therefore, invisible to the public imagination.

And the public can’t imagine how to change what it doesn’t know is happening.

But honestly, even when we do learn that constantly preparing for war at scale is jaw-droppingly polluting, that information pushes against a long and powerful narrative that our outsized military spending (more than the next nine nations combined) is what makes us safe. A source of pride at best and a necessary evil at worst.

But how can something so utterly unsustainable be “necessary?”

Perhaps we simply can’t grasp the breadth of these damaging activities, or can’t picture the destruction these activities leave in their wake. For most of us, it’s much easier to imagine a vague feeling of danger and then the subsequent need to feel safe.

But there are many ways to be safe. We don’t have to stick to the story that is most familiar. We can use our imaginations to create new versions of safety.

For instance, I’ll never forget when Marianne Williamson suggested in the 2020 presidential race that we needed to create a Department of Peace, and how ridiculous or hilarious so many pundits found that. The message was, “What a marginal, new age, spiritual kook she must be to even say that.”

But to me, she was modelling to millions of viewers how to use your imagination to envision a different kind of future.

She wasn’t even suggesting we eliminate the Pentagon. She was simply suggesting we re-frame what “defense” could look like: to create a cabinet-level counterweight to the Pentagon focused on preventing conflict rather than preparing for it.

In a way, she asking us to consider this question: If the single largest institutional polluter on Earth is a Department of War, what would it mean to have a Department of Peace with equivalent resources and political weight?

My Gaia, I find that exciting.

Because if we allow ourselves to imagine a fully funded Department of Peace, say, or when we use our individual imaginations to create or consider new definitions of patriotism, inclusion, and national security, we’re not just changing ourselves. We’re affecting and changing the collective imagination at the same time.

And when we do that, we’re helping to make space for something new to emerge from that collective imagination. Even as the dominant culture scoffs that such thoughts are not logical. Impossible. Unrealistic. Dangerously naive. Childish.

We can love our country and want to transform the military industrial complex. We can love and respect every soldier, veteran, and civilian defense contractor and still want the Pentagon to be smaller. It’s not about choosing sides. The military industrial complex is so interwoven into all aspects of our culture, that we are all a part of it, whether we want to be or not.

And while each of us may feel powerless against the momentum and inertia of the massive and overwhelmingly entrenched structures of our current system, none of us actually knows the impact of our individual actions, however small they may seem to us. And honestly, it is not for us to assess the impact of our actions. It’s just for us to do.

Learning to take action without being able to see immediate tangible results might be hard or unfamiliar, but it’s an important step in our maturation as citizens. And it all starts with a willingness to exercise our imaginations.

Because every change we make in ourselves and our culture begins there. What do we value? Who are we? How can we hold that picture in our imaginations? How can we allow ourselves to consider something new that we previously considered impossible?

And while living in “interesting times” may be stressful and scary, it’s also an extraordinary opportunity to create something new. To evolve as a people. This is what I return to when all feels lost.

Because if we keep insisting we have no choice but to only be a hammer, then everything and everyone will always only look like a nail—including the earth itself.

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Somewhere between the dormancy of winter and spring's outward push, there's a conversation worth having about the relationship between seasonal change and the pulse of our creativity.

This came up recently in my interview with Blaze Schwaller on her podcast called “Anchored and Alive.” Blaze often talks about the rhythmic and seasonal aspects of our energy and output, and we spent some time exploring how our creative energy has a seasonal rhythm as well.

Perceiving our creative activity in a cyclic, seasonal way is helpful because it reminds us that our creativity is a natural expression of being alive—something that’s always a part of us—but also something that waxes and wanes depending upon the seasonal context we’re living in.

By allowing ourselves to more consciously experience our creativity as seasonal and cyclic, we anchor our creative core into nature’s larger rhythms. This helps us step out of the pressure of a capitalist paradigm that frames creative output as do-do-do, produce-produce-produce, prove-prove-prove.

We’re mammals not factories. We have heartbeats and blood flow—circadian rhythms that deeply connect our physical bodies to the rhythm and beat of the earth rotating around the sun.

Recognizing our creativity as intrinsically woven into the cyclic cadences of the four seasons also helps us acknowledge the unique ways our individual creativity shows up within us depending upon the time of year—or even the time of day.

For instance, it’s not that creativity is necessarily dormant during the winter, but it might be more internal. Similarly, creativity might take different forms according to our circadian rhythms. While I’m an early riser, mornings are not when I’m most active. So I might catch up on some quiet research in the morning, or take an easy, early walk to gather my thoughts about an artistic project, but I usually get more “done” in the late afternoon or early evening because 4pm-8pm is my sweet spot!

Blaze and I also explored what to do when what we imagine or dream up for ourselves is larger than what our immediate creative capacity allows us to manifest.

For instance, I often have ideas for bodies of work that I literally can’t get to for a couple of years. I shared with Blaze a few of my favorite strategies for making personal symbols that keep these creative threads alive, even as I may be currently neck-deep in projects that are very different or all-consuming. This approach is also helpful when you’re up to your eyeballs with work or completely immersed in other important aspects of life that have their own arcs and seasons—like raising kids or taking care of elderly parents.

Some other ideas that came up in our conversation that I’m still thinking about:

• Navigating the tension between making something “good” and making something “true”

• What’s actually hard about making something ‘bad’

• Acknowledging our own invisible creative work that nobody sees—including us

• How our fears and our imaginations are already in a long-term, committed relationship

• Why your sovereignty needs your imagination . . . and vice versa

• How rest isn’t the opposite of creative work, but rather a crucial part of its rhythm.

Conversation is how I figure things out, and talking out loud with Blaze about the connections and disparities among clock time, nature’s time, and our particular personal creative rhythms has been percolating in my mind ever since our interview.

Perhaps you could have a listen while you’re driving or cooking dinner or cleaning the house—or whatever way you prefer to listen to a podcast.

Here’s the podcast link:

https://anchoredandalive.com/podcasts/75-Anchored-Alive-with-Blaze/episodes/1683-How-to-Use-Your-Imagination-Without

In the meantime, how do you experience your own creative rhythms? Do you allow yourself to wax and wane? Do you let yourself creatively rest at certain times of year—or day?

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I think a lot about surrender.

For years I have lain in bed at night and silently repeated to myself, “I surrender my personal will to divine will.”

I lie in the darkness and notice the ways I hold tension in my body and how that clenching feels like the opposite of surrender. A clutching at control. A bracing that started . . . Gaia knows when.

And in the midst of personal hardship or during the illnesses of loved ones, I’ve busily checked the handle of every door of surrender that I could think of—surrendering myself to love, to what is, to the earth, to fear, to confusion, to grasping, to hope, to struggle, to faith, and even to surrender itself.

“I surrender to surrender.” I’ve said that a lot.

In the last few years I’ve also often pondered the difference between the surrender of my will and the alignment of my will—silently trying out new versions of my mantra, on repeat in the darkness: “I align my personal will with divine will. I align my personal will with divine will.”

I’ve often wondered, while repeating these nightly mantras, about the difference between saying things and doing things. Am I actually surrendering? Am I really aligning? Am I just finding ways of reminding myself of life’s precious precariousness? Perhaps that’s its own good thing?

About eight weeks ago, I surprised myself one night by suddenly saying, “I surrender myself to the sacredness of all things.” And then I surprised myself by almost panicking after saying that.

I wondered about—and felt a bit dismayed by—this instant, visceral reaction of panic. It was like some part of myself had suddenly agreed to something that my mind had not really considered. It was like I’d signed a contract without reading the fine print.

And yet, this reluctance felt strange—I mean, for years I’ve been consciously working to expand my awareness of the sacredness of all things from being a nice idea to being an actual lived experience.

So this sentence that had arisen inside me didn’t appear to be a new thought, but somehow, it felt new. Like I’d finally stumbled upon the thing that all my “surrender mantra-ing” had been searching for and yet . . . gulp, it felt big. Scary big. Life-changing. I mean, what does it mean to genuinely surrender yourself to the sacredness of all things? Was I ready to do that? What would that entail?

And just as suddenly, “surrendering to the divine” felt waayyy more abstract and vague—somehow more “up” or “out.” While surrendering to the sacredness of all things felt very “in” or “inward.” Embedded. Physical. Specific.

Of course, surrendering to the sacredness of all things is really a surrendering to the divine that lives within everything. And not just in nature. In everything. Objects. Invisible viruses. AI. All persons—the good and the heinous. Again, it’s big.

I started exploring my options:

“I surrender myself to the sacred cycles of life.”

I liked that one. It felt easier, somehow, than “the sacredness of all things.” Perhaps because a “cycle” also feels more abstract?

So I said that for a while. It felt safer.

In March I started taking a class in my spiritual community and I brought all this up. My dark nights of the soul. My questions and confusion about surrender and alignment:

Is handing over my power to the divine a kind of outmoded worshipping that mostly serves to relieve me of responsibility and spiritual partnership? Is the notion of meeting the divine with my “free will” a confusion about my ego?

A few weeks into the class, I was listening to one of the teachers discuss the role of our will in embracing what might feel like a call to do a particular this or that. Because “having a calling”—however big or small—requires action. And we humans use our will and our willpower to make things happen all the time. We make. We do. We exercise our free will.

Sometimes this “making things happen” is a form of creativity. Sometimes it’s more of a “forcing.” It can look like attention and perseverance. It can look like stubbornness or even violence.

And then the teacher said something I found very interesting. She said,

“How do I hold something with all of my will and also with an openness that allows it to adapt and change? [. . .] that will [ . . .] I’m going to call it willingness.

Will-as-willingness. My will as willingness. A lightbulb moment.

It felt like the opposite of willpower. The opposite of force. The opposite of effort.

Suddenly my perception of the space between aligning my will and surrendering my will shrank considerably. Instead of perceiving my will as a way to make things happen, I can offer my will as a willingness to help things to happen. To allow.

Willingness as a receptivity. Willingness as spaciousness.

I am willing. I am willing.

I’ve been walking around for days saying this to myself in various ways—and then inevitably asking myself, “Is that true?”

For instance, “I am willing to really take care of myself.” And then—is that true? Am I willing to really take care of myself rather than sort of take care of myself?

But even that question raises my curiosity rather than my judgment. Instead of thoughts like “I should take care of myself more,” or even, “I want to take care of myself more,” “I am willing” says hello to “I am not willing” and immediately asks “Why not?”

And that “Why Not” creates a wiggle room that wasn’t there before.

Saying “I am willing” allows me space to try. To explore. “I am willing to take a first step beyond sort of taking care of myself to deeply taking care of myself.”

This wiggle room feels like generosity.

Does this all sound like a silly game of semantics? I wonder. But I’ve found, in the course of all my spiritual seeking, that even slightly different language can create shifts in my perception that feel genuinely profound. Subtle changes in language give me space to grow.

For instance, there’s a difference between saying “I honor the journey (of my life)” and “I trust the journey (of my life.)” For me, the word trust is an expression of greater faith.

But even if that shift—from saying honor to saying trust—opens up an awareness of how I’m actually moving through life with a huge lack of faith, it creates a more honest starting point and I’m no longer where I was. And it shows me where I want to go.

Where I’m willing to go.

So I continue with my “willingness” experiment:

I am willing to be more free. I am willing to forgive myself. I am willing to try things and fail. I am willing to wait and see. I am willing to not-know. I am willing to learn. And, of course, I am willing to surrender to the sacredness of all things.

I am willing to surrender to the sacredness of all things.

I am willing to find out what that really means.

I am willing to take baby steps to get there.

I am willing to trust that I can handle that commitment.

I am willing for it to take my whole life to find out what that really means.

I am willing to get as far as I can get.

I am willing to love myself as I do this.

I am willing.

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I’d love to read suggestions in the comments about anything you’ve seen or done lately that has had a big positive impact on you as well.

Cutting Through Rocks

This is a documentary about a woman in Iran named Sara Shahverdi who runs for town council in her remote rural village. I spent at least half the movie with my mouth literally hanging open in amazement because Sara is the most badass woman I’ve personally ever seen—while also being filled with love, generosity, and kindness. I was so wired when I got home from the movie theater that I paced around the house for an hour telling J. all about it.

Since then, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen to watch this movie. Sara Shahverdi is my new hero.

The trailer doesn’t do it justice but trailers never do:

Hamnet

I bawled my eyes out watching this movie. Gorgeous cinematography and wonderful acting. Really it’s a film about the cathartic capacity of the arts to refresh and redeem the human spirit. It also made me think about the Ann Patchett book Bel Canto—because that book did the same. I’m so glad I saw this in the movie theater on the big screen.

Have you seen it? What did you think?

Again, the trailer doesn’t really do it justice:

The Singing Resistance

I didn’t know about the Singing Resistance in Minneapolis until folks were singing one of their songs at our local No Kings rally. When I got home, I immediately looked them up.

They are such an inspiring example of how the arts and culture can empower, move, and connect human beings like nothing else—in this case, through group singing.

By joyfully singing directly to ICE agents with lyrics appealing to their highest good, the protestors effortlessly claim the moral high ground and reverse the power dynamic—all by anchoring themselves in love and the primal nature of group song. They are an amazing example of what a loving and beautiful resistance can look like.

The Singing Resistance is inspired by Otpor!, the Serbian civil resistance movement from the 1990s and early 2000s whose activity culminated in Milošević's overthrow in October 2000.

I watched these two videos below—one upbeat, one solemn—over and over for days, choking up every time.

Last night, I watched it before bed and kind of dreamed/thought about it all night long, the songs wafting through my dream consciousness.

Here’s a clip of the joyful “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind” from the Singing Resistance’s Instagram that I hope you can see:

This next one, “Put Down Your Weapons,” is beautiful in its solemnity. The guy narrating at the beginning is a bit of a distraction because I just wanted to listen to the hypnotic singing, but I couldn’t clip the video. Of course, if he hadn’t been there reporting on it, I wouldn’t have been able to see it at all.

So, if you just want to hear the singing, start the video at the 19 second mark.

That’s it for this week!

Have you seen either of these movies, or have you seen any clips of the singing Twin Cities protestors already? Do you find them as moving as I do?

I’d love to hear from you about what’s been touching your heart or inspiring you lately—books, poetry, movies, music, dance—so please leave a comment!

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Before there were copy machines or personal computers, there were human hands.

The underground in the Soviet Union knew that the most influential document was the handwritten one—small enough to slip into a pocket, pass between the fingers of two people, and disappear into someone’s private life before anyone in power thought or knew to look for it.

People in the Eastern Bloc called this underground system samizdat. Individuals would hand copy forbidden texts and pass them from person to person, having no idea where the copies went or who they reached.

The act of making one copy and passing it along was the whole thing. Nobody knew if it made a difference. Who it touched.

Samizdat took off after Stalin’s death, and by the 1970s, it was a fully developed parallel culture—of not just literature but political manifestos, religious texts, academic work, and even art criticism—handwritten or typed on onion skin paper and passed hand to hand.

Every time another person participated, the movement silently multiplied.

This is the power of the small individual act. It’s the opposite of insignificant—because it’s personal, specific, and concrete. Each actor took that leap of faith on their own, not knowing who else was helping, and not knowing if or how many people were affected by the forbidden work that they helped pass on.

Just the act of taking the time to re-write a forbidden piece of literature by hand or on a manual typewriter—and then taking the next risky step of passing it along to someone else—is a goose-bumps level of interpersonal resistance behavior.

There’s such power in the personal and the specific.

Those actions—creating something, releasing it, and trusting the network to move it along—required courage, faith, and a belief in both the community and the power of the individual.

I bow down.

Fast Forward to Today

In our digital age and current political climate, the creative, the interpersonal, and the specific also have an important role in our resistance or activism—even if we aren’t living under Soviet levels of repression.

When we place our creative “tiny signs,” “resistance valentines” or “resistance cootie catcher toys” in unexpected locations in our communities, we’re seeking to touch another individual person where they least expect it: pumping gas, or picking up a few groceries, or using the restroom at the movies.

And it’s that personal touch that gives it power. Our lopsided handwriting. Our awkwardly attached little pieces of tape. The visible stroke marks of a magic marker or colored pencil reveal the individual hand at work—and the person reading it can feel that.

It’s not slick. It’s not professional. It’s not permanent. And in our age of computerized-digital everything, that’s refreshing.

And unlike graffiti, our tiny signs or cootie catcher zines don’t deface anything. Or hurt the corporations that usually own those shared public spaces—be they the mall, a big box store, or the local movie theater.

It’s also a relief to do something physical in the real world—no matter how small and specific it is. Because too much doom-scrolling or over-informing ourselves online can delude us into thinking we’re “doing” more than we are. Countering all that computer time with small but specific acts of resistance in your actual real world community can serve as a powerful antidote that genuinely makes you feel better.

And finally, engaging in these personal acts of resistance also changes us—and that might be the most important reason to do them.

We live in a culture where we almost have to contradict our values at least some of the time just to function. My trip to the Walmart might be an unfortunate collusion, but in my rural area, it’s often unavoidable. So while I may be buying something from the man, I’m also quickly taping a small resistance bunny in the office supplies section and remembering what I stand for.

And that little resistance bunny sign may be cute enough to invite an apolitical customer who sees it to ask themselves, “Stop what bombing? Oh, Iran? I think I heard about that. . .Wait, it’s costing us a billion dollars a day?”

The Cure for Cognitive Dissonance

The arts and creativity have always been a part of activism—ever since ordinary Romans painted political graffiti on the walls of Pompeii over 2000 years ago.

One human affecting another by making their mark.

Even when—as is the case for so many of us right now—our everyday lives are not yet materially changed by what is happening politically in our very large country. For many of us, we’re still safe, life still feels “normal,” and it’s easy to feel no political urgency in our day-to-day lives.

When we understand how bad things are, yet aren’t directly affected, that creates a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance. A great way to alleviate that dissonance is to start weaving these small but specific actions into our normal routines, and to take these actions now while it’s still safe to do so.

If you already participate in all the national protests, these small acts are a great way to stitch those giant but very sporadic events together. It’s like you’re creating a through-line that connects your own values across your own life, which also has the effect of bolstering the movement energetically.

And when we give our specific” activism a creative twist, it genuinely sustains us because it’s playful. Fun even. And that’s good for our souls.

That’s why we have Creative Change Makers zoom calls—to sustain ourselves with playful, creative ways of resisting. And it also lets us rest in the comfort of a community of other like-minded creators.

I hope you join us on our Zoom call this Wednesday, April 1 where we’ll have fun and make some “resistance cootie catcher” toys/zines together. I’m in love with using these toys in a subversive way and I think you’ll enjoy it too.

It starts at 9am Pacific, 10am Mountain, 11am Central, and Noon Eastern.

Come with an idea of your own or come as a blank slate—I’ve got everything we need to make it a success. Even if you think you’re all thumbs.

Learn more here.

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You probably don’t know this about me, but I’m a sucker for a good paper toy.

The first time I saw poet Amelia Williams’s cootie catcher/fortune teller poetry pieces, I was immediately thrust back to my childhood: A group of neighborhood girls all clustered together as one of us worked her way through each step of another’s cootie catcher—and then all gleefully reading each “fortune” at the end—fortunes we had literally written ourselves with crayon not long before.

I vividly remembered making these folded toys as well. Sitting on the floor at the hearth in front of our family fireplace (where all our drawing activities happened—a big smooth surface that didn’t clutter the kitchen table) folding and coloring, folding and coloring.

As Amelia shared her poetic cootie catchers with a group of us on Zoom, I kept returning to these fond memories I didn’t even know I still had. And I was completely charmed by how she had woven her adult poetry into the familiar shapes of a handmade child’s toy.

I was intrigued by how she found new ways to write poems within the constraints of the structure of this simple folk art toy—an object I had personally created and played with hundreds of times as a child. It was such a fresh exploration of form and content.

My response to these cootie catchers was so visceral because my memory of them was visceral—a strong personal connection to the form of the toy lived on in my body long after my head had forgotten all about it.

This relationship between Amelia’s new way of using a cootie catcher and my deeply stored physical memories felt significant—showing me how a familiar form can make the message inside it land harder.

That’s why I knew these toys were perfect for The Creative Change Makers.

The Power of Physical Memory

When I reached out to Amelia about making “resistance cootie catchers” for The Creative Change Makers, she immediately agreed that they lent themselves perfectly to what we’ve been doing with tiny signs, resistance bunnies, and zine making.

Excited by the idea of offering this new workshop together, I started folding my own catchers. After getting a little confused by templates I found online, I realized that my hands didn’t need any directions and I just started folding. And playing with my finished “resistance fortune teller” afterward felt like connecting with an old friend.

There’s such emotional power in the physical memories we hold in our bodies. And when we insert an unexpected message within an old but familiar folk toy structure, it does its own persuading. Our bodies know how to play the game, so we play it.As soon as that happens, the viewer becomes a participant. They’re interacting, connecting, and remembering. And this creates an opening. A receptivity.

That’s why I love the idea of creating these subversive versions of a familiar toy and scattering them around my community. To perhaps take a stranger down memory lane as I simultaneously offer them a new message to consider.

And now, I’m inviting you to join Amelia and me in creating a bunch of Resistance Cootie Catchers at the next Creative Change Makers call on Wednesday April 1, at 9am Pacific, 10am Mountain, 11am Central, and Noon Eastern.

Breathing Room

Bringing creativity to our resistance efforts offers some breathing room for our hearts in this stressful political time. It gives us a chance to have fun and play. And this time, we’ll literally be creating a simple toy that gives others a chance to play as well.

Creating together in these zoom calls is somehow both energizing and relaxing at the same time. And making something that both reflects your adult values and feeds your inner child—well, that can only be good!

And if you don’t feel creative, don’t worry, you can still participate in this workshop—I’ve got you covered. But no matter how un-creative you may think you are, I promise that you will BE creative throughout the call—and that will be genuinely fun.

Quick Overview of the Workshop

In this Zoom workshop, we'll start by looking at Amelia's work and learning about her process. Then, we’ll all cut out our copies of the Broligarchy catcher and fold that together. This will give you a finished catcher that you can put out in the world or use to as a template to make more—or both! (You will receive your own copy of the broligarchy catcher once you register.)

From there, we'll create a second original catcher from scratch — with full content provided if you need it, and room to customize if you don't. We'll end by sharing what we made and talking about where to put them out in the world. Ninety minutes of folding, chatting, and making something worth scattering. And if you need to leave early, no problem.

Supplies are minimal! You'll need the printed templates, a few blank sheets of paper, scissors, a pencil, and whatever coloring tools you have around—markers, colored pencils, rubber stamps, etc. And consider buying some crayons before the session—they're cheap at the grocery store and something about crayons just belongs in this particular project.

You can view the complete step-by-step workshop overview here.

I hope you join us.

This workshop is FREE for my paid subscribers, and there’s a registration link at the top of this newsletter to sign up--if you’re read it via email. If you’re a paid subscriber and read through the app, just DM me and I’ll send you the link.

To become a paid subscriber and join us, you can upgrade using the link below.

It’s 36.00 for an annual subscription, but you can sign up for a single month if you’d rather. You can see all your options before committing by clicking on the button below. If you do upgrade, there will be a registration link for the workshop in your welcome email.

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In the meantime, please feel free to hit reply to this email to ask me any questions or leave a comment about any thoughts you have—whether you can come or not.

Maybe you have a cootie catcher memory newly awakened in your body?

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I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process because understanding how it works really helps me create.

When people struggle to create, it’s often because they don’t understand how the creative process works as a process.

The creative process is really a framework of several mini-processes—each of which is hard in its own way.

Starting is its own kind of hard process. As is being in the middle. As is finishing.

Hard is, in fact. the whole deal. It’s hard to make things. And this is where the confusion happens. Because what many people do when they hit a hard patch in the creative process is decide it’s proof of some personal failing inside themselves.

For instance, when you get to the middle of a project and everything seems like a mess, that all too familiar voice inside says, “See, this looks terrible. What were you thinking? You aren’t cut out for this.” Then you go and believe that voice.

The same with finishing. “See. I never finish anything. Once again I’ve dropped the ball. Pathetic.”

But the messy middle of any creativity is a lot like cleaning out your closet—it always gets worse before it gets better.

And finishing any creative project is all staring and pondering and making a lot of infinitesimally small, subtle decisions. And that often takes longer than the first 90% of the entire project.

This is true for everyone.

You might believe that people who are very talented or artistically productive don’t go through these excruciating stages, but they do. They’ve just learned over time to take these stages less personally.

They genuinely know that each stage they are going through is intrinsic to the creative process itself and is not evidence of their inability. Knowing that helps them soldier through the hard parts.

Giving Birth

Okay, so hard is one thing, but painful seems like quite another. Who wants to do something painful?

Well, I hate to say it, but creating IS sometimes often painful, because creativity is, after all, the act of pulling something out of the ether and giving it physical form—and that ain’t easy.

It’s its own kind of giving birth. Which is why it matters. Because giving birth—in all its forms—is a necessity for the continuity of the universe.

Boom.

But the difficult nature of this process is also why it’s so helpful to understand how this whole birthing thing works. What its rhythms are.

Because the more you realize that your own particular creativity exists within a universal creative framework with predictable rhythms, the more you can create personal strategies to help you through each stage of that universal process.

And when you can lean on these personal strategies, they really help you make the most of what each stage of the creative process actually has to offer.

When that happens, the creative process becomes your friend.

Here are a bunch of my favorite strategies:

1. Always have at least three things going at once. Working on just one thing is like making it your only child. Sometimes, it just needs you to avert your gaze and obsess about someone else for a while. Create a couple of siblings and start fretting about them instead.

2. Speaking of obsessing on one thing, if something needs to dry and you feel the need to constantly check on it, leave the building. I can poke an artwork right to death, so sometimes going to the store is the only way I can save my artwork from myself.

3. Leave your work and supplies out in the open. Yes, I’m talking to you, neat people. Stop putting everything away. Yeah yeah, you can’t think when it’s cluttered, I know. But you also can’t create when everything is tucked away. No one uses a sewing machine that’s in the closet. Period. I will die on that hill.

4. Speaking of works-in-progress, visit them often. Especially right before bed. While most things need to breathe before you can finish them, they don’t want to think you’ve abandoned them altogether. Stop by and see how they’re doing. These visits can be short—you’re just saying hello. Glue one thing down. Flip through your sketchbook. Yes.

5. Speaking of visiting, remind yourself of what you own. Test your markers. Spend a relaxing hour mixing colors as an end in itself. Arrange your fabric stash or shuffle through your special papers. This is especially helpful if you’re tired, uninspired or have no works-in-progress.

6. Speaking of having no works-in-progress, don’t get confused about the order of things: We don’t have ideas and then create. We create and then have ideas. So if you are returning to creating after a long hiatus, don’t tell yourself you can’t create anymore because you have no ideas. Of course you don’t. Visit your materials instead. Do that over and over and watch those little ideas start trotting down the hill to greet you.

7. Nothing is too small or insignificant to do or work on. Because nothing is actually small, it’s specific. Creating in a culture that is uninterested in the arts is hard, so whatever you do that supports your process counts because it’s about being on your own side. Always, always be on your own side.

8. Anytime you use the word should, catch yourself, and ask why. Why should you have finished this already? Why should this be easier than it is? Why should you be burning to create in all your free time?

9. Actively seek out inspiration. Who else did something like what you are currently working on or thinking about? How did they do it? Why is it good? What specifically do you like about it? If this makes you worry about accidentally copying or plagiarizing, let me know and I’ll write a whole post about that. In the meantime, feed your muse. She’s hungry.

10. Whenever you finish something big, there’s a period afterward when your mind feels remarkably blank. Don’t panic. It’s just resting.

11. Look at or re-visit the best thing(s) you ever made and then believe me when I say: It wasn’t a fluke. And anyway, that’s your baby—tell it you love it.

12. Know this: We all make bad work. And there’s a lot of advice out there about how you should embrace the bad. Even try to make bad stuff. But that’s easier to say or do when you’ve already made a lot of work you like or are proud of. So if you’re a beginner or are returning after a long hiatus, your bad work may hurt you more say, than my bad work hurts me. But that will get easier over time as you make more stuff you do feel good about.

13. Speaking of bad work, look at bad art by famous artists. It’ll really cheer you up.

14. And finally, even though creating is often hard and sometimes painful, it’s also a glorious way to spend your time on planet earth. See if you can make it a gift you give to yourself instead of a test you are trying to pass.

Do any of these strategies for sustaining your creativity ring true or feel helpful? Do you have a good strategy I didn’t mention that you want to share? Or maybe you disagree with something in my list? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear! (Or just drop me a heart if you’re busy or shy.)

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My dad was a football coach and my mother was an artist, but in many ways, my dad was more creative than my mom. Not more artistic, mind you, but more creative.

The reason he was more creative was that he allowed himself more. As a football coach, he’d do unexpected things to compensate for whatever weaknesses his team had—like being significantly smaller or slower than their opponent.

If his field position was bad, for instance, he’d choose to punt on third down. That surprise move not only got his team out of a jam, but it often resulted in better field position as well. My dad’s creative problem-solving made the other coaches anxious.

My mother, on the other hand, was far more talented than my father in many areas of life, but she also had way too many rules—especially about being an artist. She had rules about what makes someone a “real” artist; about what artistic “dedication” should look like; about what was “good” art and what was “bad” art; and about how important it was to never make bad art.

The rules she made up and the stories she told herself stole her joy and ruined her experience of making art.

And even though part of her knew how talented she was, she was unable to allow herself to embrace that talent. It was so much easier to find fault with herself and her abilities. To roll her eyes at her own secret ambitions.

So in a strange way, I learned more about creativity from my dad. His self-allowing was a good counterbalance to my mom, whose rigid rules, in many ways, also became my rules. Even when I technically succeeded within those confining rules, I’d just adapt them to make them harder—so whatever I did wouldn’t count—which was, of course, the real rule.

Being Called

As I’ve worked my entire adult life to get my mother’s voice out of my head, over time I came to realize that it wasn’t even her voice in her head. It was my grandmother’s. Or my great-grandmother’s. Or my great-great grandmother’s.

Her oppressive rules were really expressing an ancestral wound. And I’ve come to see how she herself struggled to break free of those rules—and the ways she even sometimes succeeded.

This understanding changed my perception of how to heal that wound. It was no long simply a source of tension between me and my mom but a painful pattern of self-policing that went back generations.

I now consider it one of my callings to heal that ancestral wound. Not only for myself, but for all the women in my family tree—backwards, forwards, and sideways. My mission to free myself is really a mission to free my lineage.

Living in this bigger picture gives me more breathing room. It’s not me. It’s not her. It’s us—in a long line of us-es.

In addition, while it’s my calling to try to break this pattern as best I can, it’s not necessarily my calling to be the one who pulls that off. I mean, I’d like to be the one that breaks it, but that’s almost not the point.

After all, a calling is not a promise, it’s an invitation. While I feel called to carry this particular baton in my particular generation, it’s not about knowing the end result. It’s about seeing how far I can go to help liberate us, as a family.

Perceiving it this way makes me curious about what I can do, rather than just feeling haunted by a family pattern I can’t shake.

My mom did what she could, and now it’s my turn.

And I’ve found that the same self-allowing my dad modeled—the willingness to do the unexpected thing, to question assumptions, and permit myself to take chances—serves me well—not only for my creativity, but for my callings as well.

Divine Inspiration?

What is it, really, to have a calling? To feel the mysterious, romantic pull of being called?

Traditionally, a calling has been defined as a mission that is divinely inspired, or a passion or talent so deep and true we can’t help but follow it. This definition makes us imagine that being called would offer us a clarity that we are missing but yearn for. A critically important “reason” for living your particular life.

But what if what we are meant to do, even if divinely inspired, still requires a lot of figuring out—a lot of work to truly understand? And what if our calling is, well, deeply prosaic? Everyday? Normal?

This feels right to me.

Feeling called or having a mission doesn’t mean you don’t have doubts. It doesn’t mean what you do isn’t hard or confusing. Or even something you wish you didn’t have to do.

Being called is also not about “success” or getting rewarded—at least in the ways we usually define that in this culture.

I feel called to be an artist, for instance, but that’s not a divine promise to be a famous artist—or even a well-compensated one.

I’m also called to write my thoughts, to heal painful patterns in my family, to till the earth I call my yard, to overcome my self-doubt, and to simply not back away from what I find hard or scary.

We all have a multitude of callings. Big and small. Personal and social. Temporary and life-long.

What’s one of yours?

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If you asked me to define myself with one word, I wouldn’t say “artist.” I’d say “student.” Because that’s really what I am—a student of life. I love to learn.

I also think I’m good at it.

That might sound goofy, to think of yourself as “good at learning.” But I’ve noticed that once most people leave school, they don’t really understand what’s involved in learning something deeply because the school structure is gone.

But the learning structure still exists, even if the school itself isn’t there.

Just as understanding the creative process allows you to make more art, understanding the learning process better can help you learn more deeply.

Knowing how learning works is like a scaffolding that holds me up as I clutch my notes and climb a new set of narrow rickety stairs skyward to the unknown.

Because I’m neck deep in learning something new right now, I am very conscious of how I use my knowledge of the learning process to help myself learn.

Here's what I know.

Twelve Truths of Learning Well

1. Learning is about allowing.
   I learn exactly what I want to learn in the order I want to learn it (even if that’s not the “logical” order.) That means I often don’t start at the beginning; instead, I start at my point of interest. It also means that sometimes I end up having to backtrack and return to the beginning—but that’s okay, because I’m now willing to be there.
   

2. Perfectionism is a form of self-violence that sabotages learning.
   Perfectionism does not allow allowing. But to learn, you must allow yourself to try something and be bad at it. Allow the evidence of your bad work to exist on your work table even if someone might see it. Allow yourself to be confused for an extended period of time—without mistaking that for being a permanent state or for indicating an innate lack of ability.
   Learning is, therefore, the opposite of trying to be perfect. (Perfectionism is also not “holding yourself to a high standard.” It’s holding yourself to an impossible standard.)
   

3. Know why you want to learn something.
   I learn particular techniques to further specific artistic goals, not just because I think they’re cool or because I saw that another artist made something great by using them. And throughout the process, I’m always asking myself: What do I want to say with these materials—and why? How does knowing how to do this serve my practice?
   In fairness, sometimes a new technique is just fun to learn and I love that too. That’s what taking a little workshop is for. For me, taking a workshop is like meeting someone new—it’s a fun and interesting way to spend a day, but not deep learning. It is, however, an efficient way to find out if I want to know that information, skill, or technique better—and really learn it—or not.
   

4. I know how I learn and I honor that.

   I need to see the big picture before I can start something. It’s the way I think. When I take online classes where they slowly drip the content out, I can’t really start the exercises until I see the whole picture. So usually, I just wait and watch everything before I start working. This makes me “behind” in class, but it’s how I understand things, so it’s non-negotiable. How do you understand things?
   

5. New activities are inefficient.
   There’s always a big cushion around doing anything new. You won’t handle your time “well.” Everything will take longer than you imagine. You think you’ll have all the materials you need, but then discover you don’t. This is the nature of newness. True learning always takes longer than you think it “should.” Especially when you’re not in an in-person class just obeying the teacher and executing their tasks.
   

6. Progress is not a straight upward line.

   It’s a crazy zig-zag at best. Once you’ve “sort of” mastered any step in a learning process, the only way to make progress on the next step is to possibly “ruin” what you just worked so hard to create. Two steps forward one step back. One step forward, two steps back. Alas.
   

7. Integrating information is different from exposing yourself to information.

   When you hit a “doing” lull, it’s time to capture what you’ve learned. Last week I was able to finally share images of my rust printed pieces because my obsessive rust printing had reached a lull. I knew it was time to take photos, transfer them to my computer, and match them with copious note-taking in order for all my learning thus far start to truly sink in. This literally took me hours.
   It’s easy to feel like this is a waste of time because you’re no longer making anything. But taking that time to gather your thoughts is an integration process. A way of embodying what you’re learning rather than just exposing yourself to something.
   

8. You’re always in a dance between the doing and the receiving.

   Watching a demo or reading instructions is only half of learning—the receiving half. No matter how detailed or complete the information might seem. No matter how carefully you paid attention.
   Learning something new is like sprinkling a fine powder on the top of the water bucket of your brain; at first, it all just floats there. To internalize that information, you must stir that fine powder until it actually dissolves and becomes a part of your body. But this stirring isn’t just the “doing” part of learning—it’s the dance between the doing and receiving. You watch/read a lot, then do a little, then realize you need to watch/read again. Then, it’s do-watch-do. Do-read-do. Bow to your partner. And just as you’re getting tired of stirring, suddenly, it’s a part of you.
   

9. There will always be dead ends.
   As you learn something new, you will probably spend a considerable amount of time doing something—perhaps creating something very good—that you realize you must abandon. This is actually a part of the learning process and the creative process. Every week, for instance, I delete wonderful paragraphs I have labored over in the writing of this newsletter. It can be a painful goodbye. But those lovely paragraphs fell on their swords so I could figure out what I really wanted to say. Adieu sweet princes, I loved you so.
   

10. Conversation helps.

    My husband and I often tell each other about our respective struggles with what we’re working on even though neither of us knows much about the other’s field of interest. But clarity often comes just from the effort it takes to explain your struggle to another person. Or when they don’t get it and ask questions that makes you say, “No, no, not that, but this.”
    And speaking of questions, a good question to an expert can take you far—not so much because you get to receive their expertise, but because it helps you articulate what exactly you don’t understand. It takes you out of the fuzziness. As a bonus, it also helps you realize how much you’ve actually already absorbed.
    

11. Learning requires faith.

    In order to learn, you have to be willing to let yourself get good and lost. To do that, you have to have faith in your ability to find your way back to yourself again.
    I’ve become a better student over the course of my life because I’ve become a better artist over that time. I have faith that I can work my artistic problems out, even when I’m groping around in the dark making mistakes with yet another new material. That faith gives me the courage to experiment—because I know my experiments aren’t evidence in a jury trial of whether I’m a good artist or not.
    

12. Deeply learning anything is a form of intimacy with life itself.

    When you do a deep dive with something, you’re no longer superficially engaging the universe with casual small talk. You’re connecting on a soul level. It can be subtle and hard to articulate, but it’s deeply satisfying. It’s like the difference between planting something from seed and buying the seedling from the nursery. I do both, of course, but when I start a seed indoors and harvest the flower or vegetable ninety days later, it creates a kind of wordless intimacy to the gardening experience that makes me feel alive.

Really, of all the bullets in my list, it’s that intimacy—the being-there-for-all-of-it—that serves up the deepest gratification. Growing things, learning things, and creating things—they’re all a way for me to partner with the universe.

I don’t want to casually wave at life across a large auditorium. I want to hug it close and tell it I love it. And learning how to do something well is one way to do that.

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For the past two months, I’ve also been obsessively learning different ways to print rust on fabric. Discovering what I can control and what I can’t. What makes a clear print and what doesn’t. (See my short video above.)

Sometimes I’ve created some seriously blobby messes, and other times I’ve been shocked at the almost photographic quality of the way the rust will transfer.

I’ve also been working with rust on different favorite fabrics to see how each behaves. Right now, I’m in love with how rust responds to the tight weave of a heavy silk charmeuse—which is basically the champagne of silk. Linen has great body and can give a clear print, so it’s also still a contender.

Silk organza is probably the most receptive to rust, but it’s so sheer that I’m not sure what to do with it afterward. Still, its ethereal nature calls me.

Often, the beauty of the rust is in the texture it provides rather than its ability to transfer a particular image. I’m slowly figuring out what I’d like to use when.

I’ve also played around with re-rusting sections of the same piece of fabric over and over—adding more rust shapes here, little copper bits there—and honestly, I’d say my results have been mixed. But it’s been a great exercise because right now, the stakes are low. I don’t want to blindly experiment with re-working something on a show deadline. Been there, done that—more times than I care to admit.

See what getting old teaches you?

Do Overs

When I’ve been unhappy with a particular rust print result, I’ve used lemon juice to see how much rust it’ll remove and how much I can contain its spread. I keep trying to control that process, with varying degrees of success. Still, I like having lemon juice in my rusty mark-making toolbelt—it’s so darn handy to have an eraser—very unusual in textile printing.

Here’s a little video where I placed lemon slices on top of an unsuccessful rust-printing attempt to try to create a repeat pattern and some brighter whites. Then I laid a few copper bits down to see what kind of print I could get with that.

(I was holding the camera while opening the wet crepe de chine at the same time, so it’s a bit wobbly.)

This was my first attempt printing with copper—and also my most successful thus far. The color from copper is probably more “fugitive” than rust, and I’m not sure why I can’t reproduce these crisp results again, but I’ll keep trying.

Taking Notes

I am at the very beginning of this rust-printing journey, but my next step is a big one—adding tannins or indigo—and that will require cutting up a bunch of my little treasures to do more testing. So I took a slew of photos and wrote copious notes. If everything goes sideways, I’ll at least have my “before” photos to help me when I start over.

Keeping a record can feel very time-consuming, but it’s worth it because it really helps cement what you’ve learned so far. And a year from now, when I wonder, “Hmm, how on earth did I get that mark?” I’ll have my notes.

Yet another example of what getting older gives you. I never would have bothered doing this when I was younger.

Creating Capacity

The next tannin and indigo steps will have as many variables—if not more—than the rust printing itself.

Tannins, for instance, play two roles in natural dyeing. Sometimes they are part of the “mordanting” process that helps natural dyes adhere to fabric. Other times, they play the role of shifting a color—usually by making it darker. I tend to think of the colors created by tannins and oxides as stone colors—greys, dark greens, blue-greys, soft tans.

The particular nature of your own water has a giant impact on your results, however. You can try following someone else’s recommendations, but you must know that their experience is just a starting point.

For instance, my water has a ton of minerals, so when someone says “Use myrobalan at 20% weight of fiber to get this beautiful grey,” I think to myself, “Hmm. Should I halve that ratio?” “Or quarter it?” And how many buckets of options do I provide myself before I go bonkers?

This is where one’s “unsuccessful” pieces save the day because it’s so much easier to let them go. And sometimes, because you’re so free and easy letting them go, you’ll try anything and what you thought were your mistakes become your favorites. Meanwhile, the ones you’re in love with can languish because you’re loath to make a mistake on them, so they never get finished.

But that’s when I remind myself of my goals in whatever learning process I engage in: I’m building capacity, not making masterpieces.

And capacity lives in my body and feeds my creativity in ways playing it safe never does.

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P.S. The next Creative Change Makers meeting is Wednesday, March 4 at 9am Pacific, 10am Mountain, 11am Central, and Noon Eastern. It’s free for paid subscribers. I hope to see you there!

You need to play more.

Way more.

So do I.

Especially in these politically grim times.

Is that self-indulgent? Privileged? Tone deaf—when so many are suffering? When we’re living in a country filled with turmoil, when our federal government itself is working to undermine our very freedoms?

I’d like to make the case for “No, no it isn’t.”

Play is, in its own way, a subversive act. It creates a space where you temporarily suspend the rules of reality/normalcy/acceptability and indulge the irrational—which makes play a little bit. . .wild.

And—lest we forget—wild is the opposite of tame. And tame is definitely not what we need right now.

Playfulness helps us tap into our wildness because it returns to us the gift of our innocence. To play is to allow yourself to be child-like. Feral. Undomesticated.

Maybe that’s why people so often think creativity is for children—because creativity is a form of play. Of imagining. Of saying “What if?”

But your ability to create—that is, to imagine and play—is also a way to stand in your power. The more you do it, the stronger you get.

Think about that. You can actually increase your power by accessing your child-like innocence—your ability to play.

How much do I love that? So much.

A Culture of Generosity

In the years that I took improv classes and was involved in various improv groups in Manhattan, I found it to be the most creative art form I’d ever experienced, and the most playful.

The playful nature of improv is born in the soil of its “yes, and” imperative. But that unique culture extends past saying “yes” to whatever your improv partner might say to you on stage. It’s part of the audience culture as well. The whole improv scene—from audience to actor—is about wanting to laugh together, wanting to find something funny or fun—and deeply respecting the willingness to be ridiculous.

Looking back on it now, I realize how much of what improv offers—through play—is a culture of generosity. And a culture of generosity is really quite radical. Eager laughter, a comfort with the ridiculous, and a commitment to develop the instinct to say yes is all very liberating and inclusive—the very opposite of authoritarian.

But for adults in our culture, it’s not easy to find ways to play or be goofy in the best of times, let alone in this political moment. There are very few structures for playing in the world of adulting—very few frameworks to let down our hair and be silly.

Which is why we have to create those opportunities ourselves—just like we do if we want to make art, or write a story, or sing a song out of tune at the tops of our lungs.

That includes bringing a bit of playfulness into our political resistance as well.

Because when we find ways to be creative or playful as we push back against authoritarianism, we imbue our activism with the energy of our own wildness and innocence. That energy keeps our souls fed, helps us stand in our sovereignty, and prevents burn out.

That’s why I created “resistance valentines.”

Message in a Bottle

When I tape up a sweet little subversive valentine in a public space, I feel quietly energized. Pleased with myself in some simple, child-like way.

It feels just a little bit delightful to find a spot that might actually match a particular resistance valentine message through color or vibe—like the candle section of a big box store. It feels equally pleasing to choose a spot that very not-matches—by being its opposite—like a pump at the gas station.

It also feels a tad mischievous to quickly attach one of my messages to a sales shelf and then innocently meander down the rest of the aisle. Who me?

So silly.

I also love how the nature of these benign vintage images help me express my political messages. They don’t attack the viewer. They invite the viewer to look closer.

Which is why I hope you download the free “Resistance Valentines Toolkit” and join me in some simple but playful activism over the next few weeks. Yes, I know Valentine’s Day was last Saturday, but we’ve still got plenty of February left to tuck these cute little signs in all kinds of unexpected places.

There are five pages of images, but feel free to cut out just a few of your favorites, find a marker, and write your simple messages. Tuck a roll of tape into your bag and bring them along as you run your errands. Tape one to a restroom stall door at the mini-mart, tape a couple on boxes in the cereal aisle of your grocery store, or prop a few up in the library when you return your books. You might just make someone smile—including yourself.

You also might make someone think or feel intrigued. They might mention it to their spouse when they get home. Or feel understood in their very red town.

These resistance valentines are like a letter in a bottle from one stranger to another—only easier and cuter.

Here are a couple examples from fellow subscribers who downloaded the kit:

Poke the System in the Eye

It’s true that the big, serious acts of resistance—the community organizing, the marches, the boycotts—have great impact and are very important. But little, less-serious actions—like resistance valentines—have impact in a different way—and that way matters too.

Fun, pleasure, and play not only feed the soul but are also important catalysts for social change. To play is to embrace the freedom to color outside the lines—and to model that freedom to others who have forgotten how or were never allowed.

Every playful act of resistance is an expression of wildness and innocence in the face of cynicism and predictability. It’s also a declaration of your personal freedom to do what you want, the way you want to.

And finally, let’s face it. Funny is fun. Silly is fun. Play is joy. And joy can be our secret weapon.

Because honestly, what team do you want to be on? The angry, suspicious, hating team? The scared, quiet, obedient team? Or the playful, fun, and joyful team?

I thought so. Me too.

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Resistance Valentines Toolkit

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P.S. Click here to see more resistance valentines from fellow Creative Change Makers in the Substack Chat!

We had a lot of fun making “Resistance Valentines” in last week’s Creative Change Makers zoom call.

It’s appealing to make these tiny signs because you don’t have to be an artist, but you still get to be creative by coming up with your own messages of resistance and matching them up to the different images.

The beauty of using these images is the love message that a valentine heart communicates. When we put our new messages of resistance on these vintage valentines, they live in this sweet context. And I’m seeing how many people are drawn to that starting point—we resist because we love.

We also resist in this way because we have a sense of humor. While many of these vintage valentines are super cute, innocent, or funny, some are awkwardly outdated, saccharine, or a little odd. But that’s part of the fun. And they all offer the element of surprise when we turn them on their heads with new messages that are political or more inclusive.

I’ve now decided to offer all these images as a free “Resistance Valentines Toolkit” for anyone to download or share as widely as possible. Will you help me get the word out?

The downloadable PDF file is at the bottom of this post.

Tips for Getting Started

If you’ve never done something like this, here’s some useful guidance to help you get started.

These tips come from our Creative Change Makers community—questions and solutions that came up when we made valentines together.

• What should I write? It’s okay to start simple. “Abolish ICE.” “Protect Immigrants.” And feel free to use the same message on multiple valentines because different people will see them. You aren’t being boring; you’re sounding the alarm.

• Do we wait for Valentine’s Day? Nope. Drop them all month. Anytime is the right time for a tiny sign of resistance in the produce aisle. If you can, try to weave it into your daily or weekly routine. Dropping two or three out in the world on a regular basis is more powerful than just doing it once. That said, if all you’ve got is a single day, then still please do it!

• How many should I make? As many or as few as you like. There are five pages of valentines and several images on each page, but feel free to pick your favorites and use them as many times as you feel like. Repetition is good.

• I don’t like my handwriting. Write in all caps if you don’t like your handwriting—it slows you down and forces you to write more clearly. But also know that the handwritten aspect is super important—it shows a human touch in a digital age.

• I’m not great at cutting things out. No problem—cut the valentines out in any way that suits you—you don’t have to be close to the edge of an image. A bit of crooked cutting shows a human hand did this.

• Use a pencil first. It can be hard to gauge how much room you have for your message. Do yourself a favor and lightly write your message in pencil first, then go over it with your marker. You can erase the pencil lines afterward.

• Why are the valentines small? These valentines are a part of an ongoing “tiny signs” project in the Creative Change Makers zoom calls. The point of these small signs is that we stick them in unexpected places—the produce aisle or freezer section of the grocery store, at the library, by the sugar and cream in your local coffee shop. We don’t spend ages making them, so it’s okay if they disappear because it’s easy for us to pop up another one the next time we cruise by that location.

• Is it safe to do this? Yes. We aren’t breaking the law or defacing property. We’re just using a small strip of scotch tape to attach a little valentine message in shared public spaces. We can’t help that our shared public spaces are mostly corporate-owned.

• I feel a little nervous now that I’m ready to put them out in the world. It’s natural to feel a little nervous the first time. But then you’ll see how people aren’t paying any attention to you anyway! And each time you do it, it gets easier. You can also pick areas that are private—like a restroom stall at the gas station.

• Come up with a plan to make it happen. The hardest thing about this whole project is remembering to bring your resistance valentines with you. I actually have to put a post-it note on my front door to remind myself. Others keep the valentines in their car and their tape in their purse or bag.

• Take a picture. After the rush of taping a valentine to a shelf in the grocery store, don’t forget to take a picture. Share it with whomever you can. When you do this, you’re being a role model.

• It’s all in the doing. You might feel awkward juggling your little valentines and your tape and your phone as you move through the grocery store or other public space. But this gets easier. I find a coat with roomy pockets helpful. You’ll also get new ideas of places to put future valentines just by roaming around and deciding where to put the ones you’ve currently created. This helps create momentum and you’re more likely to do it again.

Share and Share Alike

If this idea of making and sharing these “resistance valentines” appeals to you, please download the toolkit and start creating. Each toolkit comes with

• Five pages of images.

• A few finished examples for inspiration.

• A list of tips like the one above.

• A list of suggestions about where to put them.

Once you’ve finished your valentines—if you’re game—upload photos of where you put them to your favorite social media outlet or in the Substack chat I started on Sunday. It’s inspiring and fun for others to see them out in the wild.

Also, are there any organizations or community groups you’re a part of that might also like to receive these images? These might be political groups, like your local Indivisible or Democratic Party, or they might be your church, mosque, or synagogue (or a segment thereof), your compatriots at the dog park, a few co-workers, your blue friend in a red state, or a couple-three of your democracy-loving neighbors.

If any of these groups or organizations have a newsletter, or if YOU have a newsletter, please feel free to share the free PDF toolkit there as well. You can send folks the PDF toolkit directly, or send them to this page so they can download the free toolkit themselves.

And please forward this post to any friends you think might be interested in making a few of these themselves, or “restack” this on Substack Notes. Every bit helps.

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Here is your free Resistance Valentines Toolkit:

Resistance Valentines Toolkit

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(If you have trouble downloading the free toolkit from the link above, you can also access it by clicking here.)

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Your life is no longer filled with people obsessing about art. The structures that helped you sort through works-in-progress are gone. And you need to pay the rent—pronto.

It hits you with a quiet thud: No one cares if you make art. The people who love you, love you, and the people who don’t, don’t—whether you make art or not.

If you want to make art, you just have to make it. After work. Before work. Sunday mornings. Here and there. Whenever you can manage it.

You have to tend your own flame and nurture your own momentum—even when that flame is almost invisible. Even when that momentum feels infinitesimally small.

But the upside to all this flame-tending is that it slowly teaches you to commit to yourself. And one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from years of maintaining my own creative flame is the importance of taking small actions. Of inventing little structures to keep my pilot light on.

Some of these structures are so modest and insignificant, I don’t even want to tell you what they are.

But I’ve learned over the years that “insignificant” is actually the name of the game. I’ve learned that I need to be willing to suspend my disbelief and give my time and attention to the seemingly inconsequential—again and again.

Because it’s the small acts that create long-term momentum. That let the bigger work finally happen.

Of course, life being what it is, sometimes your creative flame can get so small, it feels more like a single imperceptible ember, and you wonder why you bother.

Well, you bother because it’s so much easier to create a fire if you already have a spark. To blow gently on those still warm embers and add a few sticks. To adjust the flue and increase the oxygen until suddenly, your little flame is back.

Resistance Valentines

This is what making tiny signs and zines are all about. Small, seemingly inconsequential, in-real-life actions that create a spark inside yourself and—when you put them out into the world—inside another as well.

Tiny signs can be a small but effective act of resistance that you can easily weave into your daily or weekly routine. An action that subtly stitches your life to the life of your local community—as well as to communities further afield who are finding themselves under siege.

Our little sparks of resistance do add fuel to fires further afield—even if that seems invisible. But that’s the nature of energy—you might not see it, but you can feel it.

Most importantly, when we create lots of little sparks of momentum, they’re able to quickly ignite into something much larger when the time is right. This is what makes tending the small flames worthwhile.

Which is why I’m hoping you’ll come to the next Creative Change-Makers zoom call which is happening TOMORROW, Wednesday, February 4 at 9am Pacific, 10am Mountain, 11am Central, and noon Eastern.

Because we’re gonna tend our flames of resistance and have some fun in the process.

This month’s theme for our tiny-sign-making is “Resistance Valentines” and I’m so excited.

I downloaded almost twenty vintage valentine card images and removed their original messages in Photoshop so we can write in our own new messages of resistance.

I’ve combined them into sets and will email these as PDFs to everyone who registers, so you can print them out for the call, where we’ll hang out and think up new slogans together as we fill in our vintage valentines.

Here’s a little example of an old valentine where I changed the original message:

Here’s another vintage valentine with its new message of resistance:

It’ll be creative, fun, and relaxing to look at the images together and brainstorm various messages for each one.

The Details

All you’ll need for the call are the vintage valentine print-outs (whichever ones you like best), a marker or two, and some scissors. Or, if you want to make your own valentines from scratch, that would be wonderful and inspiring as well.

This 60-minute call is free for my paid subscribers. If that’s you, there’s a link to register for the call at the top of this email.

(If you are reading this in the app or on the Substack website instead of your email inbox, you won’t see that link, but you can direct message or email me at bush.sarahATgmail.com.)

If you’re currently a free subscriber and would like to upgrade your subscription so you can join us, I’d love it. You can click on the link below to explore your options and see if it’s a good fit for you.

Subscribe now

Once you upgrade, you’ll receive a welcome email with the Zoom registration link at the top. Just click on that link, fill out the form, and you’re in.

Here’s an overview of how the 60-minute call will work:

• We’ll take a few minutes to connect with each other and share how we’re feeling.

• We’ll do a little brainstorming and I’ll get us (re) inspired with some new ideas.

• We’ll make some uber-simple “resistance valentines” using the files I created so everyone leaves the meeting having something to put out in the world in the coming weeks.

• We’ll spend a few minutes at the end of the call talking about where, how, and when we’ll put our sweet little valentines of resistance in different locations in our communities, why it’s safe and easy, and how we can weave this little bit of activism into our weekly routines.

There will be a Creative Change Makers zoom call on the first Wednesday of most every month in 2026 and I’m working on some fun ideas for our future calls.

I hope to see you there.