Creative Saturation
There are a lot of ways to talk about creativity, inspiration, and creative blocks. The metaphor that's been most helpful for me, that has shaped my understanding of the creative act for as long as I can remember, comes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It describes that moment when a new idea explodes into being so quickly and so completely that it feels received rather than made:
[Sarah] came trotting by with her watering pot…going from the corridor to her office, and she said, “I hope you are teaching Quality to your students.” This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal.
Seed crystal…. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.
A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded.…the material sometimes doesn’t crystallize out because the molecules don’t know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.
He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.
The one sentence “I hope you are teaching Quality to your students” was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic.
That image, of seed crystals and supersaturated solutions, is my creative lodestar. When I'm stuck, when I feel depleted, I try to set aside the possibility that the problem is me and my fundamental inadequacies as a person (we've all been there, yeah?), and I focus instead on a problem I can solve: filling that metaphorical solution where my most viable ideas, big and small, take shape. I start looking for new references, new people, new places, new experiences, new processes–everything and anything that I can take into myself until I'm full to overflowing.
Then the ideas start coming again. Not on command, and more slowly if I'm not sleeping well, eating well, spending time with people who matter to me, or if I'm not moving my body (are you familiar with the connection between moving and thinking?), but the ideas do start coming.
At least some of this probably sounds familiar to you. You’ve heard other people talk about ways to break creative blocks, or you learned about it in school, in books or podcasts, or you’ve discovered a similar insight while engaging in your own creative practice.
But if you've never heard anything like this before, and it all sounds a little woo-woo, you can dig into any of the scientific research that has established the importance of novelty and openness to experience to different kinds of creative work. It supports the idea that the more you collect new ideas and experiences, the more likely those new things are to collide, trigger a reaction, and crystallize into something new and brilliant–something new to you, and maybe something new to the world. This is true for anyone who wants to do more creative or innovative work–even in fields not always recognized as “creative” in our contemporary context.
Why a newsletter
To help minimize the time I spend in any low points of creative depletion, I regularly dig through digital archives looking for things I’ve never seen or ideas I don’t fully understand. I wander through a wide variety of disciplines, from art to archaeology, food to fashion, neuroscience to economics.
Most of the time it's fun and stimulating, and I end up tumbling down rabbit holes when maybe I should be focused on something that has a deadline. Sometimes this wandering feels like a chore and I skip it, even though it's good for me. It's not a silver bullet, and it's not the only solution for a block, but if I'm regularly putting new stuff in my head, the blocks are less frequent.
So this newsletter, Seed Crystals, is two things:
- A public commitment to a practice that I know works for me
- An invitation to anyone who may value a similar creative boost, and is:
- In need of a little nudge
- Looking for new media sources or creators to diversify their inspiration
- Interested, like me, in seeing what captures the attention of another inquisitive mind
What you get
I try to keep it simple. Every Tuesday I send you a diverse selection of the things I’ve found while wandering the internet, and I share a little about why I found each selection interesting.
The publicly available version is easily digestible in one sitting:
- An image to consider
- An article
- A video
The paid version is more robust:
- An image
- Two articles
- A video
- A podcast
- An interview or profile
I hope that having these things delivered directly to your inbox will help you skip some of the repetitive, derivative stuff that clogs up the internet (now more than ever). And I do my best to make sure each newsletter doesn't accidentally align along a particular theme. The goal is variety and quality, to help you find your own rabbit hole to fall into, not to prove some half-formed thesis of mine.
That's it. Pretty simple.
And it’s just five bucks a month.
I can't predict exactly how or when something you see here will crystalize into a new creative project or help you solve a frustrating problem. I can't promise it will immediately do anything very practical for you at all. But I can promise that the more you open yourself to novelty, here or elsewhere, the more you embrace variety, chance, and the process of discovery, the more you indulge your curiosity and engage with difference, the more chances you have to create something surprising and delightful.
I hope Seed Crystals will help along the way.