Why Creation Still Matters in Times of Destruction

Art by blue sky butterfly studio

It’s a bitterly cold February afternoon, and we haven’t spoken in a while, dear blog readers. I know I’m not the only person who struggles in wintertime. No matter how much I recognize that the grey months are coming, or try to mentally prepare, it doesn’t really help prevent it from happening. I’ve just felt uninspired for the past half month or so, and I don’t want to post blogs on here just to fill the space with insincere content. I could have expected that starting in January I was going to be having a hard time with Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I don’t think anyone anticipated the other reason why I’ve been so quiet.

On January 6th, I was sitting at work when my phone started buzzing with conversation in my WhatsApp group chat with some of my closest friends. “Go to a news website,” they said, so I went to CNN’s page, and was dumbfounded and shocked by what I saw. Our country’s Capitol building was being invaded by zealots attempting a coup. I don’t have to go into every detail about what happened that day, nor do I want to, but the experience for me was eerily similar to 9/11, when I had to try to work a normal workday and assist customers, all the while watching surreal and violent footage play out in real time.

The pandemic has been a chance for humanity to showcase the best of itself, and there are certainly examples of our having risen to the challenge. Unfortunately, in small-town Ohio, I more often see humanity succumbing to a selfish “me first” attitude. I hate the fact that seeing someone’s face fully showing in a public place now makes me recoil, and I hate even more that I see it so often, people refusing to see that their “rights” are risking the lives of others. I’m exhausted from the constant survival mode we’ve all been in for close to a year now. And watching the hate on the faces of the men and women breaking glass, screaming in the halls of a place that is meant to be respected, and worse…I think it subconsciously affected me more than I realized at the time.

The remarkable artist, Miss Wondersmith, recently posted a raw and heartfelt video on her social media. Wondersmith has a chronic illness, and in the video she said something that struck me hard. She said that people expect someone who is going through a hard time to put some sort of lesson or uplifting angle on what they share publicly. That most people don’t want to hear about struggles or pain if there isn’t a happy ending or a moral at the end of it. I suppose part of why I’ve been quiet is because I didn’t see the uplifting part of how I was feeling about humanity, the state of the world, my own experiences. And this blog, along with all my social media, isn’t supposed to be a place of politics or heavy topics. It’s mean to be a celebration of creation and wonder, magic and nature.

But life in today’s world cannot be all magic and nature. Not a true life. Not an honest one. The country in which I was born is greatly divided right now. We are sick, and we are bleeding. And I can’t deny that, nor can I just post lovely photos of moss and trees right now without acknowledging it. I am working on a blog post I hope to share soon, something I’m calling a gentle personal manifesto. Because even though I want this website to be a sanctuary, I am also not someone to stick my head in the dirt and pretend nothing is happening. I have to stand for something beyond the (important) belief in magic and wonder and imagination. And I want to make my feelings clear. Be on the lookout for that.

For a while, I couldn’t see the hope. But a couple of things recently occurred that helped me start to move beyond the stuck place I was in. I stumbled across a quote that was just the reminder I needed:

“We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction.” – Andrea Gibson

I can’t just go back to sharing artworks of fauns and photo explorations in the woods without honestly acknowledging the state of things here in this post. To do so would be disingenuous and would ignore the fear and worry I feel right now about the world around me.

But I can still share those things, because to do so is an act of creation. And this world needs that. It needs every small candle we can light, held up against the billowing winds of hate and rage. We need art that protests, art that moves people to bring about change and healing. Revolutionary creations. But we also need creations that celebrate the best of what we can be, the beauty of nature, the wonders that we can explore in our minds and in realms that may or may not exist (they do) along side of us in liminal spaces. To do this isn’t a waste. It isn’t escapism. It is its own form of protest. It is saying…see this tale about a world where faeries cavort together in glee and mischievous joy, celebrating their strangeness and differences together? See this myth about an old woman who only grows more wise and strong and revered as her hair silvers and her hands stiffen with age? About a resourceful boy who can defeat the giant in his life? See this story about a young girl who walked through the dark forests and emerged on the other side, changed, but still herself?

We still need those things, maybe now more than ever.