Restarting Creativity with the New Year

I like to start the new year restarting my creativity. Not just in my work with the authors whose books I’m editing, not by making resolutions—stop eating junk food, be nicer to my neighbors, wash the kitchen floor … you know the drill—but by doing something creative. Since childhood, creativity has always been important to me. I was forever writing stories, drawing pictures, running around with my little Brownie camera (yes, I had a real Brownie), inventing games. It seems like half the events in my life turned into stories. When my brother joined the Boy Scouts, I had to write a story that I called “My Life as a Boy Scout.” I tried to sell it to Boys’ Life. Early rejection slip.

About twenty years ago, my friend Suzan inaugurated what she called Goal Board Sunday, usually the second weekend of January. She invited a dozen of her friends (most of them New Agers, plus me, the only witch in the room), hauled a ton of old magazines out of her garage, and prepared light refreshments. We guests were instructed to bring poster board, more magazines, pens, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue sticks, and refreshments. We then set about putting the law of attraction to work. We cut pictures of things we wanted to manifest during the year out of magazines and pasted them in nice even rows across their rectangles of poster board. One of my friends pasted a picture of a red car on her goal board; by the end of the year, she was driving a bright red Mustang. Another pasted down pictures of computers; come spring, she had upgraded. The law of attraction works. Of course, you can’t just sit around passively and wait for it to work … but that’s the subject of a whole ’nother blog.

By the second year I was bored with rectangles and images in rank and file like a parade. I craved color, design, harmony, balance. I wanted to put the stuff of dreams on my goal board. Well, maybe it wasn’t a proper goal board anymore. I was turning it into a collage. To me, it's a work of art. Now don’t get me wrong—although my mother and brother were artists, and I’ve know some truly fine artists, I don’t consider myself a real artist. I once took a right-brain drawing class and drew a spectacular contour drawing of a brussels sprout, but that doesn’t make me an artist. I have good eyes, though; I know that artistic principles apply not only to illustrative art but also to music, writing, design, and other avenues of artistic endeavor.

What did I do? First I went for colored poster board. As the years have passed, I notice that I’ve usually gone for green, purple, and blue, though I’ve also been to red and yellow. Next, I laid my round altar top on the poster board and drew around it. I was the only one in the room working in the round. Then I went for pictures of gardens. I like opening doors, paths of stone or brick, trees, lake and mountain scenes. And I didn’t just line these images up on my collage. I overlapped them, I trimmed them, I found ways to make one image lead to another above or below it or next to it. I cut pictures out of catalogs, too—headlines like Act Old Later (which I have used two years in a row) and Breathe and Relax. This year, I’ve got one that says Happiness Is an Inside Job. And goddesses. Sophia (whom you can see at the top of my home page), Dame Fortuna with her cornucopia and her wheel, Green Tara and White Tara, Athena, Sarasvati with her vina, Hera. You get the idea. Every year, I had at least seven goddesses on my goal board. And glittery paper and glittery stickers. If you go to my Facebook page, you can see part of last year’s goal board behind me in my headshot.

After ten years, Suzan’s friends got too busy for her Goal Board Sunday, so she discontinued. But I kept going. I like have my own, private work of art hanging on the wall above my computer. It’s nice to look at. It inspires me. It reminds me to be creative.

I made my 2010 goal board last weekend. In the bottom quarter are big wooden doors opening inward. On the doors are cartoon draws of cats; they don’t look like my cats, but they seem to express my cats’ personalities. To the right of doors is a big headline that says My home is a mess … but my homepage looks fantastic. Because 2010 is numerologically a 3 year, I made a photocopy of Card III, the Empress, from my favorite tarot deck and pasted her right above the 2010. There’s a little photo of me on the collage, also a little photo of Michael Ball. Every year I hope and wish that I’ll have the time and money to go to England again and see him on stage or in concert. This year’s goddesses are the Winged Nike, Green and White Taras, Sophia, Sarasvati, Dame Fortuna, and Lakshmi. And—for the first time in twenty years—there’s a god there, too. Mars was not originally a war god; he was a Latin agricultural god who defended his people and his turf, which is why he was conflated with Ares. Over the past two or three years I have prayed to him to help protect my apartment and the building I live in. Also to encourage my upstairs neighbors to be quieter. My work with Mars has worked, so this year he’s on my goal board. Like every year, there’s also a border of glittery stickers around the edge—Blessed Bees, flowers, stars, fancier flowers, fancier stars. Some people might deem it tacky. I think it’s gorgeous.

And creative. I spent five hours, nonstop, creating this collage that is now hanging on my wall. I look up and see glitters and goddesses and green trees, and I feel inspired. It seems to me that my creativity flowed into my goal board just as it flows into the work I do sitting here at my keyboard. I do creative writing. I put on my creativity cap (which is like a thinking cap) when I edit books for authors who aren’t altogether sure how the writing process works. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” they get my creativity as well as my education, and some of that creativity shines out in glittery stickers and pictures cut out of magazines and pasted on green poster board.