No Waste in the Creative Garden

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"Everything can be put to use within the creative process."

Shaun McNiff, Trust the Process - An Artist's Guide to Letting Go (Shambhala, 1998)

We've just harvested a good number of large buckets of compost from our rickety makeshift compost heap. There is nothing quite like the joy of reaping such riches from a process that takes almost no effort at all - just a stroll down to the garden with the kitchen scraps and the leaf fall from the patio, an occasional desultory stir and a bit of water in the summer and, voila, free topsoil full of nutrients!

Contrast this with the constantly irritating process of collecting all the waste supermarket packaging that we seem to collect despite our efforts to the contrary followed by the reward-less trip to the nearest recycling point with bulky and unwieldy parcels (no kerb-side recycling here!) of a product that probably should never have been invented in the first place and that will be with us for millennia to come (i.e. plastic in all its myriad shapes and forms).

A major benefit of an organic garden is that it is a closed-loop system that has no waste products, everything sooner or later rotting down and returning to whence it came. Its useful to think of our creative lives in the same way.

All to often we feel we have 'wasted our time' when we make something that doesn't fulfil the criteria or expectations we had in mind for it but this is erroneous thinking because, as in the garden, everything we do in our creative lives contributes to the whole: A tiny corner of a painting we don't like sparks an idea for another work; a misplaced brushstroke sets us to wondering how it would be to paint a large canvas with broad, dripping brushstrokes; An unfinished novel that has lain in the drawer untouched for years, is recycled into a series of short stories which get published; A week spent blocked with a work in progress eventually leads to the realization that we are bored with our process and we need to experiment with new techniques...

Our minds and psyches will function very effectively as virtual compost bins for recycling creative ideas if only we will stop inhibiting the process by our negative thinking and dismissing out of hand every aspect of our creative lives that doesn't seem to fit nicely into the 'product' category. Like the making of compost in the garden, this process requires no great effort on our part; We only need a little diligence and patience and in a short time we will be rewarded with buckets of rich ideas with which to dress our creative gardens and help them grow.