Now is the Time
Creativity is the source of our power and we've been conditioned not to use it
Hello friends,
It is a gorgeous sunny day outside my studio window. My schedule is filled with tasks and activities equally split between tending to my workload and tending to my personal life, including running a curtain rod over to my daughter’s new apartment on the other side of the city. I’m excited to see her settling into this hard won season in her life and happy to lend a hand, or advice, whenever she asks.
Beyond the windows that hold my attention today, there is a world that is hurting. The news continues to shock and horrify, and I continue to swirl around the anxiety of having to push and promote my work as an artist in the midst of it all. As a highly sensitive canary-type creative human being, I am prone to worst-case-scenario imaginings and doomsday predictions. It is easy for my brain to spin out tales on an ordinary day, let alone when there is so much footage of the current traumas happening in the news.
In these doomsday ruminations, I find myself filled with regrets. To be clear, this isn’t the only thing I’m ruminating on, much of this part of my brain is occupied with compassion and ache for the sufferings of others. But there is the regret I feel mingled in with it all.
No small part of this story is influenced by the milestone trip around the sun that has brought me to my 60th year. Seeing that number—and adjusting to the reality that I can no longer get away with claiming I’m middle aged—has me thinking about all the things I wish I had known a whole heckuva lot sooner.
Regret for what could have been had I known. Regret for all the seasons of my life where my own hopes and dreams were put on hold for one reason or another.
Not to be selfish, I suffer no illusions that this regret is one of exclusivity. It is shared far and wide by many women like me. Women, who are far more likely to have been convinced that Now is not the time to pursue their own creative dreams.
Now is the time to focus on a sensible career track. Now is the time to focus on your engagement and planning your wedding. Now is the time to support your husband while he builds his career. Now is the time to focus on your children. Now is the time to focus on their college careers.
Now is the time to be sensible and sensible never allows for the whimsical notions of art and creativity.
We hit that age where the Now is the Time Commandments ascribed to those of us of the female persuasion morph into the messages that it is Now Too Late.
Now you’ve waited too long. Now it is silly to begin.
Now there are much more important things going on in the world. Now you can maybe have a little hobby or even a side hustle, but how dare you dream of it being anything more.
The thing about all of these messages we’ve received over the course of our lifetimes, is that they presume we aren’t capable of expanding beyond the prescribed role.
As if mothering is counter to being an artist.
As if living a creative life is limited to a formula and a timeline and must be connected to something of monetary value.
As if the world will ever stop spinning out reasons to keep us beholden to somebody else’s needs and standards.
As if we are merely one-dimensional cardboard cutouts without the ability to hold space for it all.
As if creativity isn’t the source of our power.
As if our power isn’t the source for creating change.
Love for my children and my grandchildren doesn’t negate the love I have for creating a work of art or mentoring others into realizing their own dreams of becoming. My love for them brings into sharp focus the urgency of connecting them to their own source of power. To hope and to dream of something more and to equip them to build it.
Compassion for the hurting populations isn’t solved by limits on my own activities and it isn’t resolved by my forgoing the things that bring me joy. Giving myself permission to create art and show others how, opens me to see beyond borders and to dream beyond what is being destroyed.
It opens me to connect to my own voice and inner-knowing, which is ancient and deep.
I don’t want to wait for the world to give me permission to use my voice anymore or to acknowledge my own needs as relevant. I don’t want to find myself entering my 70s and 80s and even my 90s, looking back and regretting the ways I made myself smaller.
I don’t want to spend any more of my days believing the lie that now is not the time.
Because dreaming is not frivolous. Creating is not indulgent. The work of tending our own imagination and spirit is not separate from the work of caring for the world—it is part of it.
In the words of Audre Lorde:
“If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly towards and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.”
Read on for more.
With gratitude,
Crystal Marie
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Thanks for that needed Reaffirmation on finding and keep our power. After more than a year of preparing to move and selling a house, I have lost my way. My passion got put on the back burner and feeling like it was too late to pursue. Reading this brought tears and a renewed vow to keep making art!!