This is my personal take on creativity, of course. Narrated version is HERE

I’ve been marveled at a bit in my time for all of the creative things I enjoy doing, have done, and continue to do. (Really wish I could make even a subsistence living on it, and that’s my goal.)

I’ve been an amateur photographer since my first photography class in high school, I think I was sixteen. (Back when we had to use dark rooms and real film!) I took some of these pics yesterday for my account on Shutterstock. Digital photography is a vast improvement on the artform for me.

I do mostly backgrounds, nature shots, I have an eye for light/shadow and finding the unique in the everyday. I don’t usually photograph people, mostly because I know I don’t have the eye for it.

I do graphic design (I have an real University Minor in it and everything, lolz) and cover art for books, media packages and the like. I use a pseudonym for a degree of separation between the name I publish under and the name I do artwork under… (It’s here, if you want to see)

I spin, yes, using a spinning wheel. (I can also use an Andean hand spinner and a drop spindle, I actually started using those.)

I’m currently spinning a black merino, but my favorite things to spin are usually bamboo, alpaca, silk blends, merino, and Tencel. Anything soft, really (except bunny fur, cause I’m allergic.)

I knit, and I don’t have any pics of anything I’ve knit because I usually give them away.

Obviously, given what I’m trying to achieve with my writing, I’m a writer, and it’s one of those things I’ve been doing for so long as a hobby that I just can’t remember a time when I haven’t been a writer. Trying to make a living at it is a much later development in my life.

My very first book I wrote in Kindergarten. I colored the cover on upside down. But I guess my parents loved it anyway. It took me a while to really learn to love the written word because I’m dyslexic, but once I did… well, there wasn’t any turning back for me.

I’m an excellent editor, if anything, I’m a better editor than I am a writer, but I love writing, editing has its beauty, but it’s more analytical than creative for me.

I make stone jewelry, beads or chips, wire wrapped stones or wood, that type of thing. I’ve sold quite a few unique pieces. Malas like these I especially love to craft. Each one I’ve made has been a gift, the types of stones chosen to fit the person I made it for.

I have historical reenactment garments in history museums, and my work has graced the stage. I have made a minimalistic living being a seamstress, but over time, I had to stop sewing because of my fibromyalgia. I still do an occasional stint at it, but it hurts too much, in all honesty, to do it very often.

One of my pieces is a blue silk velvet that looks a lot like this late Tudor.

I’ve done calligraphy and illumination in medieval styles, and my work has been gifted as awards to strangers in historical re-enactment royal courts. 

I’ve kept bees, studied aromatherapy and herbalism for going on ten or fifteen years? Maybe more, and I make perfumes, bath salts, candles, hand creams, and the like using those skills.

I’m a gardener, and before we lost our house this past fall, I had a beautiful garden I’d poured my blood, sweat, and tears into for years.

Of course, I don’t do all of these things every day, but I do consistently do them. I’ve taught middle eastern dance professionally, I’ve done and taught silk painting using the gutta serti methodology, I’ve learned how to batik cotton… there are so many things I’ve done and learned that I’ll never remember to list them all.

Oh, brewing! I’ve developed a talent at brewing wheat ales that are so delicious they’re hard to stop drinking.

Creativity just calls to me and feeds my soul.

I cook and bake, my joys in the kitchen are learning new recipes from different countries and cultures to add to my repertoire.

Something I’ve learned over the four decades I’ve been on the planet is that I need to be creative. I wither in a standard career in corporate, and though I love teaching, teaching to the test sucks the life out of me.

What is the source of all this creativity? I wish I could answer that. I’ve met people who don’t seem to have any of it, while I’ve been blessed with so much that I can’t even come close to listing all the things I’ve learned how to do. I’ve met those who are happy with one hobby, and wondered how they can focus on only the one?

I find inspiration in everything around me, on the days my fibromyalgia lets me, I wander woods and fields with my kids collecting herbs and barks and photographs. The herbs and barks we use for dying things, (yep, I do that too).

The photographs, I use for whatever I can.

I think it’s like that for a lot of creative folks, the writers, the singers, the artists, the entertainers. We bleed creativity and exude it in our very breaths.

I know without it, some daily expression of it, I can quickly slide into anxiety and depression, and I suppose this habit of creativity is a form of therapy or medication.

Ancient cultures may have called one such as me gods-touched, or a healer, a shaman or a druid. I don’t lay claim to any titles, but I do sincerely believe that our culture (our human culture, and the various, diverse patchwork pieces that it’s made up of) needs our creatives.

We need our entertainers, our gods-blessed people, for we are the ones who see past the here and now, to the maybe and when. To the IF.

We are the dreamers.

Here’s the thing, though. Dreamers still need to eat. Here’s why I need the help… but, if you can and anything I do has value to you…

Buy Me a Coffee

Patreon is here

and Paypal  and Skrill email addy is kaelan.rhywiol@gmail.com

Help me keep providing content, and you know, eating?

Amazon Wishlist too.

1$/month 12$/year from 1000 people and I’d have enough to keep going and doing what I love. To keep dreaming.