✨ The Creative MOMent: December 2022
Rainbow Walk + Discovering Our Own Light + Walking the Soul Back Home
✨ The Creative MOMent
The Creative MOMent is a section of the Emily Lupita ❤️🔥 Creativity Series where I share creativity prompts for journaling + my own creative journal.
Creativity Prompt: Rainbow Walk
The connection between walking and creativity is strong. Scientific studies have shown that we tend to think more creatively while on the move. (More on this later.) The Rainbow Walk is a calming way to start a walk, giving you a soft structure to shift toward the creative mind.
The activity is to make a list of the colors of the rainbow and spot one thing from each color. So, start with red and walk until you see something red. Then simply notice it and appreciate the redness. Continue on and on, gathering all the colors of the rainbow in your mind. Go in this order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. (ROY G. BIV)
Journaling
By being mindful of the different colors on your walk, you can start to see what you may have missed before. Give this activity a try and ask yourself:
Did you notice anything new on your usual route?
Did you find one color much easier to spot than others?
Did doing this activity help take your mind off stressful things from your day?
☀️ What did you write? Share your thoughts in a comment.
My Creativity Journal
I do this activity to start off most of my walks. If I find that going straight down the rainbow colors is a bit too structured for me that day, I simply set the intention to notice the way colors play along my path. I may look at a picture of a rainbow before I set out. This helps to center my focus on noticing colors as I walk.
On my last walk, I noticed how black the tree trunks along my street had become in the freezing rain. Contrasted against the still yellow leaves on the trees, it was a beautiful detail I had previously missed. This activity is one of the many ways I try to keep my mind focused on the beauty around me. I’m trying to be mindful of my ability to use my imagination + creativity to paint my own rainbows. This painting from my I Believe in Seeds series helps me remember this.
Further Afield
The science tells us that creativity and walking are linked. This isn’t a new idea, of course, with creatives telling us this for centuries. Consider the 13th century poet, Rumi, who wrote, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”
More recently, Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist reflections of nature, conceived while walking and living in solitude. And Nietzsche’s philosophical quote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
Now there are scientific studies to back up what creatives have been telling us all along. According to the research report, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking” by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz (Stanford University), when asked to come up with novel and useful ideas, study participants who were walking outperformed their stationary peers by considerable amounts. The conclusion:
“…walking improves the generation of novel yet appropriate ideas, and the effect even extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly after.”
The TED talk below is about the same research. Some take aways for me are:
Walking works best with brainstorming ideas around solving a certain problem
It’s best to speak your ideas aloud while walking
Marily Oppezzo also recommends to record your ideas on your phone and just pretend like you’re having a conversation with someone. I love this because I actually do this and thought it was a little weird. But turns out it’s not weird, it’s just science. Walking and talking (to myself) is when I think the best. I work on lines from poems, ideas for stories, and on blocking out paintings. I say things like, “Okay, the tree goes in the upper right corner, then Lupita standing on a hill with flowers…then which direction is the light coming from?”
Morning Walk
In this painting below, Lupita is walking deep in the forest at sunrise wearing a special homemade blanket, created IRL for me by my dear cousin, Angie. She sent me this prayer blanket at a difficult time in my life and it arrived like a ray of light. I would wrap myself in it and take morning walks through our small wooded property near Atlanta that we owned at the time.
It was on one of those walks that this painting came to me - all at once - complete with the trees and orbs of sunlight. It’s a combination of my recent walks with my special blanket and the long morning walks I used to takes as a young girl, following my father through the forest in rural Iowa.
And the skunks? Well…if you happen to be deep in the timber just at sunrise in summertime, you can meet skunks returning home after foraging for berries all night. They walk with a wobble, having ingested so much fruit, which is now fermenting. Hence the phrase “drunk as a skunk.” At least that’s the tale the old farmers tell. As a little girl, I used to giggle and wave at the skunks as they hobbled past me in the new morning light.
I named the painting after a quote by the artist Evelyn Dunbar, “It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own light.” I feel now that I have another painting to make…a reflection on the “walks the soul back home” quote by Mary Davis. These words speak to me so clearly. Walking the soul back home. Yes.
Journaling
What does walking the soul back home mean to you?
What’s a walk you’ll always remember?
What could you create from the memory of that walk?
☀️ Share your reflections
I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections on this post.
Thank you for reading.
Good journey,
❤️🔥Emily Lupita
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I love this, and certainly will try this on our next venture in the woods near Lake Michigan, in Indiana. I will try to take photos as I go thru the spectrum of colors. Beautiful post. Vero
The research about walking and creativity really bears out for me too! I started doing this years ago, every time I got stuck on a plot point in my novel. I remember the walk very vividly on which I realized a character was going to enter a bird’s mind!
I love the painting from the I Believe in Seeds series!