Divesting from productivity, remembering creativity.
An exercise for reconnecting with decolonised creativity...
Our creativity is sacred.
It’s an access point into our liberated humanity.
Creativity and ingenuity — the kind that exist outside colonial capitalist prescriptions of productivity and extraction — are desperately needed for any successful revolution.
If we cannot imagine a world beyond colonial capitalist patriarchy, we cannot build it.
If we cannot imagine a relationship with ourselves outside of the identity we were indoctrinated into by the empire, we cannot cultivate it.
Recovering our creativity from the extractive and domination-centric paradigm we live in is step zero in embodying the role we’re here to play in building the liberated world we all long for.
Creativity consciousness and productivity consciousness…
Inside of colonial capitalism, our humanity and everything that comes with it, is seen as a series of resources to extract.
Creativity is no different.
Wild creativity, when it’s extracted by colonial capitalist patriarchy, becomes a resource to funnel into productivity and profit.
Within this paradigm, all our creative faculties exist solely for the purpose of producing value.
Creativity, for creativity’s sake, is totally worthless inside this framework. Creativity is only worth anything as a resource to frack and extract — much like colonisers and capitalists frack and extract resources from the Earth.
These precious resources are worthless and useless on their own. They only have value after they’ve been extracted and funnelled into profit and productivity.
Our creativity, once it’s been fracked, extracted, and funnelled through the production line like this, will not a liberated world make.
Coming back into remembrance of raw creativity means taking our creative faculties OFF the production line we’ve created inside our own minds, and allowing it to exist for its own sake.
Only when creativity itself has been liberated from the confines that colonial capitalism forces on it, can it be worked with as a force of recovery and revolution.
For the purposes of this conversation here, let’s call it the difference between creativity consciousness… and productivity consciousness.
Productivity consciousness sees value only in THE THING BEING MADE.
Creativity consciousness sees value in THE MAKING.
One puts all the emphasis on the end product, and the other puts the emphasis on the channel that the end product is coming through.
Creativity consciousness encourages us to develop a relationship with creativity as a faculty of our spirit, and an innate aspect of our Wild Humanity.
Human beings are creative creatures in the same way that human beings are loving creatures. We are digesting-with-our-bellies creatures. We are tactile creatures. We are relational creatures. We are bipedal creatures. These are simply aspects of what it means to be a person.
Creativity is no different. Creativity is one of the muscles of the spirit, in the same way that a bicep is one of the muscles of the arm.
You just have it, because you’re a person.
Tuning back into creativity as a faculty of your humanity, rather than as a resource for capitalism to extract and exploit, is how we reconnect with the kind of creativity that’ll get us through this mess.
A practical invitation...
During all of Aries season inside REWILDING, we’ve been exploring the art of decolonising our creativity and reconnecting with liberatory ingenuity. A whole lot of that work is divesting from the indoctrination that creativity, as a faculty of our humanity, only exists to extracted and exploited for profit + productivity.
The exercise I’m sharing with you today is one of the daily practices we’re working with this month.
Obviously the REWILDING space breaks it down into a tonne more nuance, with a lot more specificity, weekly group sessions for workshopping and ritual, and tailored-to-you integration prompts — but this is the gist of it.
This is an exercise to reconnect you with wild creativity as a faculty of your humanity and the fuel for your liberation.
You will need:
- a creative medium of your choice (drawing, writing, poetry, sculpture, painting, anything where you create a thing outside of yourself that you can point to and say "I made that")
- seven minutes, each and every day
For seven minutes each day this month, I'd love to invite you into creative reclamation.
Pick a thing, set a timer for seven minutes, and create something. Stop immediately when the timer goes off.
Once you're done creating the thing, destroy it.
Rinse and repeat, every day for a month.
This exercise is for flexing our creative muscles, and opening the creative channel. The point here is not to make "good" stuff. Our understanding of what is "good" has been colonised to fuck.
The point is simply to create stuff. And keep creating it.
For no purpose at all. That's why we're destroying it. We're letting it go immediately, because we're anchoring back into the Sacred Truth that our creativity is infinite, and we don't have to cling onto our creations our of fear that we "won't produce something of value again".
You're going to create a lot of shitty art that you're not happy with.
You're going to occasionally create brilliant art that you get attached to.
You're going to destroy all of it, and watch as your wild creativity grabs onto more and more and more ideas, forever.
We are reconnecting with the WILD here. We are divesting from the colonised understanding that our creativity exists to be extracted from for profit and productivity.
Go pick a medium, set your timer.
(You have time for seven minutes. I promise.)
That’s it.
Some things to remember as you’re taking the plunge here…
The point of this exercise is to reconnect with the FACULTY of creativity. For the purposes of this little seven-minute exercise, you are not building a vast and beautiful body of work. You’re basically going to the gym. This is getting your creative reps in, to strengthen your connection to liberated creativity — for creativity’s sake.
You might find that you have huuuuuuuge amounts of resistance to destroying your work after you’ve made it.
That’s okay. Do it anyway. I promise it’ll be enormously liberating.
(I can say this with absolute certainty, having just spent almost three weeks watching this exact process take place for everyone inside the REWILDING space)
Resistance to destroying your work will often come from one of two places:
(1) - you have accidentally created an emotional attachment to the end product.
Loving your art and being unwilling to let it go is still value-based projection that we’re putting onto the end product of our creativity. We are subtly saying, “my creativity is valuable because I made this thing with it.”. Do you see the very subtle productivity-consciousness here?
I’m not saying you should burn absolutely everything you’ve ever made. I am saying that for the purposes of this exercise, destroy whatever comes out of you inside this seven minute container.
This will gently train your brain away from dictating value based on product, and toward dictating value based on innate process.
Very tricky to get bogged down in worth-is-productivity indoctrination when there is literally no productivity. Because we actively destroyed it. 😉
(2) - your creative faculties are SCREAMING to be honoured more.
If this seven minute window is literally the only time in the past five years that you’ve allowed yourself to be actively creative, you’re going to have an understandably hard time destroying your work.
There might be layers of grief present here that you don’t want to face right now. There might be humiliation or embarrassment. All of that is okay.
If you’re struggling to let go of the hard evidence that you are in fact a creative person, let me remind you that the evidence isn’t on the page or the canvass in front of you. It’s within your body.
You’re a creative person because you’re a person. End of.
The end product of your creativity is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if it exists or not, if it’s “good” or not, if you love it or hate it or hide it or shout about it from the rooftops.
Your creative faculty has nothing to do with that piece of art at all.
Your creative faculty is part of your humanity.
You don’t need to point to anything outside of you to prove your creativity. It’s innate, and it can’t ever go anywhere.
If you do experience massive amounts of grief or resistance when it comes time to destroy your work during this exercise, remember that spending just a few weeks doing this practice every day will liberate your creativity ENORMOUSLY in ALL OTHER areas of your life as well.
This will be the thing that gets you back into writing that book you started years ago but abandoned when you got “too busy” for (or whatever your sacred creative calling is).
This will be the practice that reconnects you with the INFINITY-NESS of your own creativity.
You don’t have to hoard it. It’s infinite. You can take and take and take from your creative channel, it never loses anything. That infinity-ness is already built in. It’s a part of you.
This is just about reconnecting with it.
Just like having stronger muscles will help you run faster, a stronger connection with your creative faculties will help you think more openly and critically about how to show up for collective liberation.
So please, for the sake of your liberated creativity, and for the sake of a world that desperately needs it… set yourself up with a 30 day container for this exercise.
Use the lunar cycle if you like. A full menstrual cycle works too. Inside REWILDING, we’re working with the Solar months.
It doesn’t matter what map you use. As long as it’s a commitment of at least 30 days. Each day during this container, set a timer for seven minutes. I PROMISE you can find seven minutes somewhere. Spend seven minutes with your creativity, and when that timer goes off — rip up the paper. Delete the file. Scribble over the drawing. Whatever you need to do to destroy and let go of the “end product”.
See how much stronger your creative faculties become after just thirty days of this.
And to do this work in a more structured container, with a community of liberation-centric witches around you, weekly sessions for workshop, ritual, and integration, and as much or as little support as you need along the way — come and join us inside REWILDING.
We’re closing tomorrow with the full moon in Libra, so make sure you get your application in TODAY so that I can hold a spot for you ❤️
We’ve got one more week left of working with decolonised creativity, and when the sun moves into Taurus, we’re moving into a month of taking up space and using our voices for collective liberation.
You’re gonna want to be there for that. Your voice has power, our movement needs it, and you deserve to be held and supported as you come into deeper embodiment of it.
Click the button below to join us. We’d love to have you.
