Coming Together Workshop

The other week I ran a poetry workshop on low level interpersonal conflict for Rising Arts Agency at Artist Residence Bristol. Here are some thoughts on this new creative journey.

We all have times when we look back on a conversation and think it could have gone better. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight, we realise that we should have spoken up and we didn’t. Or maybe we spoke too quickly and said something we regret.

Mother of Ruminations

I can be a bit of a daydreamer and perhaps there’s no more creative potential in my daydreaming than in my interpersonal conflict. When we ruminate, we drag up situations that have deeply affected us. These thoughts come up and it literally comes from a word that is related to cows churning their food again and again. I’m there, turning the conversation up and over in my head, chewing it, swallowing it, and bringing it up again. It’s a bad habit I have. I’ve gotten better over the years, but it still is my default and I have to put a lot of effort into not taking the going down the rabbit hole of woulda shoulda coulda’s in my head. I want to ruminate less and get to a place where my rethinking of a conversation produces something good. What I’ve realised is the power to take these thoughts and make them into something generative. Something that has potential to bring about healing and even the possibility of reconciliation. 

Mother of Pearl: relinquish control, reclaim agency

Ruminations are a fantasy, a way to control the situation - they are very creative, but they produce bitter, stony residue that gets lodged and leaves us feeling stuck. In my ruminations, I often paint the other person as a shrivelled caricature, whilst I’m more savvy, more confident, more sharp -  all at the same time being incredibly kind and attuned to the intricacies of the situation, because you know, I’m perfect. But this isn’t me in reality, this is fantasy Leeza. There’s a better way, and that usually happens in community, guided by someone who has walked the path of relational pain. I want to produce pearls with my memories of conflict and help others in their journeys. This happens only through being guided through with the right space and time.

Oysters produce pearls as a defence mechanism and need two things to do this: time and to rightly identify the threat. They’re are able to take an irritant, such as sand or even a parasite and wrap that intrusion in something called nacre. This is the iridescent substance which, when layered on top of each other, forms a pearl. 

We can do the same, but we need time and to properly identify the threat in our relationships. Ruminating with no creative guidance keeps us stuck and hinders our ability to properly identify what the real threats are.

I believe part of what it means to be human is to properly understand our God-given agency. I distinguish control from agency. Control has to do with establishing the boundaries of reality and setting the rules of life. Agency has more to do with making meaningful choices within the realities we find ourselves and influencing our environment. Inasmuch as we’d like to think we’re in control, we’re not. We’re thrown into families we didn’t choose, bodies we didn’t choose, societies we didn’t choose and a whole host of other variables which make up who we are. But we always have agency. The moment when we grasp for complete control of a situation, like through ruminating, we denigrate our agency and lose an opportunity to create something beautiful. 

I get this idea about agency from the Christian story of Eden. Whilst Adam and Eve weren’t in control, they had God-given agency. God told Adam to name the animals, which is a creative act of agency. God could have named the animals and told Adam what they were, but he gave Adam the dignity of naming things. What an amazing privilege! 

So, back to poetry and conflict. Let’s make pearls of our pain - creatively and communally. 

Wisdom and Creativity

Wisdom, like humility, is difficult to grasp because we generally have different perspectives when we talk about it. For example, we sometimes think of wisdom being personified in an old man in a dim library with a cigar, or it could be in a young person who is careful with their finances and saves a lot. 

One thing is clear, often when we talk about wisdom we emphasise things that we do. 

But the wisdom I explore here primarily is a way of being. It overflows out of character, habit and ethics.

From my reading and thinking about this, the most helpful way to think about someone who is wise is that they are in sync with reality.

An area where wisdom shines brightly is in interpersonal relationships. In fact, the wisdom I’m talking about here could not be gained in isolation. A bit like love, it requires relationship with others to be able to grow and to test whether it’s genuine.

The ability to know what’s really going on

Aren’t we funny as human beings? We say one thing, but our tight lips say another. We leave out important information which, if it were the other way round, we’d really want to know. We say we’re okay, when deep down we’d really love for someone to see that we’re not. The wise person understands human relationships and has the ability to properly assess what is going on beneath the surface. Wise people have this superpower which enables them to sift through interpersonal data and make sense of things as they truly are. 

This is so key in the creative arts and it’s especially needed when it comes to creative community engagement, precisely because we as arts practitioners hit deeper realities of human existence quicker than other types of work. We work with people who bear their souls, recreate their lived experience and use their voice to drive forward political ideals in a way that those working in the transport engineering sector don’t. We get to issues of ethics and values quicker and have the privilege and responsibility to hold those precious things in honour. 

So if we’re going to have success in creativity, we’re going have to get clued up on how people are wired, both in the sense of how they are as individuals and also common human experience. And we do this by being attentive, curious and by asking good questions. 

Wait, aren’t these inherently creative acts, don’t they by necessity require us to engage our imaginations? Yes they are  - so let’s leverage them.

The ability to move in the direction of good ethics

Wisdom in interpersonal relationships also involves the ability to know what to do or say next, if anything. But this is all in the context of moving towards good ethics, which can be challenging to figure out. Without getting too philosophical and meta, there’s a sense in which the wise person keeps their eye on the macro as well as the micro. This of course is a big task - but from my experience the wisest people in this sense have the ability to intuitively keep the bigger picture in perspective.  

When it comes to creative work relationships, wisdom involves sensitivity to peoples’ quirks, but also keeps the vision of what needs to happen to get things done, and in a way that as much as possible, everyone involved is satisfied. 

This is why, in my experience, producers are the wisest people in the sector. They’re on the ground, relating to many different kinds of people, they are often very emotionally attuned, but are grounded enough to keep their eye on the end goal. They’re the ones diplomatically managing expectations, reminding people of deadlines and budget limits, all whilst maintaining an approachability that masks just how stressed and overloaded they really are. If you’re on a project with a producer and they’re doing a great job - tell them!

Faith and Creativity

Almost everything we see as admirable and as excellent at one point didn’t exist. For something as simple as a ballpoint pen, László Bíró after many attempts at trying to fix the inky inconveniences of the fountain pen, had the faith to persist - to keep going in his quest for a better alternative. Then one day, he was inspired by a child playing with marbles in a puddle. He was struck by the watery trace the marble left behind, made the mental connection to previous versions he had made, and the ingenuity of modern ballpoint pen was born.

Creativity requires faith. It requires the ability to see the fuller potential of raw material; pen and paper, clay and spinning wheel, isolated notes and melody. The very act of envisioning a creative idea involves pulling of scraps of memory and desire, ache and frustration. It does this by contorting and stretching it into a resolution or aim that doesn’t yet exist.

My favourite quote on faith is one from the bible. The writer says:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

But perhaps more fundamentally, faith requires creativity. A visual demonstration of this is the stretching of an elastic band and holding it taut. Faith is a stretching of our imagination and holding it in that position of tension over a period of time. Its integrity is tested, which essentially requires creative thinking to be able to remember previous successes, adapt, give the benefit of the doubt in difficult relationships and take advantage of the benefits of hindsight which are currently unfolding in real time. Faith is inherently imaginative. It takes scraps of memory, mental images from previous encounters and reworks them into a new image. In essence, faith is a stretching of our imaginative resources.

There’s an interrelated relationship between faith and creativity

The same chapter from where this verse is from lists multiple examples of where this creative stretching took place. The writer concludes:

‘These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth’.

What does greeting something from afar look like in practice, other than a kind envisioning which is stretched? I imagine these individuals squinting in the distance, tensing their chest and eye muscles in hope of something better to come.

But what blocks faith? Often, people talk about fear - and rightly so. But fear only blocks faith via the route of imagination. Fear is just as imaginative as faith, but it conjures up phantoms and fantasies of annihilation, rather than resolution.

Within this stretching, there is inevitable tension. There’s a pulling and a discomfort within the process. Faith is creativity with tensile strength. It encompasses resilience, malleability and is tested and strengthened over time.

This has become a core value to my creative practice because so many other good qualities are contingent on it. For example, without faith I cannot have the emotional resources to combat setbacks and disillusionment. I need faith to be able to push forward when I feel uncertain about a new partnership, and trust that if things don’t work out, it wasn’t pointless. But my faith isn’t arbitrary. I don’t have faith in faith. Ultimately for me, it’s grounded in a personal God who has proved himself faithful over time.

Humility and Creativity

Humility and Creativity

Humility is a funny one… mainly because people view it in such different ways. Unlike the concept of love, calling someone a humble person can have positive or negative connotations. 

Some people view humility as putting yourself down - denying your gifts or deflecting compliments. 

Others view it almost as a spiritual state of being unaffected by the world, as C.S. Lewis famously said: 

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” 

Imagine that - not thinking of yourself at all as the highest form of virtue.

But is that even possible?

I’m made from earth

It’s interesting that the English word ‘humility’ comes from the Latin ‘humilitas’ which is derived from ‘humus’ meaning ‘earth’. It signals being close to the ground - or as we commonly say, ‘down to earth’.

My understanding of humility is grounded in the idea of being a creature. The Latin association of ‘earth’ and ‘ground’ reminds me of Adam being made from clay, something which speaks deeply to our humanity. I am a dependent being, I did not bring myself into existence. For all of my efforts at self sufficiency and perceived independence, I didn’t stride into this world this way. The first full sensory experience I had in this world, touch - is an ode to dependence. 

This understanding of humility helps me to veer away from faulty aspirations of self forgetfulness on the one hand and false deprecation on the other.

Having grown up in Black culture in the UK, I find self effacement as virtue in White British culture a bit of a red herring. Brits don’t like to make a big deal of themselves and have tied moral value to it.

But I wonder whether having no concern for the self leaves us vulnerable to a different kind of pride: saviourism.

Could we, in attempting not to not draw attention to ourselves out of humility, end up thinking we don’t need the attention of others, that somehow we’re above it? Might we have an overinflated view of our ability to handle life because deep down, we actually do believe we are completely okay?

I’m not the saviour

Creativity constantly touches what is most sacred to us requires resilience, but our dedication as artists can turn sour when we veer into saviour mode. 

Humility keeps my creativity in check because it reminds me that I don’t have to be the expert at everything - it helps me see that truly, there’s no such thing as an original work of art and that I need the input of others to thrive. 

Humility helps me see that I am created to be in relationship with others, which is why I can’t just dismiss them if I disagree. It helps me want to meet the needs of others, without fooling myself into thinking I can do this all the time. 

Love and Creativity

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” 

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Most would agree that true love requires work, a stretching beyond our resources. But is it the end to which all meaningful things are headed? The quote by Rilke suggests so, and I would agree. Unless my work is for the ultimate end of love, there’s no point setting out to labour in the first place. 

There are many different ways to look at love, so I want to outline what I mean by it here. The love that underpins all my work aims to be persevering, self sacrificial, other-centred. It's durable, yet flexible - not stoic, but bendable.

“Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

- Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie (via Zora Neale Hurston) teaches me the bendability of love, the fact that it’s malleable in the presence of whoever it seeks to connect with. Love holds in tension an objective and subjective quality to it. On the one hand, it’s as deeply fixed and rooted as a mature oak tree, on the other hand, it’s as tender and perceptibly wholesome as a baby’s yawn. 

This isn’t to say that every time people who engage with my work will feel loved. The feeling is likely to come much more tangentially. For example, I hope that people will feel seen in my work. The ‘eyes’ in eyesandoath refers directly to that. I observe the world around me and peer into my own soul in order to connect with others. My hope is that people listen to my work and ‘yes, that’s my experience of the world too’. This leads to love because it forms connection and combats isolation. The objective necessity of common human experience and the subjective necessity of fleshing out that experience is satisfied. 

The flexible side of love is inherently creative and this is where the magic happens. In order to connect with someone, I reshape myself into their world. Counterintuitively, this requires a subduing of parts of myself which compete with or jar against the uniqueness in others. 

For example in my poem Mother, I speak from the perspective of a middle aged man in a corporate world. Now, I have nothing against middle aged men (I promise! more on what inspired this poem another time…), but we would all agree that a middle aged man working in the corporate world is likely to have aspects to his personality which don’t entirely fit with mine. But in writing Mother, I looked to my own difficult experiences and honoured them through metaphor. At the same time, I subdued aspects of myself in order to connect with someone totally different to me, but who could identify with me in this experience. 

This is an attempt for me to love and connect with others:

“mother is muffled tears behind closed doors over drowned years of suffocating pain, 

mother is perseverance and collapse, 

I, a grown man, run around this world with an umbilical cord tied to her lap, 

chair board meetings with her eyes in the shadows, 

see glints of her wild smile in my daughter’s folly.”

I think this is how empathy functionally works. Real empathy requires putting a pause button on our own demands and preferences in order to step into the world of others, and empathy is a prerequisite for love. 

Four Values and Creativity

This post introduces a miniseries on four values which remain integral to my creative work: love, humility, faith and wisdom.

I will be delving into how each value transforms my practice, but also how they balance each other out to provide a good foundation for others to learn from.

A lot of people talk about how values are your unique flavour to what you’re bringing to the table. But I prefer to think of them as guardrails which help me to stay on track. They provide a focus and an impetus when things are tough and they help problem solving processes. I arrived at these values nearly three years ago during some careers coaching I received and I have returned to them ever since. I don’t take on any projects which don’t have any discernible resemblance of these qualities and they are what I strive for in every working relationship. 

As much as we artists often veer away from clinging to moral absolutes, we’re deeply moral people. Perhaps the word ‘moral’ feels a bit too jarring. We might taper it by saying we have conviction or settle for ‘value-based’. But the truth is no one is out there creating persuasive art simply for arts sake. However subtle or imperceptible, there is always a moral note to be struck. It’s what keeps us going. 

Values are a way to keep us drawing from the deep pure waters of our moral core which lie dormant in our day to day, but flare up when we’re hit with something not right in the world. 

Talking about the arts ecosystem in New York, visual artist Makoto Fujimura puts it like this: 

“It is widely recognized that our culture today is not life giving. There is little room at the margins to make artistic endeavors sustainable. The wider ecosystem of art and culture has been decimated, leaving only homogenous pockets of survivors, those fit enough to survive in a poisoned environment. In culture as in nature, a lack of diversity is a first sign of a distressed ecosystem. 

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented.”1

Values help us stay hydrated in our sometimes suffocating environments. 

Stay tuned for what’s next: 

• Love

• Humility

• Faith

• Wisdom

1. Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life, (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2017), p. 30.

Ephrem the Syrian’s Poetic Christ

Most people have a version of Christ which makes sense of their world. Whether that comes from a religious belief or not, the historic Christ has many cloaks. I’ve encountered him as a marxist and nationalist, and alchemist. Amongst Christians, he is God. But he also was a man, so how does that all fit? 

If you’re new to my work, you might be surprised to find I’m interested in the relationship between poetry and theology. I find deep imaginative potential in both and have had intellectual curiosities satisfied by both. Ephrem the Syrian has been part of that journey in recent months and I’d love to introduce you to his writing. 

Ephrem the Syrian was a Syriac theologian who lived in fourth century Edessa, modern day Turkey. During his time, many groups were trying to make sense of who Christ was. Was he fully human like us, or was his humanity an illusion? Did Christ have a divided physical and soul nature or was it just one nature? A lot of these debates happened for good reason and answers to them had real implications. However it became tainted for Ephrem when he perceived a certain arrogance. 

Ephrem didn’t shy away from the need to engage in deep theological inquiry (after all, he was himself a theologian), but he saw a problem amongst his peers. What started out as open curiosity, quickly became a mission for managing the mechanics of Christ. What began as genuine inquiry for the benefit of the church, eventually slipped into logical sports for the benefit of the intellectual elite. Ephrem the Syrian valued thorough theological engagement, but cautioned his readers. He saw the need for wisdom in debating with others, whilst remaining humble in quiet contemplation. He puts it like this: 

‘The mouth which wishes to speak about him who is

unspeakable,

Makes him small, for it is insufficient to his greatness.

[...]

Refrain from debating, which cannot comprehend him, and

acquire silence, which befits him.

Enable me, my Lord, to use both of these discerningly:

May I not debate presumptuously; may I not be silent

impudently.

May I learn beneficial speech; may I acquire discerning

silence.’1

Like poetry, the historic Christ is often beyond our understanding. We’re drawn out of ourselves not primarily to make all the cogs fit, but to delight, to feel unsettled, or to worship. Like poetry the historic Christ cannot easily be put together in a neat bundle of comprehension. And whilst thinking deeply about Christ often leads to worship for the Christian, there are ways in which fixating on how Christ’s nature fits together diminishes our awe of him. 

Ephrem the Syrian has taught me the value of thinking deeply, whilst holding open hands for imagination, for delight and reverence.

1. The Fathers of the Church: St. Ephrem the Syrian, trans. by Jeffrey T. Wickes (Missouri: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015), p. 62.