Creative Wellness Letters - 🌅 Welcome to Creative Joy Beams

Hi Reader, 

Welcome to Creative Joy Beams! 🌅

This new iteration of my newsletter will have the same focus as Creative Wellness Letters (to help you self-compassionately support your creative practice), but with more emphasis on joy, because we need it!

In my last letter, where I shared about my personal Care and Feeding Manual for These Times™, I mentioned that expanding upon my values was something I am exploring and continuing to iterate on.

Over the past few years, I have realized that joy is a main theme in my work, but I hadn’t fully owned it.

As I wrote about in September 2023, I hired Karla Peters of The Inspired Foundry to create a “Tiny Brand” for me, and at the beginning of the design process, Karla asked me many big-picture sorts of questions, including “what kind of world do you want to create with your work?”

Since I’d been struggling to concisely articulate this, I was surprised at how fast my answer came out: “a world where everyone can find joy in their creative practice.” This statement felt solid, like a well-poured foundation for my house.

I also realized that the word “joy” was already in my musician bio - “her biggest passion is bringing joy to others through Brazilian music” - and it’s time to share and spread it further.

Why Creative Joy Beams? Why now?

The most obvious catalyst is the current political situation in the U.S. With all of the anxiety and grief it’s bringing, I am finding extra essential to lean into joy wherever I can find it, and perhaps you are, too.

We need joy to fuel us through the hard stuff

Whether big life or collective events, or the regular ongoing difficulties of continuing to pursue creativity (whether as a career or avocation), joy helps us keep going. I have many more thoughts on joy as a form of creative career sustainability and protection from burnout, but that needs its own letter!

Joy and compassion are friends

At first I worried that this was too big of a shift in focus for my writing, but it’s really not - embodying compassion helps us deeply and authentically relate to others, which can be very expansive and joyful in a deep way.

Letting ourselves feel joy also opens us up to feeling (and expressing) the full range of human emotions more freely - essential for creativity!

Of course, as an overthinker (thanks, cautious brain), I have questions, too, so I’ll share them and my answers, in case you have the same ones.

Can I, someone who regularly experiences anxiety and depression, truly say that joy is at the center of my work if I’m not feeling it regularly?

Yes, cultivating more joy in our lives is a practice - more on that in a minute.

Is joy (and pleasure) enough of a worthy goal? (Thanks a lot, Catholic upbringing.)

Experiencing joy, like all emotions, is a transitory, impermanent state, and truly experiencing our emotions as they happen is how to truly be present in our impermanent lives. For me, it’s also a form of healing from the idea that pleasure is bad, or just not enough of a reason to pursue something.

Or is pursuing joy more of a silly, fluffy “rainbows and unicorns” sentiment, not serious enough for the significance of the work I want to bring to the world?

Joy is usually tied to the things that really make life worth living, like connecting with loved ones, appreciating beauty, creating something in the moment (being present, again!) Joy isn’t always defined as happiness, it has many flavors.

See Ross Gay’s beautiful book Inciting Joy, where he “considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. [He]…explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.” One of the media quotes on his website sums it up very concisely: “Gay ponders joy, defining it less as the absence of sorrow and rather as our response to it."

Another example: My tune Sombras Remanescentes (Lingering Shadows) has joy and hope in it, as well as uncertainty. It ends on a major chord to symbolize this hope, and Brazilian music often embodies this complex mixing of emotion - an upbeat song can be mixed with a minor key or melancholy lyrics.

When so much is wrong in the world, is focusing on joy just a form of spiritual bypassing? 

The short answer: not unless you’re suppressing all other types of feelings. I’m all for authentically feeling your feelings (and seeking help from a mental health professional if this is difficult).

My focus on joy here is more like “watering the seeds you want to grow” - when times are tough, focusing more on what you want more of can help you cultivate more of that. There is still space here for all sorts of feelings, and this newsletter does not denounce non-joyful forms of creativity!

Side note: I’m writing a pretty passionate and angry sax duet (working title: Decade of Disbelief) right now in response to what’s happening in the U.S. government.

(Even when I write about more serious or less overtly joyful topics, you can count on the Creative Joy Beams section to have some joy fuel for you.)

We’re allowed to celebrate joy even (especially!) when life is hard, it’s not a contradiction.

We deserve to experience creative joy for our own fulfillment, and we get to share it with others. Joy radiates outward and is contagious, it can change the world in small but significant ways.

In case you’re thinking, “Ummm, that sounds great, but I don’t remember the last time I experienced joy, let alone joy in creativity,” I see you!

Feeling like joy is missing is a great realization, and now you can start looking for it and planting seeds to cultivate more of it.

I was very inspired by the idea of hope as an active practice when I recently read Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility edited by Thelma Young Lutunatabua and Rebecca Solnit. (Highly recommend if you have a lot of climate anxiety, like me.)

Joy is an active practice, too - we have to seek it out, and let it know that it’s a welcomed friend, so it continues to return to us.

During busy seasons when I realize that it’s been a long while since I played the piano for fun and not out of obligation, my go-to joy-maker is always jamming out a samba groove, sometimes just making up a chord progression, or playing a favorite tune like Ao Mestre by Alessandro Penezzi.

If you’re not sure where to find your creative joy, you probably know more than you think. You can ask yourself:

• Where do I often find joy in my life?
• What would feel good right now?
• What makes my inner child happy?
• What’s one of the best experiences I’ve had while making or sharing art? How can I reproduce some of that feeling?

Think of your favorite artists, the ones that really mean something to you - what if they hadn’t followed their creative joy and decided to share it? 

(Yes, there are more creative impulses than just joy, but let’s keep following this thread.)

We owe it to ourselves, and others, to follow that joy!

I know that my thoughts on joy will continue to deepen, which I’m looking forward to sharing with you. 

I’m sure my creative joy (and yours) will continue to evolve as we grow.

Here’s to growing in the directions we choose! 🥂

Find the joy where you can, and take care of yourself - wishing you fortitude, peace, and creative energy! 💗

🤩 Share your creative joys! 🤩

From now on, each email will feature a section celebrating creative joys - not just mine but YOURS, too! 

Hit reply to share any kind of creative joy you’re causing or experiencing, and I’ll share it next time! 🤗

Examples of creative joys:

• celebrating a small action you took on a project
• something inspiring you read / heard / saw
• someone else’s work of art
• an item that makes your creative workspace a better place to be

My current joys:

• Meeting random cats on my daily walks - one yesterday was very chatty and followed me for a half a block, until distracted by a squirrel 😹
• The video game Spiritfarer ("an award-winning cozy management game about dying") where you build a boat and make friends with spirits who you care for until it's time to usher them to the afterlife - it's sad, but also heartwarming and funny
• GT's kombucha winter seasonal flavor Pure Love (hibiscus/rose/blood orange) - I stock up on it while it's available because it's one of my favorites!

Next time this section will be full of more joys, beaming out to you from me and anyone who wants to contribute! 

🕸️ Staying on the good side of the internet 🕸️

• Gift Thinking: The relationships, abundance, and reciprocity of nature's economy (Orion) - 2 of my favorite authors (Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jenny Odell) conversing about a topic I love? Sign me up!

• Seeing in the Dark: Lessons from the night - Lovely and comforting writing from Mari Andrew
• 5 Ways to Gather Without Breaking the Bank - I love pretty much every post from Priya Parker (as well as her book The Art of Gathering), because community is extra important right now, and this one is practical, too.