Alice Walker on the True Meaning of Creativity
“Look closely at the present you are constructing it should look like the future you are dreaming”
My greatest creative inspiration is Alice Walker. As a freshman in college I read In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, obsessively highlighting each essay.
In her profound body of work, you encounter personal testimony, exposition of political participation, and ultimately, groundbreaking literary criticism.
Walker's style of writing is a constant revelation of her flaws, loves, hates, passions, goals, and fears. She writes as a Black woman, mother, and fully embodied womanist. I find myself constantly wanting to reach for her artistic tenets and self-discipline.
In this segment from PBS’s American Masters, Alice Walker thoughtfully reflects on how exploring one's creativity can be an affirming yet challenging experience:
"Creation is really a sustained period of bliss — even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it — you didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it, you did it just the way you had to do it. And that is what makes us."
In Walker's pivotal essay, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, she states:
What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day?…
How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life.
Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our “crazy,” “Sainted” mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them."
Throughout the essay, Walker emphasizes the outlets which Black women found to express their genius; her mother, in the example which provides the essay's title, expresses her creativity in the artistry of her garden.
Walker wants us to consider how the will to artistically create - write, paint, sing, sculpt, dance, perform - it’s ALL ultimately, linked to our own survival and humanity. In essence, our survival itself becomes an act of artistry.
I revisit Walker's work often when visualizing my goals and preparing for any new creative project. I have the following quote at my desk:
“Look closely at the present you are constructing it should look like the future you are dreaming”- Alice Walker
I’ve made it a practice to find ways to enjoy the process of setting goals. Insight from The Creative Visualization Workbook:
“Every time you have a desire, in a certain sense you have a GOAL - something that you would like to BE, DO, or HAVE. Some desires are merely passing fancies, but others stay with us and go deeper. Our desire and goals give us direction and focus; they help to point us down our path of action in life.
For many people, the word "goal" has a negative connotation because it has so often been associated with compulsiveness, pushing, driving ourselves, competing with others, and so on. And truly, goals are often misused. But you can't really avoid having goals anyway (even if your goal is to have no goals, be in the moment, or meditate all day, that's still a goal!). So you might as well learn to use and enjoy them.
To enjoy your goals, think of them as signposts pointing you in a certain direction. They give you a certain focus and help your energy to get moving.”
Here are some guidelines for setting creative goals:
With short-term goals, be realistic. Don't set them too high, or you'll end up feeling discouraged. It's best to take a short, reachable step first, to create a feeling of confidence.
With long-range goals, be expansive and idealistic. Let your imagination open up and reach for the highest. This will inspire you.
Put your main focus on the essence of the goal. Don't worry about the details, as those may change.
Don't be compulsive about your goals. In other words, don't try to make them happen. Hold them lightly, relax, and let them happen at their own pace and in their own way. Turn them over to your higher self to create them, and LET GO.
Be flexible. You will probably find that many of your goals change frequently, but that there is an essence in the most important one that remains the same, and which helps guide you ever closer to your highest purpose.
I am determined to set goals and give birth to my ideas - I refuse to stifle my creativity. I consider my great-grandmother and her creative desires that didn’t come to pass. Thankfully, we have more opportunities than our ancestors. To explore, to question, to be bold with our individual becoming. No dream or desire should go ignored.
I’m leaving you with 6 of Walker’s affirming quotes to inspire your own creative goal-setting this season:
“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for."
"Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves."
“It's so important to unclutter the mind. For me, creativity is greatly impeded just by the chatter and visual clutter of life. It's really important to have a space that is really clear for whatever is emerging to come.”
“Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.”
“For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone life, just really being present in a lot of life.”
“I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.”