There is a voice I hear frequently that likes to send ideas directly into the compost, one that worries about repetition, about saying the same thing(s) too many times. Sometimes it takes the refrain of “you’ve already done this/shown this/said this so many times, no one wants to do/see/hear it again.”
It comes up a lot when I’m prepping to teach a yoga class (“you did this pose or sequence last time, you can’t do it that way again this time”), or when I’m taking photos (“this one looks exactly like everything else you’ve taken”), or sharing work (“that one has been shown so many times before”) and there are times I listen to it and abandon ship.
Lately I’m trying to challenge that voice and remind it that there is immense value in traveling the well-worn paths, that there are times that repetition leads to new insights, to noticing something you didn’t see before, to having a breakthrough.
I think about how much value the well-worn paths have when I’m walking the same circle around my neighborhood every day with the dog, or while hiking along the centuries-old fisherman’s trails that weave like a net across along the cliffs of Portugal several weeks ago, or every time I do a sun salutation, or sing the eight notes of an octave. It’s a desire to innately know a place, a feeling, to be able to notice the tiniest changes, to be able to lose myself in the sensations of familiarity so that the thing that is different or unique is what stands out. I want to be able to feel my way through, to know my art, my space, my work, the world, intimately and deeply.
This is part of the work, being able to sit in the space between the new, novel, exhilarating, and the treasured, staid, known. As someone who is wary of the paths carved out by everyone else, I’m beginning to explore the idea that I can create my very own way, and then come back to it again and again and again. That it is desirable – and creatively freeing – to come back to the same ideas, to use the same tools, to explore the same themes as many times as needed. And so far, there hasn’t been a single one that doesn’t reveal something new each time I turn my attention to it.
Maybe that’s the best part about challenging the voice that says that it’s already been done, it’s already too much. Creative reuse is not just something to do with physical objects, but with ideas and processes too. Because pulling ideas out of the compost allows them to nourish and sustain my creative practice many times over.
✨ A short, incomplete list of things that I want to know as well as myself: the ocean; flowers; the elements – fire, water, earth, air; movement, especially bodies in motion; double exposures; color; light, sparkles; coastal places. ✨