Dear Reader,
It happens all the time. I sit in front of the canvas, the piano or when I’m writing and I look at that familiar blinking line on the white screen and...nothing. There’s no wild and untamed inspiration. There’s no divine spark that lights a fire in my heart to bring some fresh and beautiful idea into being. Usually I’m simply sat there, doing the hard work of mining my own inner landscape and trying to create. Sometimes there is an idea that arrives fully formed and I catch it as best I can but that’s a rarity rather than a norm. Mostly I am gathering whispers of ideas, whispers of old echoes of old ideas and trying to make something happen. When even that fails me, I practice my fundamentals. Portraits, musical scales, writing poetry, just staying in motion.
I have learned that inspiration finds you busy. It finds you already working on something.
Ideas bloom in their own time. Your creative practice is the soil it blooms in. Oh and while I’m here talking to myself, rest is a part of that practice too!
The big news for me this week is that I’ve rebooted my music youtube. After a year of learning music production and re learning how to work youtube at all I decided that it was time to have a place to share what I’ve been doing. This whole process has been beautiful, slow and meandering and it feels both vulnerable and exciting to put my work out there. It’s been entirely me in a dark room at the back of the house for a year learning, making and growing something. When I uploaded 5 videos yesterday it felt like the next step in the creative process. I have very different goals with my music now than I used to so the fact that it exists anywhere outside of my studio is more than enough for me. Anything else beyond this is a bonus.
I’ve learned so much this last year and I’ve also relearned a few things that I had largely forgotten. Mainly, the importance of showing up. I had forgotten the significance of catching glimpses of songs and ideas and what it means to create alongside them. Showing up every day for an hour has been a way to create a rich relationship with my music and it’s one that is precious and joyful to me. The knock on effect it’s had has begun to filter into other aspects of my life too. Music is Joy for me and to spend an hour soaked in that energy has rippled out into my entire life like a wave of invitation for everything else to exist in that space or in a space that compliments it.
I think that’s been one of the bigger benefits of my creative practice this whole year. It’s been making room for Joy. Capital J. I’ve been practicing joy. Not waiting for it to come and strike at my life like lightning but to create my own series of small storms and winds and rain and everything in between. If you want to deepen your relationship to Joy you have to invite joy in and you have to do it every day. The paradox of creativity has been getting clearer to me the older I get. The more I give myself structure the more free I feel. The more I give myself a routine, the more creative I can be. I genuinely used to think of it the other way around. Like I’d get a series of well planned ideas gifted to me by the Universe and it would all unfold perfectly in front of me. I was wrong. I’d rather be as surprised as the Universe is when I arrive at the end point of what I’ve been creating.
So, even if you’re not feeling it particularly, as long as you’re watered, rested and fed, get back to your practice. Create joy. Make something. Open the doors to it at the very least. Then do it again and again and again. Don’t worry about silly ideas like talent, you don’t need to be good at something to want to participate. Do it for you!
Thank you for reading and also thank you to those of you who have been sharing my new music around!
Big Love
Ryan James x