✨ 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: Draw A Tree
There’s an activity I used to do with my students as part of their orientation before leaving on a study abroad program called Draw A Tree. I’d ask everyone to take out a pen and paper, then simply draw a tree. Then I’d pair up the students and ask them to show each other their drawings. I’d ask this question:
“Is there anyone who drew exactly the same tree as their partner?”
Nope. Every tree was always a little different - no two trees were ever exactly alike. I’d talk about how our concept of what a tree is - and how to draw it - are based on learned behaviors combined with our environment. Someone who knows only the lush rainforest would have a different concept of a tree than someone who knows only the desert. We each have our own combination of factors that create what we understand to be a tree.
It’s a simple concept when used with trees, but then I’d ask my students to transfer that concept over to the basic fundamental truths they hold in their lives to be true. Fairness, beauty, compassion, trust, love…each of these concepts are as different for each one of us as our tree drawings. Now add in a different culture, a different language, a different religion, a different country…so very complex.
In the end, the Draw A Tree activity isn’t really about trees, after all. It’s an introduction to the idea of enthorelativity, defined by the Intercultural Research Institute in this way:
Enthnorelative, meaning that one’s own culture is experienced in the context of other cultures. Acceptance of cultural difference is the state in which one’s own culture is experienced as just one of a number of equally complex worldviews. By discriminating differences among cultures (including one’s own), and by constructing a kind of self-reflexive perspective, people with this worldview are able to experience others as different from themselves, but equally human.
Even though I’ve been studying, working, and living in different cultures most of my adult life, I’m still working on my journey towards enthnorelativism. I try to use this concept as a basis for how I process the world around me, and am continually having to re-set my focus when new and unexpected cultural differences arise.
Journaling
Close your eyes and imagine a tree.
How big is your tree?
What type of tree - an evergreen or one with colored leaves in Autumn?
Where is your tree - by itself on a hill or in the thick of a forest?
After answering these questions, start drawing / writing…or however you feel like creating…to express the concept of your special tree.
☀️ What did you write? Share your thoughts in a comment.
My Creativity Journal
When I close my eyes and visualize a tree, I go back to my childhood in rural Iowa. I spent so much time outside playing and discovering the intricacies of the natural world surrounding us there. One of my favorite trees was the giant weeping willow behind our house. There’s something majestic and gentle about weeping willows that’s always drawn me to them. This painting is from my Childhood in Nature series and shows Lupita (my self-portrait character) with her special tree.
I’m living in Turkey now and the trees here are incredible. I remember seeing a row of windswept trees while we were driving through the massive farming area, going south from Ankara to the Aegean coast. These trees have stayed with me - the way they endured there on the banks of a stream surrounded by farmland as far as the eye could see. Each tree was bent over in the direction the wind pushed it. Such striking dark green against the light yellow wisps of wheat. I’ll try to paint it.
Further Afield
Twenty years ago I was 24 years old and living in Japan. I’d recently graduated from college and wanted to be a writer. Most of all, I wanted to travel the world to see and experience the amazing scenes I’d read about in my National Geographic magazines as a kid out in rural Iowa. I’d collect these magazines from the free piles at our local laundromat in the small town where I went to middle & high school.
We didn’t have running water in our house out in the countryside, so we had to bring our clothes to the laundromat in town. My mom and brothers and I would carry the baskets from the house and load them into the trunk of the car. Then carry them into the laundromat. Mom would usually leave us kids there to watch the clothes while she went grocery shopping. We’d play in the rolling baskets, taking turns pushing each other down the aisles between the washing machines.
Every once in awhile, a good samaritan would drop off a box of used magazines with the name and address on the back cut out. I’d sort through the box and keep every National Geographic that appeared. My favorite issue of all time was the one about the Mayan murals at Bonampak. I remember telling Mom as I taped up the magazine’s pull-out poster of the murals onto the wall in my bedroom, I will go there one day.
Mexico, my mom said with a soft reverence to her motherland. These magical paintings are inside a pyramid in Mexico. I studied the mural poster carefully, every inch, probably a hundred times over the years it was on my wall. I dreamt of dancing lobsters and jaguar masks. When I closed my eyes I could see the procession of warriors gliding through the streets, the turquoise sky behind them blazing. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was planting a powerful seed that would influence my life and career in a fundamental way.
It took me almost 20 years, but I did make it to Bonampak. I was a co-Director and onsite staff translator and cultural consultant for the Spanish Language and World Literature study abroad program from the university where I was working. The program was six weeks long, culminating in visits to the wonders of Zinacantán, Yaxchilan, Palenque, and Bonampak, deep in the Lacandón Jungle from our base of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico.
Check out this video (less than 2 minutes long) of this area from National Geographic.
The murals are very difficult to get to. It takes a commitment to get that far into the jungle and walk up the pyramid stairs into that room. About half of my students gave up along the way and didn’t make it. Once we were there, each person was only allowed a few minutes inside the room, only 2 people at a time. I was lucky enough to have a kind student with me who offered to take my picture. I spent the rest of my moments just gazing in awe, trying to take in every color, every nuance I could before the whistle blew and I had to leave.
I exited the murals weeping. Completely overwhelmed by the beauty and magnificence of the artwork. Yes. And also filled with joy and anguish at the incredible, harrowing, beautiful journey that led me from my childhood bedroom to the murals of Bonampak. I missed my Mom and wished she could have been there with me. Most of all, I felt this sense of wonder - about the past, about the world now, and how art is infused inside it all.
Yale conducted a project to reconstruct the murals at Bonampak and this is the lecture from Professor Mary Miller describing it in detail. (It’s an hour long, but well worth the watch.)
What I mean to say with my story of Bonampak is that it’s not too late to pursue your dreams. It took me twenty years, but I got to see my favorite archeological site with my own eyes. And I have more dreams that are still in the mix and making…I’m gathering energy and strength wherever I can to nurture these dreams into being.
I’m continually planting seeds.
It’s true the some dreams don’t ever come true. I’ve had that happen as well. There are dreams that are just fantasies now - my body or time or resources are no longer capable of some of my early dreams anymore. But my list of dreams is long and wild and winding. With each new seed I plant, I profess my faith in the future, where dreams I don’t even know are possible can still come true.
Journaling
What’s a dream that’s in your heart?
What’s one small action you can take this week toward making that dream come true?
Is there a timeline for your dream?
Draw it out, visualize it, see all the steps it takes to get there, and walk yourself through it.
☀️ 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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This is such a rich post, Emily! Thank you.