#20: An ode to the reader’s creative act.
I don’t want an audience. I want a cohort of co-creators.
Writing you from Mississippi this week: We made it to #20! As we like to do when we hit a new “decade”, there’s an index of the topics we’ve covered in the last nine posts at the bottom. And before that, a little riff on what I’m learning about writing and reading and sharing ideas with all of you! On to the post…
Expanding creativity from art to existence.
Rick Rubin, a prolific and genre-spanning music producer recently released a book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. When it first hit the shelves, I passed. “What does a music producer of Adele and the Beastie Boys have to teach me? I’m not in the music biz, I barely count myself as a creative, this can’t possibly apply.”
But the book kept popping up in disparate outlets where I satisfy my cravings for new ideas — a weekly newsletter on creativity, a podcast about the human condition, the Wall Street Journal. Once I get a “recommendation” twice from the universe, I pay attention. Three times? I’m in.
Rubin’s points are straightforward yet revelatory. To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. Therefore we are all creators… of our lives. The person you will be tomorrow — with new ideas, experiences, thoughts, goals, influences — is different from the person you are today.
After twenty weeks of writing The Luminist, I was just beginning to see myself as a creative (for the first time in my life.)
But, according to Rubin’s definition, I have been a creative for my entire life. I couldn’t help but be one. None of us can. But for me, for most of my life, this “creative act” was unnoticed… I was focused on the destination rather than the (creative) process. I didn’t realize the power I had. Until Mike died.
In the last six years, I have been wildly intentional, inventive, experimental, and devoted to creating a new life for myself and my kids.
We think loss hinders our creativity but it actually nuclear powers it. It removes the veil of the ordinary, helps us not take ourselves so seriously, reveals the mystery threading through our lives, ignites the connection and the power inside of us. But you have to co-create this new life, this next evolution of yourself.
You must be an active participant.
My creative endeavor here at TL is a sacred contract I have with you, dear reader, to do what Rubin recommends — keep my input antenna sharp like a giant satellite receiving messages from outer space. But no Area-51 aliens here, just me receiving input from everything in my life. Noticing. Pulling it all together. Finding the common denominator.
Aggregate, integrate, illuminate. That’s my art.
Then you — your creativity, your agency, your power — come in. I have created an idea, but it’s just an idea. It’s not a fact. I’m not plucking a ruby red apple from an orchard branch and offering it to you, fully formed and ready to eat. Rather, I’m presenting you with a modern sculpture at the MOMA.
My dream is that you walk around that idea and view it from all its different angles, translating and absorbing it in a way that makes sense to you — serves you — based on your lived experiences, based on who you are.
You get to make it your own.
Find what works and leave the rest.
Let it inspire you to the epiphany that changes your life, your month, your day.
Offer it, in a revised version, to a friend who needed to hear it.
Use it as the foundation for an idea of your own that serves you and/or those around you better than my original idea.
Contemplate it until it evolves into something unrecognizable, then present it to the world in your own way, letting it spread new wings once again to seed new ideas for new people.
Butcher my words however you need to until they speak to part of you, awaken part of you, actualize part of you.
That’s what TL is all about. Taking the raw ingredients of your life and deciding what you want to make out of them. Like learning to take the hard, seemingly inedible berries from ancient, knotted trees and turn them into olives. (Or if you’re not an olive fan, the process of making cheese is also a wild thing to think about.)
We are all creatives — that’s what I took from Rubin and that’s what I want to deliver to you in the next 20, 50, 100, 1000 posts.
Adding to my standard themes of connection, power, and mystery, you can expect to read more from me about changing the way we think about our lives:
How to take action to transform our thinking.
How to balance trauma with resilience.
How to support each other better.
How to access the power inside.
But enough about me, this is really about you.
My antenna is up and ready to receive. Want to put something in my aggregation engine and see what comes out in a post? Want to co-create?
With creative agency,
Sue
One of the most satisfying parts of writing The Luminist is looking back and seeing how far we’ve come. So indulge me, would you? (And maybe catch up on old posts that you missed!)
#11: Restoring the magic of time.
From the kairos perspective, obstacles look less like mountains to climb and more like river bends to navigate… Follow the current, stay in the flow, see your opening and take it.
But to slip into kairos, we have to momentarily release our death grip on chronos.
We have to step back from our to-do lists and tap into our inner knowing. Which, let’s be honest, we could all probably use some practice at.
When we are in sync with what we really need — along with the world around us — we make the right choices at the right times… for our personal growth, our impact on the world, whatever we are trying to accomplish.
#12: How I became a heart-seeking missile (in a good way).
Though, six years later, [the hole in my heart where Mike should be] still aches regularly, I’m realizing that even the vacuum of loss has its technicolor lining.
It keeps us present, on the razor’s edge of life’s potential and pain, absolutely unwilling to settle for anything less than a life well lived (which I wrote a post about a few weeks ago!)
If we are able to hold a blackhole inside our chests and keep living, it must mean that — like outer space — our hearts are giant, expansive, seemingly never-ending… and capable of endless connection, care, and compassion.
#13: We are not islands.
Grief is a brutal emotion to carry around. No one can “fix” it. So it’s easy to feel like the best thing we can do is try to protect everyone else from our raincloud. And if in the meantime we figure out how to avoid or ignore the raincloud ourselves, even better!
But it doesn’t work that way!!
Denying painful emotions not only separates us from others, it separates us from ourselves.
#14: Things will be great again.
Those precious words from Wayne gave me permission to let life go on when so much of society assumed that my life would be permanently less-than, diminished, small.
Permission to let my family’s future unfold in exciting ways alongside the sad ways.
Permission to let my heart feel joy again while still being broken.
Permission to let this tragedy transform my life in not all good ways, but definitely some good ways.
#15: Sue Deagle, Despot (Part 1).
For the first time in my life, I didn’t even pretend to handle things well. I didn’t take myself seriously. I didn’t expect myself to “rise to the challenge.”
I asked the bare minimum of myself, and was gentle with myself when I couldn’t even deliver that.
I admitted mistakes easily and forgave myself immediately after that.
I learned to ask for help without feeling bad at all. And also how to tell people to politely f*** off because I did not have the time, strength, nor concern for anyone’s drama but my own.
There were only two things in the world that mattered to me, and my ego was not one of them.
#16: Sue Deagle, Despot (Part 2).
Because turns out power — at least the kind that humans can sustain, versus bulldozers — is not about control or perfection. It’s about being imperfect, acknowledging your limits, leaning into love and compassion, especially for yourself.
Then it becomes absolutely clear what’s non-negotiable for you. What is worth fighting for, changing, pushing through in this one wild and precious life. Not because you have anything to prove to anyone, including yourself. But because that’s what your life is for: showing up for the people, communities, causes, adventures that light up your heart.
In this new understanding, exerting power gives you life rather than taking away from it.
#17: Mystery is my religion.
I don’t know if synchronicities are “real.” And I don’t really care. It’s all part of the mystery… Please, no spoilers! I am giving myself permission to notice the weird coincidences and cherish them, maybe even call them miracles, without the burden of searching for causation.
Because they wouldn’t be any less magical if I knew how they worked. I’d just be less appreciative of their magic, less touched by it, less delighted by it. I’d explain it away. I wouldn’t let it make me feel something. And I want to feel something.
(FYI, causation is still very much a part of my daily life. Just only when it’s actually constructive, rather than simply a wet blanket.)
#18: Purpose isn’t the destination.
But by Friday afternoon, no matter how humbling the writing process has been that week, Leona and I are both in pinch-myself-awe at what has channeled through us. Even when it’s not that good!
Because we are on our hero’s journey. We are stepping outside our comfort zones, outside the walls that keep us warm and safe and a little anesthetized. We are feeling the elements whip around us — and inside of us — cheeks red from the wind and the sun, lungs burning with the effort, backs sweaty from blood pumping. We can look back, down the mountain, and see how far we’ve come. We can see the spot where we once pointed up from and said, “Do you think we can get there? I think we should try.”
We’re not “there” yet. But it doesn’t matter. We are trying, and because of it, we feel alive.
#19: Where words can’t take us.
To be human is to have an interior life and a soul that needs witnessing. Needs acknowledgement. Needs connection.
Needs to stand side-by-side with another soul, hip-deep in the roiling river of life, wide-eyed and wordless, taking it all in, knowing the other is with them, experiencing it too.
Love this and all you’re doing. Would love to co-create. And help inspire others to create and co-create some more.
Another gem, Sue. You've already created something special, and continue doing it. Consider me a co-. xo