Rhododendron Joy + You are allowed

There’s a rhododendron behind my house that the people who built this place planted decades ago, it’s fully mature, taller than me, wider than my arms can stretch. Right now it’s covered in those big pink ball-blooms, dozens of them, exuberantly alive. I keep going to the window and standing there, and I feel the thrill of the joy of it every time.

Does that sound a little too intense? A little too much?

Maybe. I’ve heard both, more than once, more than I’d like to count. And I’m way past apologizing for it.

Maybe I AM too much for some people. Too forward about the joy. Too unabashed about the work. Too unwilling to dim down so the room stays comfortable. Oh well. That’s too bad. It is not my job to manage everyone’s feelings, smooth everything over, and make sure no one is unsettled by the fact that there’s a person over here who is actually thrilled to be alive in front of a flowering bush.

You are allowed to be a lot. You are allowed to make work that takes up room. You don’t have to shrink your work, your voice, or your delight to keep anyone else comfortable.

The world has an enormous appetite for asking creative people to soften, calm down, be more "professional," stop making such a fuss. The tax gets levied especially hard on women, on outsiders, on anyone who didn’t come up through the approved channels. The tax is optional. You can stop paying it.

Your creative authority isn’t something you earn from a panel of judges. It’s already yours. You claim it by acting like it’s true — by making the thing, by saying the thing, by standing in front of the rhododendron and being too much on purpose.

This is exactly the territory Take What Belongs to You — Wild Creativity: Claim Your Creative Authority walks you through. It’s a working book, not a sit-and-read book. You make marks in it. You cut into it. You build with it. The exercises walk you out of the "am-I-allowed-to" zone and into the actual work that’s yours.

I’d reach for the print version, it’s tactile, real, meant to be lived in and painted on and torn into. It’s also on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited if that’s your way of working.

A new raw studio session went up. I’m working on a reclaimed wood panel that’s already been layered with paint and tissue paper collage, with a foam skull as my model. I draw a quick portrait with Stabilo Woody water-soluble crayons, then activate everything with gel medium. The crayons blur and smear when the gel hits them, and you work with whatever arrives. This isn’t a tutorial. It’s not about figuring out just how to do it. It’s about letting the materials show you what they’re going to be. The Creation’s wild energy does the talking.

What’s been asking you to be too much this week? Reply and tell me, I read every single one and will reply.

You are a Light,

Monette

PS — The rhododendron has dropped a few petals on the gravel below already, just a few, like it’s spilling over the edges of itself. Good. Whoever planted it decades ago picked the spot exactly right and left it to become enormous. Nobody asked the bush to be smaller. Be the bush.