Creative creatures

My creativity feels like a living thing. Reading about all the things you lovely Substackers do to stimulate your creativity made me want to get to know my own better, to grow my relationship with my own.

So what or who is it? Well, it's alive, but not a human. It has a personality and will and moods, but isn't a person. I wondered if I could name it, but not with any human or gendered name. So I've decided to call it my Creature. That sounds suitably animal, small, wild, delicate, and definitely untameable. I feel I could spend a lifetime getting to know something called that, trying to discover, fathom and befriend it.

Two favourite quotations immediately jump into my head:

' - you can see how far the soul, when it goes under flesh, is not a soul, is small and creaturish.' 

Prayer - Alice Oswald.

'You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.' 

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver.

I think my Creature is very physical, bound up in the richness of my senses and the physical world around me. I think it has a magpie's quick attraction to sights, sounds, sudden flashes of movement, smells and textures, and hoarding them up like treasures. There is an immediacy to all these things and an ease. My Creature doesn't need to strain with effort, it simply and instinctively responds - if I let it.

Which is the key thing; I don't. I police it, constrain it, doubt it, judge it, suspect it, tether it, maroon it, question it, disapprove of it. Because I live in a rational world of getting Useful and Important things done. Where, oh, where does play fit in?

My creature needs feeding, nurturing, exercising, resting, entertaining, interaction, variety, and time with me. But, above all else, play. Play is freedom, play is fun, play is discovery, and play is dangerous because it might change you and your life for the better. 

I feel I've not played much in a long while. My Creature feels starved and listless, poor thing. Have I forgotten how to play? The things I could do as hobbies feel stale and just ideas in my head, not springing from my gut. Do I need to try new things? Or is it a question of just getting stuck back in, action preceding motivation, in order for them to come back to life?

To be fair, I live with three chronic illnesses, and things like play get ground down by survival and pain. But right now a little window of improvement is opening up (I think), and I think I need a bit more in my life. This is such an embarrassment of riches that I don't know where to start. For so many years my life has been, and needed to be, so small. The thought of possibly being able to do a tiny bit more of what I want? It's exactly what I want - and TERRIFYING. But if I don't I've started feeling like I'm going mad, so I have to try, I have to find out....

So, I want to dip my toe into all things creative:

Going out: 

Artist's dates - I'm close to London, but not always well enough to get there, let alone do something exciting and big like a museum. So how could I do artist's dates in my own town, even though I feel like I know it by heart? I already walk in the park and go to cafes a lot, what else could I find?

Exercise? If my Creature is so physical, surely it would like that? Fun forms of this though?!

Staying in and doing creative things not involving writing: I have art supplies but am not good at art. Other crafts?

Here's where I need to ask for your help to inspire me and get me going! What things do you do? How do you find ways to reconnect with joy? How do you rediscover spontaneity? How do you play?

If anyone reading this has a moment please do leave a thought - it would be a massive help and encouragement in this scary adventure of mine! I would be hugely grateful, thankyou. 

I promise to update you with what I've tried and discover...!