Tag Archives: Creative Process

Halloween Creativity 2017

At A Spacious Place we believe in creating in community, because the sharing of ideas and feedback helps the creative process. Last Sunday night, friends of A Spacious Place gathered to carve pumpkins, decorate calaveras (sugar skulls), and share a meal. We cheered one another’s creations, laughed at the stories shared, and enjoyed the food offerings. Below are some of our calaveras and our pumpkins that lit the night on Halloween. Enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them.

Gutting the pumpkin…                                          Time to carve your ideas into its skin

 

 

 

 

 

Here are the final results

           Woodstock singing                                                         Creepy face

Ghostly face                                                “Ruh-roh, Raggy!”

Snoopy howling “Aroooo”

 

And calveras galore

             

We hope that you had a fun, safe Halloween, and that your spooky creating time was enjoyable.

September 2011 Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , , , , ,

Follow the Learner

A Spacious Place is founded on what we call our six “Playground Principles.”  Read an overview of “Follow the Learner,” the second of our six “Playground Principles,” below.

2. Follow the Learner: A Spacious Place sets up an environment rich in choice-making opportunities. Participants feel safer and more valued when they are provided with a range of choices for creative/educational/spiritual exploration. We invite participants to choose activities based on their interests.

We seek to avoid the “My Way or the Highway” approach, in which the guide communicates one “right way” to do art, to express learning, and/or to think about things spiritual. Instead, we favor an egalitarian approach that recognizes the worth of all people and that honors the unique shape of each human heart.

Our symbol for “Follow the Learner” is a set of paper dolls. Rather than favor a “one-size-fits-all” approach, in which every participant, like a paper cut-out, is taught in the same way, “Follow the Learner” seeks to provide an environment adapted to each participant’s learning and creative needs.

Do you take creative risks? Would you like to challenge others in their creative process? Then you are our kind of people and we’d love to hear from you!

February 2011 Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , , ,

Am I Creative?

A grandfather watches patiently as his granddaughter lifts fallen cedar bark into the nooks of two cedar trees: places the bark, steps back, places another strip of bark, steps back, studies her creation, rearranges it. For the child, this moment is All.

In his yard, another child hoists curved PVC pipe to his lips and exhales, creating a poignant, otherworldly tone. Exhaling, he moves the tone up and down the scale, absorbed in the magic he is creating.

These children never ask themselves, “Am I creative?” They might as well ask, “Does my heart beat?” “Do my lungs exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen?” They are, naturally, creative. We all are.

We express our creativity every day:

  • in how we guide children through the rough waters of human growth;
  • in the charts or graphs we prepare to communicate concepts;
  • in the ways we adorn our living space or our bodies;
  • in handmade gifts we create, from a PB & J sandwich to a CD mix of special tunes; and
  • in the ways we show love for other creations/creators, to name just a few.

How do you express your natural creativity? We’d like to know!

August 2010 Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , , , ,

Messiness & Chaos

Thursday of creativity camp week is Messy Art Day—I figure after three days of creative concentration, it’s time for a break. We head outside for ice sculpting (otherwise known as hacking away at large ice blocks with butter knives, then running relays with those blocks held against the belly as some sort of endurance ritual), marble painting (otherwise known as drenching marbles in paint, plopping them onto a sheet of paper in large box and, by tilting the box this way and that, sending the marbles careening across the page, leaving tracks of clean and muddy color in their wake), and shaving-cream painting (which starts as shaving cream and powdered tempera on old cookie sheets and ends up with campers as their own foamy and colorful artworks).

Sitting in the sweltering heat, watching it all, I am reminded of the need for chaos in the creative process. Indeed, the word “process” hardly seems, in such times, to fit; there appears to be no direction at all. We are simply being one with our mess!

Messy Art Day ends with a garden hose baptism. We traipse inside, shimmering with water, dripping on the floor, shivering, and grinning from ear to ear.

—And it is good!

What are your experiences of chaos and process?