What is this place?

Suddenly you are 60. Or 50. Or 80. Or 43. Maybe even 12 1/2.You’ve been through some shit, and you’ve probably shut down parts of yourself that once gave you joy, or something related to it. It had to be done, and maybe you would even do it again. Maybe you gave up parts of yourself for love, or career. Or inertia. Why or for what purpose matters, alot, but not for right now. 

 

What matters for now is that, wherever you are, it’s very far from the shore of this true thing in you. I’m going to call that your creativity. 

 

We don’t really live in a place that values creativity, or even recognizes it when it’s actually there. 

 

But I don’t know anything that fosters freedom, courage, and joy like creativity does. And that doesn’t even touch upon the power of beauty.

 

Discovering or reconnecting with your creative self is a messy business, with no guarantee of any specific outcome. It resides outside of that. And if you’ve been working in a corporate or institutional environment for a while, you may have forgotten how to do that.

 

But if you can remember what it felt like to play, then you know where this is headed. And if you’ve come to a place where you are feeling a bit stubborn about how you want to live in this world, in this particularly fucked up moment, then you’re ready to reconnect.

 

Bad cellist is not really about learning an instrument. It’s about wrangling with whatever’s keeping you from your creative self. 

 

For me, I do that through my relationship with this instrument, my cello. 

 

And it gets ugly. Which is kind of beautiful. Because it’s like having a conversation with fear, and walking away afterwords, ready for all of it.

 

It’s how you create the conditions for (your own) creativity. With room for all of it, the good and the bad. And, obviously, the ugly.