Our ancestors were creative people. 

Living in the homeland now (my family and I moved back to Taiwan from California this past summer), I am surrounded by the resourcefulness, innovation, and beauty that my ancestors possessed (and living ancestors still channel). They used natural resources efficiently. They created art masterfully. They devised tools ingeniously. 

Undoubtedly, the assembly line industrialization of labor, along with the parallel systematization of public education in the U.S. and other western countries to FEED the assembly line factories, stripped the best hours of our waking day of any chance to be creative. 

Before my first classroom teaching job, I taught in schools in Tanzania (Africa) for a brief stint. 

I was tasked with creating a critical thinking program. It was a no-brainer for me to link critical thinking to creative thinking and I designed activities that tapped into my young students’ unfiltered creativity. 

Given an out-of-the-box prompt, for example: “design an animal that could best thrive on a marshmallow planet” and a whiteboard, the children collaborated to invent a creature with paddle feet to keep them afloat on marshmallow roads, a non-stick coat to avoid getting stuck to marshmallow surroundings, and an extra wide mouth to eat whole marshmallows off marshmallow trees. 

It was problem-solving. It was art. It was creation. Problem-solving at its most beautiful.

Most memorably for me, it was effortless and natural for them. They hadn’t had the creativity crushed out of them. Their status quo was resourcefulness and innovation. Anyone who has seen the ubiquitous African stick car toy in action knows the innate power of the creative mind. IYKYK.

Living (at the time in 2010) without addiction to screens or western systems of education, commerce, and media, my students in Tanzania embodied the same no-big-deal type creativity that exists when you aren’t forced to sell your intellect as property to survive a system that aims daily to  crush your soul.

I have always aimed to infuse space for creativity into my classrooms, but it was never without resistance. More significantly, I've realized how much surviving capitalism positions our choices to spend time in creativity as a sacrifice of our material security. Even if we are lucky enough to be employed in a role that allows genuine creativity, much of it is still dictated by the entity's bottom line. How often are we afforded the chance to live creatively for creativity and community's sake alone?

My foray into entrepreneurship has both shown me glimpses of making this a reality for myself and my community outside of dominant institutions WHILE continuously presented me with reasons why, for many, this hasn't been possible. 

I am determined to untangle this knot, channeling the ingenuity, grit, and artfulness that my ancestors possessed.

Why Creativity Will Save Humanity

I don’t know about you all, but I feel like the world is crumbling before our eyes. The status-quo of earning just enough money to stay abreast of inflation while watching many of our global neighbors be stricken by war, famine, genocide, and climate disaster is just not the life I hoped to live or bring my children into. 

Let’s be clear. I am VERY privileged. I am writing this essay in route home from a family vacation in Bali for my children’s spring break. 

I didn’t even have to live through the scare of last week’s earthquake that shook my home island and caused destruction for so many, because I was on an airplane to a beach-side resort. 

Needless to say, I am grappling with the contradictions & privileges in my life, but I won’t deep dive into that here. Just know, the grapple is real and sustained. 

What I will share is that I’ve been observing flickers of affirmation that collective consciousness is seeking creativity in response to crisis. 

This post popped up in my feed about Ireland offering a no-strings-attached stipend to fund creative efforts for 2,000 artists. Ireland has been one of the most vocal first-world countries to oppose the genocide in Gaza, and I don't believe it is coincidental that a country that values human life would also be willing to fund creativity. 

This thread touched on the radical imagination of the Global South as the pathway to move past the clutch of capitalist doom. I have been reading and writing about this notion for about 10 years in academic essays, and seeing such an easy-to-read accessible post reminds me of the power of creativity to connect and send messages to the masses. I’m inspired. 

This week a friend shared with me how she's been channeling her fierce fighting spirit of guarding human life and dignity into a new creative project, Watermelon Pictures: a Palestinian-founded film label, taking back the narrative about their people and their stories into their own loving, creative hands. Art as resistance is so beautifully human. 

Creativity firstly connects us to our own humanity and intrinsic worth. Creativity then connects us to collective consciousness. No ideas are new. When we allow ourselves to become a channel of creation, we are inevitably handling energy and thought that have been swirling around the universe for all of time. Creativity also connects us to one-another in tangible, temporal ways that remind us we are alive. And powerful. And purposeful. 

As global imperialism attempts to make this planet unlivable, it is our creativity, plugged into the collective that will allow us to be resilient. To literally imagine and then create our realities out of this mess. 

This might sound all a bit woo woo still. But stay with me long enough, and we will have some good chats about systems theory, fungi, feedback loops, and living systems’ innate collective power to thwart greed and exist in sustainable symbiosis. 

In other words, my good creative people, we got this. 

As for me, if it’s gonna be rampant inflation and unimaginable housing, land, and food insecurity that threatens our day-to-day existence, then FOR SURE my time and loyalty doesn’t need be spent as a cog in someone else’s assembly line. 

As for me, I’m gonna write. Heal. Heal others. Make stuff. Create community. Have meaningful conversations. Start projects. Build loving ecosystems. Help others get free. Somehow get boatloads of money ethically and ruthlessly (you figure out that contradiction) and then use that money to make money not a thing by funding the innovations that sustain our planet and communities in reciprocal well-being. You feel me?

 In other words, my good creative people, we got this.