THE WHEEL OF CREATIVITY®

Today is the first day of Spring. 

Harbinger of all things new and vibrant and pure.

Like the four seasons in each year, The Wheel of Creativity is divided into four quarters.

As you move around the Wheel from Home to Chaos and back again, these four quarters, like seasons, take you into new energetic places.

Four Quarters of the Wheel

1. Vision is the domain of the mind and corresponds to the element of air. It is where your thoughts rule, and where ideas are generated.
2. Exploration is the domain of the spirit and corresponds to the element of fire. It is where your intuition takes you out away from what you know, and where you do your research.
3. Incubation is the domain of the heart and corresponds to the element of water. It is where your emotions nourish the seed of the new growing within you, and where you begin developing a prototype.
4. Cultivation is the domain of the body and corresponds to the element of earth. It is where your sensations connect you with the world around you, and where you do the work to make your idea real and useful in the world.

Four Seasons in One Day

Your thoughts are the lines you draw on the canvas of your life. They outline the pictures you make, whether a single creative project or an overarching career track that leads you through your life. They give the structure to the creations you will develop in your day and in your life.

Your intuitions – hunches or instincts – lead you out of your head into the world around you to discover what you don’t know, to engage with others and with what’s already in the world around your idea. Your spirit inspires the work and makes it universal, taking it beyond your limited personal vision into the context of all of life.

Your emotions and your feelings are the colors you use to paint within the lines you’ve drawn with your thoughts. They give richness and depth and texture and your original idea. They give space for the character of the new thing to emerge on its own and restore your passion as you fall in love with the work you’re doing.

And finally, your senses connect you with the physical world around you. They put you into the real experience of life. They connect you with other human beings who share that experience, those who will view your work, connect with it and be moved by it.

Whatever Comes… Be Inspired

Your circumstances are the subject of your creative work. They are the model in your figure drawing class, the protagonist in your story, the rhythm of your poem.

Everything in the world around you inspires you, either by your love or hate of it. Your work of art is what you do with those things, the forms you create with your mind, spirit, heart and body. Every one of us has a different vision, and every vision is important and valuable and creative. Your sketch comes only through you. The world is richer when you let it come and poorer when you don’t.

Reach out and Take Action

If you’d like to find out more about how you can use the Wheel of Creativity in your life, have fun exploring this blog. And sign up for updates on my Spring book tour itinerary to find out when I’ll be in a city near you.

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Whatever their shape, size, color or creed…

there is a great big world of people to love.

We all have a Valentine.

Let love flow through you today.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

from The Wheel of Creativity

and

Katherine Robertson-Pilling

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The Call

One of my first big creative adventures came in 1994. I was living in Chicago and had just received a fellowship for a Master’s program in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College when I got the call. The intuitive calling, which came through my morning writing practice, was to leave Chicago and move to LA.

I had no rational explanation, no job, no place to live in LA and only one friend there. I made my living as a writer, but the calling was not to write in LA (though I later did so). Still it was so clear and true that I knew I had to trust it. So I responded. I gratefully declined the fellowship, packed my car and set out.

The Journey

A friend of mine, who agreed to make the cross-country trip with me, gave me a recording of songs he had compiled. My favorite was “In The Garden” by Van Morrison. In this haunting song, Morrison sings about a young woman who returns to a garden transformed; the refrain of the song is:

“No guru, no method, no teacher

just you and I and Nature in the garden.”

I remember at that time feeling how deeply true this was for me, as I set out on the journey that would transform me.

The Mystery

What I was doing did not make sense at all. It was high risk and the outcome was highly unpredictable. Strange things happened from there. The place I was to stay fell through. My car was broken into and later stolen. Someone offered me a gorgeous home with five cuddly kitties. I got the first TV writing job I applied for. I found a community. I made a new life. Life itself took me out of all that I knew, made me very uncomfortable and then transformed me. And that was just the beginning.

The Path

A couple of years ago, I met someone at a party who’s become a good friend of mine since. She asked what I did, and when I told her she replied, “So, you’re a guru!” “No,” I cried, “Not that word, please!” Definitely not a guru.

Ever since my Chicago days, I have felt that when we look to gurus or we name people as our gurus, we often give them responsibility for our own path. Of course there are many things that we can learn from other people. There are many, many people ahead of us on any path who can guide us. But the truth we must live will always be found deep within ourselves through our own connection with Life.

We listen. We live. We learn. The path of truth, as the mystics have always known, is personal experience, validated by Nature in respectful relation to the rest of life.

The Hero… You

Each of you has a unique journey to make in life. There is no one who can teach you what direction you should go, because the path is yours alone. This is why the Hero is an archetype present in almost all stories and myths around the world. You make the journey, and the journey transforms you. This is what it means to…

Live CREATIVE.

With love always,

Katherine xo

To learn more about my experience and the key stops on your life’s creative journey, check out my book, The Wheel of Creativity: Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life, on Amazon.

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What has Life given you today to create with?

Last week, as I left the sushi takeaway near my flat, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and turned toward home. Suddenly I realized, out of the corner of my eye I had glimpsed something extraordinary. I turned back to see a tiny bird’s nest in the middle of the sidewalk. No bird in sight. I had almost missed it.

Instead I turned back, picked it up, and held it carefully between two fingers. The walk home, with this tiny treasure in my hand, was an impromptu lesson in how precious life can be, and how easily we can miss it.

I found a nest once before, on the driveway of our house in England, where it now sits on our living room bookcase. This is a very different place. Trees – aside from the stereotypical scattered palms – are less common here. The raw materials available to birds here are different.

Today’s nest is smaller. Both nests are uniquely beautiful. But this one is made almost entirely of feathers, with only a small internal structure of twigs to hold them in place.

As I walked home, I couldn’t help thinking that while the twigs provide a delicate structure for the nest, the bird who built this nest then plucked her own soft feathers to complete it. That spoke to me. What she created had her in it. And the words rose spontaneously within me, “Feather your nest.”

Birds must use the materials at hand to make their nests. They use what’s around them and weave it all together with elements of themselves. It’s their nature. They migrate. They settle. They nest. They create a family. They let it go. And then they do the same thing again, year after year.

I am fond of saying, when speaking with people about the Wheel of Creativity, that our circumstances are the raw materials with which we create our lives. My circumstances are different than yours. They are different than they were a year ago. And we all have our preferences.

Some circumstances may produce more comfortable nests than others. But each year, each day, each moment, it is in your human nature to create something new… to feel the longing, to build the nest, to give birth to something new, to set it free, and then to move on to the next thing. This is the natural creative cycle of life.

All we have to do is look to Nature to know that we are creative, and to understand how to live creatively. To my knowledge, birds do not argue with Nature. They do not wait for perfection. They feel the calling. They start the family. They build the nest. They do the work. They set their children free. And they sing.

Life wants you to create. Life is constantly seeking to perpetuate itself through you. You may prefer to wait until things are just so before you act. But in the end, if you are to have a nest in your life, you will create it.

What a privilege, this experience of being alive. What materials has life given you to make your nest today? What will you add of yourself to make the world a more beautiful place?

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It’s Easter Sunday. My step kids have gone home. And my husband is at sea. So I decided to get myself up from the computer where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately and go for a walk.

I took my iPod to keep me company and stave off those lonely holiday blues. But no sooner had I closed the door behind me than Life grabbed me by the senses. I was so impressed; I could not put the earbuds in my ears.

So off I went, down the quiet tree-covered lane I like to walk, with Life as my close companion, resurrecting me by the senses, restoring my connection with it in the creativity of Nature all around me.

Life’s raw improvisation, as I moved through it, was more exciting than any creative composition I had heard before. A few notes…

• Birds with such beautiful voices they could have taught me to sing
• Winter-stricken trees dressing up in new Spring greens and pastels
• The deep green bush sharing its pink camellias with the sidewalk below
• The little two-seater prop plane flying along the beach
• The man in the red sweatshirt who turned onto the lane ahead of me
• Five boys on bicycles discovering the depths of new voices
• Crossing the street, an untended green belt between me and the beach
• Meandering paths through mossy mounds of earth slightly lower than me
• A mini-prairie covered with bushes bursting with tiny yellow flowers whose scent reminded me of my childhood in Texas
• The sounds of hard wheels hitting the steel waves of the local skateboard park
• Stripes of colorful beach huts framing the seaside just beyond
• Then the sea, its perpetual percussion stirring up stones on the beach
• The long, wide beach at low tide, sandy patches stripped bare of stone by the waves
• Seagulls returning to the water, squawking at me for disturbing their peace
• A dozen smaller birds, for whom I was an excuse to catch the wind one more time, flying and soaring longer than was necessary
• The thundering roar of the roller coaster at the local Family Fun Fair
• The chute flying ahead on the beach, telling me there was at least one kite surfer out today
• The rich carpet of fresh green grass as I turned back toward home.

Another lane, with different birds, different trees, different flowers; and the story was the same. Life was beckoning me to live it, to feel it with all my senses, to appreciate the incredible richness of this moment. I could not have been lonely if I tried.

Wherever you are today, whomever you’re with (or not with), your world is equally as rich, your senses equally as hungry. So just for this day, step back from the computer, leave the iPod at home, and let Life in… in… in, to resurrect your senses with all that’s around you, and reconnect you with Life itself.

Happy Easter.

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Some days I just feel so much love for the Earth.

Today I was out for a walk, because the sun was out for a few minutes this morning. I had a plan to go one way and got to a turning point and turned a different way. I thought I would come back by way of the village, and instead I turned toward the beach.

I was looking for windsurfers. But when I got to the beach, there weren’t any. So I had this huge expanse of desolate, isolated beach with nobody on it. And it was low tide. The beach was really wide. And so I stopped and I danced.

It reminds me very much of my mermaid impressions, which I do in the sea. It’s the same thing, but the sea was just a bit farther out today. And then there was a piece of sea glass on the beach, which I’ve never found here before. It was an amazing experience.

I realize now that this is the way I make myself feel at home, by touching the earth where I am, putting my feet down, saying, “I’m here,” and experiencing myself in the place where I am. And so it’s been really quite amazing this morning. Surprising. I feel welcomed here… much more than I would if I had had coffee with a friend or had any of the things I think I need. It’s so simple.

Thank you, Earth.

Every moment is like a piece of sea glass. We can either stop and pick it up and count it as precious, or we can pass it. When we’re not present, when I’m not present, I miss all the little jewels of life, like the bird that just flew through my picture as I was taking a picture of my hand.

Life can be magic.

And for those of us who are fortunate enough to be in the place to think about that, let us not fail to do so.

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I suppose I was in a romantic mood. Less than 24 hours after my husband’s return from seven months at sea, we sat at Le Safari on the Cours Saleya in Nice. We just escaped a downpour of rain that had been building since we left the beach an hour earlier. The fruit and vegetable vendors tore down their stalls as the world-famous marché closed for the day, and street cleaners washed everything down.

I’m not sure exactly when I spotted it, but there among the tourists, locals and Saturday workers was a small blue balloon, caressing the bricks of the sidewalk as it floated along. Being a lover of anthropomorphism, I immediately assigned it feelings and thoughts and even a personality. I watched it follow the wind. I observed its effect on the world around it:  the masculine response was to kick it – sometimes gently, sometimes violently – while the children just wanted to play. One moment it was at the far end of the street; the next, carried along by the feet of many strangers, it had returned to my side.

I couldn’t help thinking of the 1956 film by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse called, Le Ballon Rouge. The Red Balloon won the Palme D’Or at Cannes for Best Short Film, and Lamorisse won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his 34-minute film with almost no dialogue. The film told the story of another balloon, born the same year I was, which befriends a young Parisian boy named Pascal, accompanying him around the city, following him home and to school, until a gang of jealous bullies destroys it.

As the street cleaners made their way through the market today, I heard the same dreaded sound Pascal had heard. Above the twitter of tourists, the stir of place settings and the motors of vendor vehicles, the pop of the blue balloon rang out. And then it was gone.

And that made me think of how similar we humans are. On the day my mother died, as her body lay lifeless in her home hospital bed, I felt the same thing. She is not there. The body is worn out, but the life goes on.

Today, sitting joyfully with my husband at the market, I saw once again that life is more than all this stuff. Life is not the blue balloon, but rather the air that fills it. That blue balloon gave a small bit of air the chance to move through and relate to the world. Our bodies do the same for us. As a tiny shred of blue lay motionless on the ground, the air that had filled it simply returned to its source.

Is it not the same for us? Is not our effect on the world made possible by our sense of separation from it? Do we not have a limited-time offer to make our impact? And when we are gone, does that impact not continue in the hearts and minds of those who’ve met us on the street? Each of those encounters is an opportunity to create something! Enjoy the ride!

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This has been a tough week for me.  I could cite circumstances and reasons, but the real difficulty has come in my response to them. So I’ll just go directly there, and save us both the boredom.

One of the most intimate pieces of advice I’ve ever received about writing (and it holds true for just about everything else in life too) is:

“You can’t take someone where you haven’t been yourself.”

I guess that little ditty sits at the heart of what I’m up to in the world. It’s the launch pad for my thoughts about the creative journey we’re all on in life. For me, and I believe for all of us, it gives meaning and context to the inevitable peaks and valleys along the way.

In my Creative Process Group this week we’ve been working with the second gate in the Wheel of Creativity™… Chaos. Chaos is the far side of the Wheel, as far from the metaphorical Home as you can get. If Home is what is known, ordered, stable and predictable, then Chaos is unknown, disordered, unstable and unpredictable. Yet, throughout all of Nature—from the origins of the universe, to the regeneration of our cells—it is the creative void from which all things come to be.

In the past 30 days, the word chaos appeared more than 10,000 times in the text of the New York Times online. A few tidbits from the headlines:

• Chaos in Yemen
• The Chaos of War
• Anti-Chaos Crusaders
• Chaos of Internet
• Signs of Chaos in Syria
• Bloody Chaos

…along with:

• Creating Amid Chaos
• Creations of Poetry and Chaos

The world is currently undergoing an enormous and sweeping transformation. In times of Chaos, the forms we have known dissolve, releasing energy from which new forms are created. It is a creative process, but not an easy one. The point of Chaos is a fragile time, and what we do in these hours and days and months will determine whether it leads us to failure or a new way of life.

Chaos appeared in my life this week as disappointment and self-doubt, when Life threw me several unexpected curves. I have embarked on this journey consciously, and I am grateful to recognize this place and to know it is leading somewhere good. In order to take my group through the gate of Chaos, I must go through it again myself. Its infinite creative potential exists not only for them, but for myself, as once again I come through that gate and find my Life on the other side, and myself clearer and stronger than ever.

Where in your life does the instability and unknown of Chaos appear? What could your response to it be?

Be brave. Leave a comment.

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Today I am flying to France after two weeks in the UK. It’s the first time I have taken this route to the airport, and it involves taking a bus from the train to the airport. While waiting for this bus in the fresh Spring air of May Day, I find myself standing beside a tree.

As I like to do with plants, I move toward this tree to inquire about the condition of its health. I look at its leaves, and they look a bit dry to me, even this early in the season. I look for its roots; they are wedged into a small opening in the brick sidewalk. What kind of soil does it grow in? What is its exposure to the wind? How much sun and rain does it get?

I look again and see that the tree is growing inside a cylinder of iron bars. Why? It seems absurd to me. Is this an insurance requirement, for the protection of small children? Is it to keep the tree safe from theft? Is the cage to keep the tree in? Or is it to keep us out? I don’t know, but I feel sorry for the tree.

On closer inspection, I can see that this tree’s cage is its wound. Several of the branches are growing into the bars, the bars cutting into the tree’s flesh as it grows. And I wonder, how long has this been going on?

Today is the anniversary of my mother’s death. Fifteen years ago today at Noon (straight up), my mother left her body in a hospital bed in her small apartment in Houston Texas, and went wherever it is we go. She was a few months shy of 80 years old. She had lived a good life, full of hardships as well as achievements. And she fought for her very last breath.

Two days earlier. In that very same bed, she looked me in the eyes and said, “I never got my turn.” As a physician and a psychiatrist, she lived her life listening to and caring for others. But she never gave herself permission to express her innermost self.

I remember thinking that afternoon as I sat with the empty shell of her body, as the fluid of her cancer-ridden cells drained into the bed sheets, that she had just worn her body out and it was time for her to go.

It occurred to me that day that life is a continuously flowing river. Our parents give us the vehicle that carries our spark of life in the world. We grow in a woman’s womb until it is too small, and then we are born. We continue to grow from children into adulthood and on into old age, until our vehicles become too small again. And then we shed them like worn-out skin and move into whatever new and larger form waits for us beyond this one.

My mother’s words of regret have guided me in these past 15 years to:

• Know that life is precious and I have a choice about how mine turns out
• Make it a priority to know what I want to express in the world and do it
• Give voice to my fear and doubt but never let them stop me

Sometimes the things we construct to protect us end up harming us in the end. Sometimes we need room to grow. And we must free ourselves from these unyielding constructions to have it. If my mother was not able to do this for herself, then my life can give dignity to hers if I take down the bars she could not.

I have always loved these words from George Bernard Shaw:

This is the true joy in life…

The being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

The being a force of nature… instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community… and that as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.  For the harder I work, the more I live.

I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no brief candle to me.  It is the splendid torch, which I’ve got a hold of for the moment.  And I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

What is your splendid torch? What are the bars that keep you safe? Bring them down.

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