5 gifts from your chatty creative heart
If I give my heart to you,
Then I’ll have none.
And you’ll have two.
This little ditty might be true if you’re talking about chatty candy hearts, but remember what they say about love and creativity, “the more you give away, the more you have to give.”
Happy Valentines week, my stARTistic heartthrobs! I hope you have dinner reservations locked down, if that’s your jam. And if this is not your season for romantic love, I hope you USE THIS WEEK to get the love flowing – to people, places and projects that get your creative heart pounding.
Fifteen years ago, while trying to maintain momentum on a big painting I’d been putting off, I discovered that drawing and painting the schwoopy heart shape gets my hands loosened up and puts my head in a sweet place. So a heart-healthy habit was born!
Now, I accidentally make dozens of heart paintings every year, just while mixing paints and cleaning the paint off my brushes from other paintings…while listening to my creative heart.
Heart paintings have became my studio buddies…mini muses telling me whether I am craving to work loose and sloppy or slow and detailed. It is as if these paintings speak to me and through me…my own creative heart helping to get me stARTed and keep me focused to the finish.
Our creative hearts want big things for us. Whatever your ideas or creative cravings, my wish for you this sweet holiday is that you grab the bag of bling that awaits you, just for showing up.
Grab the FIVE THINGS our creative hearts are aching to give us:
Nourishment
Believe your therapist and Oprah: our hearts have more to give when we give them what they need. The stuff we get from creating - meaning, connection, beauty, introspection – are the same things our human hearts need to heal and thrive.
Get moving.
Get loud.
Get curious.
True stories
Your heart knows stuff. In fact, it knows more than it remembers. Getting to our best authentic ideas comes in finding our own truth…in discovering our own forgotten stories. Creative hearts help us get to the good stuff – to dig in, to start writing, start talking, or start drawing.
Creative courage
It’s not our hearts that keep us from making bold moves, it’s some other part of us – our amygdalas, our stomach acids, our nervous friends. Creative hearts push us to break through the gatekeepers of survival mode. They want us to be in learning brain mode, and they will show us the way given the tiniest opening. Roll the dice. Take a chance. Get in the game. Run. Reach. Put your heart into to it.
Friendship & Free Coaching
Our creative hearts are great listeners. They listen to our longings, our fears and our despair. They hear our joy, our curiosity and our ambition. They love it ALL, unconditionally. They have hugs and high fives for whoever comes to play.
But nobody’s getting paid, so like friendship, it goes two ways. If a creative heart is out of practice or out of shape, you may have to take the lead. You might have to talk to it like a best friend in a bad relationship. You may have to kidnap it, feed it quinoa and take it for a paint & sip night out.
A sense of humor
I’ll speak for myself…sometimes my heart gets heavy about stupid stuff and the only way to lighten the load is levity. When my daughters were teenagers, I used my painted hearts to find the humor in the every-day friction and the heartbreak of losing them to adulthood.
I’m not suggesting your stARTistic sense of humor will arrive in the form of snarky mom advice. It may arrive by penning a parody of a business plan that is getting too intense, or by goofing around with a character you’re creating for your screenplay, or by putting your painting out in the rain.
I post hearts like this on social media to stir up conversations among parents, about my advice book Do Your Laundry or You’ll Die Alone.
Sometimes the gifts from our creative hearts don’t show up directly visible or valuable. Sometimes, however, they become accidental creations we didn’t know we needed for a book we didn’t know we were writing. I pieced these early hearts together for this spread in Do Your Laundry or You’ll Die Alone.
Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to start a chat with your creative heart. If you don’t know what to say, here are some conversation starters.
P.S. This week, my hometown football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won the Super Bowl in overtime. My actual heart was beating at an unhealthy rate when we scored the winning touchdown. It was Valentine’s week, and my creative heart had to weigh in.
