I made the best quesadilla ever and I have an announcement to make ...
Published about 23 hours ago • 5 min read
Say No With Love Letters
what matters most to you inside your creative practice might surprise you.
The other day I made a ten-spice roasted cauliflower and caramelized onion quesadilla on a whim. I have no idea why. I saw the cauliflower and I had a basket of onions that needed using up, and I thought … Let’s play.
I had been working all day, in fact I was pretty tired, but cooking helps me unwind, so it made sense that I lean into that activity above anything else. And this is also an example of how different we all are. Different things may nourish and excite you. You may prefer to unwind with a friend, or by taking a long drive. You may prefer to stay as far away from the kitchen as possible!
I grabbed my core ingredients and then everything else was just … instinct.
It’s funny, because within the act of cooking I rarely get in my own head. I don’t stop myself from making a mess or get mad at myself for potentially ruining a perfectly good head of cauliflower with one of my wild ideas, even when said head of cauliflower finds itself at its peak cost of eight dollars.
There’s always going to be a price to pay. We don’t get to walk away unscathed. And if nothing else, I always try to remind myself of that with any decision I make.
The quesadilla was delicious. In fact, I impressed the heck out of myself with that one! I was so energized. It was so fun … I didn’t know what I wanted to make. I just wanted to use up a few ingredients and see what was possible. The outcome was less important. Hmm.
But it doesn’t always work out like that.
Two weeks prior I tried my hand at baking a chocolate cake. Now, if you know anything about me you know I really don’t enjoy baking the way I enjoy cooking. Thinking back, I didn’t go into it open-minded. In fact, I had an attitude the whole time. I worried about the end result. I told myself it wouldn’t work out. I even noticed I was muttering to myself, venting under my breath as I measured and leveled off the flour. I didn’t want to follow the steps because I didn’t value why they needed to happen and in that order. When the cake was in the oven, I said out loud “I’m never doing that again.” lol
The cake turned out fine, but the way I felt after wasn’t like how I felt after the cauliflower quesadilla.
if you know, you know! lol
We do the same thing with our creative lives. We want to skip steps because we don’t understand them. So we just say “I don’t understand” and just like that, the door is closed. Curiosity asks us to follow up with a question about what we don’t understand … that’s where real change is possible. What if I would have paused during that cake-baking fiasco? What if I would have asked myself what I really wanted from this? Why was I doing it? What influenced the decision? What could I alter? What needed to remain as is and why? And how would asking questions like this have changed the way I felt about baking in general?
There are a lot of assumptions being made when we don’t ask questions.
You might not think cooking or baking has anything at all to do with writing, but the daily conditions of life are what most threatens the art we want to create. Maybe we think we need to jump over this foundational stuff, and start fighting the fight and attempt to change conditions for writers by putting on our activists hats, (and that is PART of the work, so don’t get me wrong) but the order of things matters. We can’t skip over looking at what actually holds up each of our unique creative practices. Because even if we change the way writers are treated and valued in the arts as a whole, skipping the foundational work of figuring out what else we want from our art, and how we want to feel is a little like building a beautiful mansion on top of a massively cracked foundation. How are we meant to get “the powers that be” to value what we haven’t yet valued ourselves?
Anything big and heavy placed atop a shaky foundation will collapse in on itself. Maybe it’s also like the baking of the cake in that I really didn’t want to measure the baking powder. I scoffed at the idea of room temperature butter, but I needed to create the right conditions for the cake to rise.
This is why I know my Creative Ecosystem Launchpad group program is so important, and why I was so nervous about launching it to the world. I’m sure it seems insignificant when you think about the massive struggles that creatives face in today’s world. But this is the catalyst for change. I refuse to skip this work. It’s been glossed over for too long. I feel myself raising my hand so eagerly. Let me do this work, dammit!
We will always be carrying something heavy into our creative practices. That is part of being human. There will always be something happening in your life that threatens the time, space, and energy you give to your creative practice. But the point of my program is that you will learn how to value and visualize all the pieces of your life differently to accommodate for that heavy piece. You will be equipped to handle it.
The Creative Ecosystem Launchpad has been a decade in the making and I am so proud of it! Heck, I even had my first announcement of it on Instagram receive the most love of any of my posts in the history of me being on social media. Notice I said “love” and not likes or engagement (blah!). When I asked myself “why are you posting this, Chelene and what do you want in return? Be honest.” I wrote down: I want love. I want people to sign up for the waitlist, yes, but I really want to feel the love.
Micro ways of doing things differently, honesty, self trust, processes, prioritizing, valuing, developing and managing realistic expectations, listing out creative assets and liabilities, figuring out our values, our message, alchemizing our writing and books into other creative projects, money making opportunities aligned with said values … This is OUR work to do. First. This is more important now than ever. Sure, I want you to have a creative life that fits into everything you do.
But above all else I want you to feel the way I felt making the ten spice quesadilla.
Want to support my work? Please share this with someone else in your creative circle!
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