Creativity & Global Change: Healing Our Planet Starts With Us
We’ve heard that we are in the midst of a climate crisis — a global change that hasn’t happened in 65 million years. We’ve heard frightening statistics that can easily overwhelm us — to the point where we want to throw our hands up in the air and run in the other direction…
….or worse, think the problem is TOO overwhelming to do anything about.
What can one person do to make any kind of significant difference?
One person can do so much! It’s not that we each make little changes…it’s the individual changes that can remake our world, patch by patch, step by step. This month, I’ll be giving my fourth TEDx Talk about healing (no PhD required!)…our planet…through creativity. (no art experience needed!)
Take a breath. Quick — name the first thing you see around you. Nature is everywhere…How can we keep this joy alive?
Creativity is the act of shaping. It’s magic, it’s change. It’s the craft of the wise and if done wholeheartedly, it inspires action.
Growing up, trees inspired me to create — but so did everything else in my world. My assignment notepads were scribbled with lyrics and music notes that the trees from my morning walk had inspired.
Once, I was so distracted for an entire Biology period because I was tensely awaiting one lingering leaf to fall from a slender, shaking branch. You might have thought I was watching a baseball game, from how I was cheering on that leaf. “You can do it!” Everything around me was stimulation for a poem, song, or story.
Waking from a coma, I looked out the hospital window to see the trees. I saw that trees can adapt, move and grow even with the harshest of storms.
So trees were my ongoing inspiration feeling uprooted and longing to plant myself back home.
As I gained my strength back I took my long walks again, and now with a new experience post-coma and trauma, I realized trees were uprooted too. I saw the state of our world, and I longed to restore our ecosystem, in all of its natural splendor. What were humans doing to our earth?
I asked myself, how can we have a relationship with ourselves, or with each other if we don’t have a compassionate relationship with the Earth?
We often don’t take action not because we aren’t passionate about making a difference — we just don’t know where to begin.
Start with creativity. Creativity is something you do.
Creativity connects, and now we need creativity more than ever for that purpose.The arts help us people believe WE CAN. They are the antidote to feeling powerless.
We can build from the patches of our broken world. Arts help us visualize this. How we interact with our environment is shaped by our culture, our every day rituals. So use creativity to help you build new rituals.
Here’s an example: Reduce the negative impacts of material waste — Recycle and Reuse! That’s when I really fell in love with puppetry — yes puppetry! I used some cardboard boxes to celebrate the women’s movement!
Buy recycled paper products and using cloths instead of paper towels. Check out products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which means they come from responsibly managed forests.
Art brings sights and sounds, sensations together, into our bodies, because we aren’t walking brains. And embodying something makes action.
How can we use creativity for action?
CREATIVITY can mean conversations, relationships, or outcomes that result from this relational, collaborative process.
We can each create this imagery to communicate our need to the world and make it a public issue, while also creating a daily reminder for ourselves to do SOMETHING.
Active art participation can develop our personal power to make change in the world. We make sense of our place in the world and how we are to interact with it in the stories we share.
Our one patch with our story put together with others is like putting together pieces of a puzzle. Together we can create new and more sustainable thinking and behavior.
Now as I continue to create, heal from my own personal traumas, move forward, and strive to make a difference in our world, art emboldened me with the confidence and knowing that caring for myself, caring for others and caring about life itself goes hand in hand with caring for our world.
We can visualize our role in climate change, and how we can adapt our way of life to play our part.
I have a lot of scars on me from 28 surgeries. But each scar and surgery had put my patchworked system together.
Every patch DOES make a difference.
Yes, YOU can heal our planet. SO start now!
Amy will be giving her 4th TEDx Talk on Change and Creative Activism on October 18th at UCONN TEDx. Her memoir, “My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful” has won multiple awards including “Best Memoir” (2019 CT Press Club Award) and will soon be an audiobook. Learn more about her virtual programs and performances on healing from PTSD, creativity, mental health, environmentalism, and student wellbeing at https://www.amyoes.com/
