Cultivating our creativity to dream the world
Let’s look at the name of my practice.
Creative Care Cult(ure)
Creativity and expression is one of our most primal abilities. As humans, we’ve been expressing our sense of self, our beliefs, our values, our thoughts, our ideas and our cultures throughout time. All these social conditions influence us. What we learn about our environments and the world essentially allows us to become inspired in many ways. We are continuously experiencing life and feeling the spectrum of emotions.
We all have the capacity to create. It is really hard to (un)learn that our creative ability is not about being successful, sellable, talented and productive. Rather, we should see it being about our relationship with our own imagination and being able to be in dialogue with ourselves and the world we inhabit. To make something simply because we can and we want to, to follow a curiosity with wonder, to play, experiment and explore. To be able to imagine something that doesn't exist yet!!!
What is ‘self-care’ really?
I believe it is important to note that self-care didn’t begin as an indulgence - it began as a survival strategy. Especially for those who were never given the luxury of ease.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
- Audre Lorde
This quote is a declaration born from the body of a black, queer, chronically ill artist and activist who understood that care (for those whose lives are constantly devalued) is survival work. When Lorde wrote this, she was challenging a world that demanded her labour over her life. Political warfare here in this context does not mean violence of any kind, it means radical resistance through care.
Her words remind me that tending to my body, mind, and creative spirit in a world designed to exhaust and erase is resistance. This understanding of self-care is intentional. Radical. And very, very necessary. You can read my previous note on (Self)Care.
Culture is CultivatED.
It is grown through what we practise, what we value, what we make space for and what we choose to pass on to current and next generations.
Every time we gather, make, tell a story, care for a place, share knowledge or imagine something different, we are actively participating in culture.
So what happens when we become intentional about what we're cultivating? What do we choose to devote ourselves to? What do we tend? What do we nourish? What do we practise? What kind of culture grows from that devotion?
At the intersection of my personal creative practice and my community work are three things: Creativity, Care and Culture.
At its heart, Creative Care Cult(ure) is about making space - physical, creative and imaginative - for people to connect, express themselves and imagine what could be possible within the environments they live in. I’m deeply interested in cultivating spaces where young people can create and dream, reimagine what is possible, and actively participate in shaping and rebuilding the world around them.
Ultimately, I want to cultivate a culture where young people have the space to imagine beyond what already exists and the agency to participate in creating what comes next. I want creativity to be something that lives within communities, not something people have to go elsewhere to find. If we can create spaces where young people feel safe enough to dream, supported enough to experiment and empowered enough to participate, perhaps we can begin to cultivate different kinds of communities and eventually.. different ways of being in the world.
