Designing my Creative Life

My Three C's :

Creativity

Community

Connecting to Nature.

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I was working in a cage, tied to a timeclock like a bird on a leash. The entirety of my life had become draped with a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction no matter how fat the paycheck was.

"If you could design your life to be whatever you wanted it to be, what would you want?" asked the retreat leader. Her name was Paulette Rees-Denis. She was a fulltime creative and life coach. I thought her question was absurd, the ultimate audacity of someone living in wealth and privilege and utterly disconnected from the reality of paying bills. My good friend Mimi had invited me to this women's retreat I was barely divorced, the entirety of my life had unraveled like a cheap Walmart sweater. Design my life? "Are we gonna play dress-up, too?" I wondered with concealed cynicism.

Yet two years later as I kept slogging away at the factory job her question was lighting up in my brain like a neon sign on the Vegas Strip.

"How would I design my life if I could have any kind of life I want?"

I reached for ways to occupy my mind during those long factory shifts amidst the catatonic whir of the machines. I found myself occupied with her question. How would I design my life? My cynicism from two years prior had given way to curiosity and reflection. I began to allow myself to daydream, to imagine myself living a different kind of life than the one that had me tethered to the timeclock and mandatory overtime.

I noted that I did not pine for a life of leisure sipping cocktails on a sun soaked beach. Instead, I fantasized about unbridled time and energy to create and make art, to allow my personal hobby of art making to become front and center in my life rather than the little side thing I did when I had leftover time and energy. What if art making became front and center? What if my life centered on creativity? What would that look like ?

As I indulged daydreaming about an art-full life I also noted that community was something I longed for. The long work weeks of factory life often kept me isolated from spending time with the people I wanted to spend time with. My work life dominated everything - my time, my energy, my art making, my relationships, even my time in the outdoors which I had become such a forest lover as I retreated to the woods every chance I had as I healed up from the ending of my marriage.

What would it look like if I could design my life to be centered on

Creativity, Community and Connecting to nature?

With a blueprint in my hand, I set about determining how to hit reset on my life and make these Three C's a reality.

That was five years ago.

Once I made the reckless decision to leave the timeclock for an uncertain livelihood as a fulltime creative, all kinds of magic and mayhem transpired. I made a mess of things for a while as I went through the chaos of transformation. The butterfly is a gooey mess of a caterpillar dissolving before it's beautiful monarch wings flutter in the garden.

I am in such a privileged place in my life to make the leaps of faith that I do, yet it is my life and there have been ten thousand decisions made over the course of years that has led me to be able to make the wild and foolhardy decisions of today. My life, like every artwork I create, is made one decision at a time.

I Live centered on creativity, community and connecting to nature because I Decided To. To have different outcomes for my life is to make different decisions. So I decided to leave the timeclock behind five years ago. So far it has worked out pretty good despite the odds being against me pretty much every step of the way. I was an unproven artist and an unproven solopreneur yet here I still stand with a tank full of grace and grit to stay the course.

The winds of change have been gusting up again. They blew the map right out of my hands. And that's ok, for I still possess that inner compass of my three C's, that I continue to determine my decisions from my core values of a life lived centered on creativity, community and connecting to nature. I'm doing a lot of shifting right now as I shapeshift into the next evolution of my one wild and wonderful life. I keep on designing it on the go as if all of my life is one great unending artwork.

Creativity. Community. Connecting to nature. This is the audacity of my life lived by design.