LCN 071: The Good, the Bad, and the Hysterical from the Retreat

Coming home from a retreat is always a bit of a shock to the system.

I just spent five days immersed in creative play at my 4th annual Create & Incubate Retreat, wrapped in the most loving, supportive community of creatives a person could ask for.

How does one even start trying to describe something like this?

Here’s what I’d like to share about it.

You know how I say if you do something enough it becomes normal? Well, the first time I ran my retreat, I carried an undercurrent of tension and anxiety the whole time.

How would it go? Would people like it? I was super anxious about making sure everyone was happy.

It was my first time leading a group in what I call “catalyzing sessions,” but what are essentially improv games, and I was anxious about that. Would they participate? Would they roll their eyes?

The whole thing was a big experiment. I wanted to create the retreat that I wanted for myself — creativity, community, courage, compassion (which, btw, are the official theme words of Life is a Verb Camp, which you should totally come to in November! I’ll be speaking this year, and it’s happening over my 50th birthday, so I’m treating it in my own mind as a big birthday and life celebration!)

Anyway, I wanted to create the retreat I wanted, because I knew it would be wonderful… but would other people feel the same way?

Would people even come to something that wasn’t a structured workshop or conference? Would they even get how valuable it is?

I understood, because I’d been going to creative retreats for years. I knew how special it is to gather with other creators simply to create.

I knew how energizing it is to be in a room together, each working on our own thing.

I knew how inspiring it is to see what everyone else is up to.

How amazing it feels simply to be in the company of other people who get you, and who will encourage, support, and champion you.

Voices of the Retreat

“You threw some of your work in the trash? Well, pull it out and let’s see it! Oh, my gosh – you rejected this?? Seriously, I think it’s beautiful, but when I don’t like a piece, I either layer over it with gesso, or cut it into pieces to find serendipitous gems, or soak it in water to take some of the paint off, then crinkle it up to create some cool texture (and, by the way, someone here brought a tub just for that purpose).”

“Oh, you forgot your scissors or waterproof ink? I brought some — use mine!”

“And hey, have you tried these Inktense Watercolor Pencils? (aff) Use mine and see what you think — they’re awesome!”

These are the kinds of voices I don’t hear in my day-to-day life, working in isolation in my studio. But at Create & Incubate Retreat, we hear this kind of thing all the time.

The vibe is pure generosity and sharing.

Playing and Experimenting

In fact, Kimberly did bring Inktense Watercolor Pencils, and I fell in love with them!

They work like watercolor pencils: you can draw with them just like regular colored pencils, but then you can take a wet brush (or, even better, a waterbrush (aff), with a built-in water reservoir in the handle), and when you brush over the dry color it blooms into the most vibrant, wet, flowing watercolor, except that it dries permanent — waterproof! So you can layer over it with more pencil or water media and it won’t turn to mud!

(Can you guess what I added to my Amazon wish list?)

And I brought a ton of stuff to share, too: several big jars of acrylic poster paint; brushes; Adult Coloring Book Treasury 1 and 2 (aff) (which I contributed designs to); lots of markers and colored pencils; a box of magazines and calendars for collage, plus a couple of big books of decorated paper, and glue sticks; and a stack of Readers’ Digest Condensed Books for altering — enough for everyone.

I load up my car with all this stuff so that everyone has something fun and playful to do if they want to take a break from their project at any point.

And people used the stuff! Amy colored a page from one of the coloring books, then cut it into tiny squares and made a paper mosaic on the cover of one of the Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. Then she typed a poem on the mechanical typewriter I always bring (did I mention that? yes, I always bring my mechanical typewriter!), and collaged it on, too.

Relaxing and Recharging

And did I mention the beautiful pool right outside our window? Every so often I’d notice someone leave the room, and a few minutes later I’d see them in the pool.

The weather was glorious, as August in this part of California usually is, and I did more swimming than I’ve done since a trip to Hawaii in 2003! Every day around 4:00pm I’d set the timer on my iPhone for 20 minutes and swim laps.

(Next year I’m bringing my snorkel and mask, which is what one of the attendees did this year — brilliant! No need to turn your head to breathe, only to get water in your ear.)

Some people went hiking into the redwoods, or took a stroll around the pond, or walked the labyrinth. Or just went back to the cottage to nap.

One afternoon I sat outside and read a novel by a splashing fountain.

It was just so relaxed. None of the sense of urgency and pressure and GoGoGo! that fills my normal life.

 

Except…

Well, except that I did allow some of that to leak in, in this one way:

Every morning I did at least one calligraphy video to post to my @calligraphyhowto Instagram account.

Like this one:

A video posted by Melissa Dinwiddie (@calligraphyhowto) on Aug 20, 2016 at 1:48pm PDT

And this one:

A video posted by Melissa Dinwiddie (@calligraphyhowto) on Aug 21, 2016 at 10:38am PDT

See, I started that account back on June 7, to share my calligraphy exclusively.

My main account, @a_creative_life, is a mishmash — I share whatever I happen to be working on. But I wanted a dedicated, curated, calligraphy-only account, and really, I started it as an experiment.

I’d been noticing how popular calligraphy has gotten these days. There are numerous calligraphy Instagram accounts with tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of followers. And I was curious to see how quickly I might grow an audience.

So I created the @calligraphyhowto account as an experiment, and have been posting to it daily (except when I was off in the woods at Jazz Camp West), and right before I left for the retreat the account had a little growth spurt.

The day I left home, I passed 800 followers, and the next morning I was at 963, and a few hours later I topped 1,000, so I wanted to surf that wave.

By the time the retreat was over I’d hit 1,400, which, coincidentally, I had also just hit the day before on my main account!

A video posted by Melissa Dinwiddie (@calligraphyhowto) on Aug 21, 2016 at 5:06pm PDT

Now my @calligraphyhowto account actually has more followers than my “main” account! I achieved in two and a half months and 132 posts what had taken over three years and 1,950 posts on my other account!

Time to Pay the Piper

But here’s what I noticed:

It’s fun to create the posts, most of which are videos, and mostly of people’s names, because I’ve been running this ongoing name lottery — you enter by following my @calligraphyhowto account on Instagram, tagging a friend, and leaving a comment on my most recent #namelottery post with a friend’s name (not your own name) that you want me to calligraph.

So yeah, it’s fun for me, but it’s also very product-oriented.

And if you remember my Creative Sandbox Manifesto, rule #2 is “Think process, not product.”

I usually end up writing the name more than once (sometimes several times), and sometimes I end up videotaping it more than once, because I want it to be the best I can make it.

Now I should say that I still practice imperfectionism, because it is never perfect, and very often I’m personally not as happy with my efforts as I’d like to be, but at some point I just have to accept that it’s not going to get any better right now, so I post and move on.

And this also means I spend a lot of time in iMovie, cropping videos and often speeding them up to fit in Instagram’s 60-second maximum.

So instead of playing in the Creative Sandbox, I spent a lot of time at Create & Incubate Retreat making very product-oriented calligraphy videos, posting them to Instagram, and then checking my Instagram account to see how many followers I have now, and responding to comments.

All of which is fun, but…

Sounds a Lot Like Work

Instead of playing in the Creative Sandbox, which I like to do as much of as possible at the retreat, because Lord knows I never get as much as I want the rest of the year, instead of that I spent a good chunk of my retreat time in a very different vibe and headspace from making messes for the joy of it and following my curiosity.

I did get pure Creative Sandbox playtime in as well, but a lot less of it than I would have had I not been obsessively Instagramming!

I don’t regret it — it was its own kind of fun — but I do think next year I’d like to set a different intention.

My Golden Formula at Work

This is a perfect example of applying my Golden Formula: self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good.

First, self-awareness: this means noticing that I felt disappointed that I didn’t feed my need for pure play and exploration more.

In my younger years, I would probably have beat myself up for this, but I’ve learned that loving myself up works ever so much better.

So what is the self-compassionate response?

First, I can acknowledge that I’m human. I’m not the only person on the planet who’s ever gotten pulled away from a goal by the gravitational pull of social media! I get to forgive myself for that.

And I get to decide in advance how I’d like things to be different next time, so I’ll have the best chance of meeting my needs.

This, my dear creative, is how it works. Notice, love yourself up, and tweak to adjust. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Best Year Yet!

Meanwhile, I get to bask in the glow of also noticing that this retreat was absolutely the best Create & Incubate Retreat yet.

Why?

I was more relaxed than any other retreat — I feel like I’ve sort of hit my stride this year, and I feel like I’ve got the structure (what little of it there is) down.

I reacquainted myself with COLOR (when I was not obsessively creating calligraphy videos!), which was great fun (time to figure out how to get some regular color play back into my day-to-day days!)

I also laughed more than I have in a long time. We laughed during our Catalyzing sessions in the mornings, and we laughed during our games nights — on Friday night, when we played word-picture-word Exquisite Corpse (which, I learned from Kimberly, someone has monetized into a boxed game, called Telestrations (aff)), I laughed so hard tears were streaming down my face!!

One of the regulars, Randi, who’s been coming every year since we started in 2013, brought a photocopy of the last section of the Exquisite Corpse sheet from last year that had us all helpless with laughter for days, and posted it on the wall in our Incubator work room. “Look before you leap” somehow became transformed into “May I have this dance, chicken?”

It still busts me up.

(I decided this year, btw, that those Exquisite Corpse/Telestration-like sheets live in a special binder that will come to every retreat, for future retreatants to leaf through and get a chuckle.)

As always, we had rich conversations over (and after!) breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And most importantly, every person who came was exactly the right person to be there. And lest I have any doubts about that, they have all already signed up to come back next year!!!

Even though I do not yet have confirmed dates, and probably won’t for months, because the retreat center requires a group of 60 or greater to release dates this early!

I am on the waiting list for 5-day/4-night, Wednesday-Sunday stay in mid/late August 2017. Depending on which work room I get, I’ll have room for anywhere from one to four new people to come. If you’d like to snag one of those spots yourself, get on my mailing list and stay tuned — I’ll announce the dates and open the remaining spaces as soon as I have a signed contract.

Members of my Creative Sandbox Community get first dibs.

This is absolutely the best five days of my year, and I have a lot of awesome days — the Friends of Calligraphy Retreat in the Spring, Jazz Camp West in June; Life is a Verb Camp in November–all so wonderful.

But this, this I created, and it is finally growing into what I always dreamed it could be.

I feel full. Tired, happy, and beautifully filled up.

❤️

 

Quotes In this Episode

Click to tweet:

My Golden Formula: self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good

Don’t beat yourself up, LOVE yourself up!

Resources In this Episode

Create & Incubate Retreat

Life is a Verb Camp (which is happening over my 50th birthday!!! And I’m speaking this year!)

Jazz Camp West

Inktense Watercolor Pencils (aff)

Adult Coloring Book Treasury 1 (aff)

Adult Coloring Book Treasury 2 (aff)

My @calligraphyhowto Instagram account

My @a_creative_life Instagram account

Creative Sandbox Manifesto

Exquisite Corpse

Telestrations (aff)

Creative Sandbox Community

Friends of Calligraphy

 

Thanks for Listening!

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