Hard Beautiful Work |A Musing on Creativity

Hola Beloveds!It has truly been a while. I've been restructuring a few things, creating and resting, and learning in the in-betweens of quarantine life.Over the last few months, I've gotten the chance to truly think about creativity--the beauty of it, the discipline, and the truly hard parts of creating.Creativity is hard beautiful work. Sometimes the act of creating feels like extricating pieces of myself onto paper, onto canvas, onto hardwood floors in movement. Every day I am learning how to do. Doing from a place of resting and from a place of wholeness.In two days I turn 25. I will have been alive for 25 years. Crazy to think about!  I will have been out of college going on four years, out of high school going on eight. I will have been living on my own for about a year. When  I think about creativity, lately what I've been thinking about is how hard it is-- how hard it is to wake up every morning and will myself to do the things I love to do. That in 25 years' time, I can still find it hard to do the things I feel makes me who I am. Not that my creativity is all that I am--it isn't-- but it is a part of me, a piece of me. It is pieces of me that make up my wholeness and in creativity, I have a lens that allows me to see life in a way that makes it worth living.When I wake up in the morning and I see the sun or I see the clouds that are the beginning of the birth of a storm, I think of God. I rise from my bed and I pray and I give thanks for the day before me. I say affirmations and I give gratitude. There are mornings where I am at war with who I used to be and who I want to be. I am at war with the fear that maybe what I do won't be good enough and maybe if I try it won't be worth it, so why should I even try at all. Why make effort upon choices that may beget nothing?Sometimes I think the hardest thing in life is to actually try and not be afraid of succeeding. To actually try and not be afraid that other people are watching.In my conversations with God about creativity, I feel this excitement--this calmness, this steady, yet weighty beautiful urgency to create and to remember Who has caused me to create in the first place.Creativity has been given to me, as to many people, as to all people, and in it there is beauty. There is grace. There is healing and there is wholeness.And every day I'm waking up learning to rest in wholeness, to rest in healing. Every day I am waking up creating not to strive, but creating to be. Creating to rest, creating to love, to have laughter, to have peace.So, why do you create?What is it within you that pushes you to do the thing you were made to do? Sincerely, a woman learning to be  creative,Antavia Mason~If you like poetry, find my debut poetry book For Wonder in the Wilderness here:

~If you want more tips and info on creativity, subscribe to my YouTube channel Pen of the Beloved! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1tVl7wjHWk&t=59s *Featured Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.com