The Inner Spirit of Creators Space - The sacred spiral keeps growing
I am tremendously grateful for Creators Space and our creative community. As a collective, we built something special with lasting impact. Over the 7 years, we cultivated an inner foundation that became the spirit of Creators Space. I came to understand this as 12 unique inner traits that formed into a spiral shape created from our personal and collective efforts. I share this reflection as a tribute to the spirit we created together and to all of those who continue to grow the spiral through your creative expression, community service, personal growth, and dedication to doing your part to create a culture where all can thrive. So, grab a cup of coffee or tea, and reminisce with me on what we created together.
The Spiral Begins – The Origin Story
Cultivating Inner Strength
The call to build a creativity center came in mid-December 2016. I was sitting at a coffee shop reading through my journal entries of the past few months. My mind was so cluttered with random thoughts and feelings and my body was filled with an electric energy resembling a swirl of fire and ice converging into one spinning ball. The prior few months had been filled with so many jarring events that had me question everything. My husband’s health issues, my children’s mental state, the impact of working 20 years for large intensely capitalistic corporations, the divide of our country, and the acts of violence seeming to be more widespread than acts of kindness. So many thoughts spinning around in my head, both personal struggles and afflictions of our culture. Ironically, accompanying all this confusion was a feeling of hope, a feeling of purpose, a feeling of responsibility to help enable a positive shift. This conflicted state of mind and the hopeful swirl deep in my gut converged into a burst of anguish. Thudding my elbows on the table and my fingertips to my forehead, I shouted, “I just need to create space in my head to think”. Those words spoken out loud birthed the idea for a center where individuals come together to nurture their spirit in a shared space, and then work together as a community to address the issues of our culture. I spent the next 30 minutes, tears streaming, frantically capturing the vision and concept for Creators Space. I called my husband and told him, “I think I found my purpose”. Even though I lacked the relevant experience to do something this ambitious, my inner commitment to the call, signed with the metaphorical ink of faith, provided the contractual agreement for my inner strength to see it through to the end, whenever that is and whatever it looks like. This was the first brick of our inner foundation, residing in the whisper to heed this call.
Cultivating Inner Imagination
When I share the experience of building Creators Space, I tend to fast forward through the stubborn parts of the first year. I simplified the story to the right people showed up at just the right time with the needed wisdom to put structure to our concept, and in no time, we had a business plan, financing, and a building to call home. All that is true if you pluck out the exciting parts, omitting the moments of insecurity when we need to beg our imagination to bring solutions to solve the seemingly impossible barriers. These situations of struggle expand our minds, serving up new lands of creative problem-solving. Within the first 12 months, I had to call upon my inner imagination to figure out a way to transform the shiny object in my mind into a physical place bustling with creative abundance. The call to my inner imagination made over and over and over again built a corridor to my creative center. The safe place within us to wrestle with our inner shadows, which create the narratives of our limiting beliefs birthed from our fears and wounded-ness. Our shadow is an important teacher who provides the opportunity to work through our struggles using both our inner strength and inner imagination to slowly chip away at the hardened limitations of our perceived capabilities, developing the chiseled masterpiece of our sculpted creative solutions.
The Spiral Grows – A Community that Thrives Together
Cultivating the Inner Joy
Creators Space opened in April 2018 in a newly renovated space within a 130-year-old building in Saint Paul, MN. It emerged into the world as an infant and with each challenge and the growing needs of the community, it evolved into a thriving collective. The 34,000 square feet of creative utopia provided the community with collaborative studio space and tools for painting, pottery, woodworking, dance, healing arts, and music along with the programming to assist individuals in selling artwork and services and hosting classes, events, and community service initiatives. As creative opportunities presented themselves, the time frame from idea to launch happened quickly and smoothly. The community had a physical home base to experiment with creative endeavors that were affordable and flexible, enabling our inner artist to extract the ideas within our mind through the constricting birth canal of our cultural conditions into a tangible form of brilliance. This is the same creative process our ancestors tapped into that brought about the innovations of their time that we now consider our living essentials. This process creates a new corridor to our creative center that, when practiced repeatedly, builds up our confidence as an effective creator, transcending our work efforts into a flow of inner joy.
Cultivating Inner Self-Knowledge
There was a common phrase we heard at Creators Space, “WOW! You built this place for me!”. And for some, it was spoken with a flow of emotions appearing to come from the depths of their soul. These words were not reserved for the artists but came from the everyday people who wandered into the space because their feet simply walked in our direction, “If only I knew why” we would hear. We came to understand this as a cry from their inner spirit, that they were finally seen and had a place that understood their needs with a pathway to be brought out and into the light of creative existence. When we discover our unique gifts that come in the form of our personal interests, traits, strengths, unique disposition, and calls from our curiosity, then nurture them through active participation of some form, we are cultivating our self-knowledge. As we work with our unique gifts and integrate them into our daily living, we turn mundane activities into joyful experiences. The root words of knowledge are knowen, which means to recognize, and leche, which means to find out. Inner self-knowledge is an active exploration of the self to identify, recall, and remember what we know to be true about ourselves. Those gifts are hidden in the DNA of our human spirit to be manifested into a particular interest, a unique calling, and through an undeniable urge to ______ (fill in the blank). Our opportunity in this lifetime is that of an archeologist, to unearth the treasures buried within our inner spirit and discover their usages within the path of our existence. Creators Space spoke directly to our inner spirit and provided the conditions for our transformative excavation.
Cultivating Inner Responsibility
In the first 2 years, we experienced 10 years of earned wisdom. Each challenge provided an opportunity to work through a problem and expand our way of thinking, which is the most effective approach to learning. The cultural pandemic of 2020 positioned Creators Space as a supportive environment for community engagement and service work. During the critical months of the pandemic, we switched our focus to serving the local community by providing free lunches and becoming a safe haven for a portion of our member community disproportionally impacted by the shutdown. We provided the basic needs of food and shelter, along with the space to continue their creative work. As challenging as this time was, we saw a side of humanity filled with empathy, compassion, and the innate need to help others even under the conditions of our own need to survive. In listening to the whispers of our inner responsibility, we discovered a heightened state of accountability to serve the greater community, putting aside our personal needs because, at this moment in time, they just were not as important as the needs of the collective to survive this challenging time. Our inner responsibility was communicating that our need for financial security was not as important as the health of our member community. By heeding this call, our actions established our reputation as being an influential hub for community service work.
Cultivating Inner Integrity
The murder of George Floyd and the civil rights movement of 2020 was a transformative time for our community and the evolution of Creators Space. It opened a new facet of Creators Space to hold space for critical conversations impacting our culture. We experienced the discomfort our ethnic backgrounds may represent, but then through individual interactions, collaborations, and the power of creativity, we began to see a coming together based on things we have in common. These common threads helped to support the critical conversations needing to be shared as a way to begin the healing and transcendence process. We learned that we all have lived experiences of oppression and sharing them in a supportive environment and with a diverse community, helps lift the suppressed spirit out of the depths of our wounded-ness. When we listen to the pain of others with an open heart, our expanded empathy and enriched mindset activate our inner integrity to look deeper into our past behavior and how we may be interfering with the thriving conditions for all. Then armed with this insight, we do our part to break the cycle of oppression both as a victim and as a perpetrator.
Cultivating Inner Wonder
2021 was a year of growth for Creators Space. As the emotional effects of the pandemic set in, we began to see a reemergence of social engagement. Creators Space came to be a place where people could reinvent themselves or take up a lost hobby in the creative arts. We experienced the birth of our Creative Collective as people felt called to find authentic meaning and purpose in their lives with the spirit of creativity as the primary guide in the process. For me personally, I began to pay more attention to my inner artist. I accelerated my painting practice, started reiki training, and went deeper into curating my healing arts offerings. My curiosity was demanding more attention with my inner wonder taking me to places I had little awareness of. This path of exploration provided a deeper understanding of what gives life meaning and more tangible methods of living with purpose. These nudges coming from our curiosity were experienced by many within the broader community as witnessed from the significant growth in our memberships. This included cultural organizations joining our community to use our creative approach as the method to support the people they serve. We also saw a growth in our healing arts programs from the public interest in exploring holistic healing practices as an alternative way to heal from the effects of the cultural pandemic. Curiosity is our inner call signaling that we are ready and open to new possibilities in how we are living our life.
Cultivating Inner Harmony
We organically built a creative collective of over 160 individuals and organizations from various cultural backgrounds, economic situations, creative modalities, age groups, and education levels. All sharing a common physical space, nurturing our inner spirit, and engaging as a community. This unusual divergence of communities that would not typically commune together led to building healthy relationships, mentorships, and problem-solving for the community at large. If we trust in the cultivation of our true nature, we will realize that we have everything needed as a collective species to create a thriving eco-system for all. This natural integration of diversity, birthed from a common interest, went beyond the obvious of our race, sex, religion, and economic status, to a place where we find the natural organic matter of diversity within us. When we engage with our true nature, we are using our energetic currency to invest in a diversity system that can effectively deliver on a long-term viable system where all can thrive. This led to our creative community helping address the challenges within our broader community using our unique creative offerings as a collective. Our offerings of meditation, yoga, healing arts services, artistic classes, clothing swaps, food drives, youth mentorship programs, critical bleed training, chess clubs, open mics, recovery meetings, cultural exhibitions, and so many other things, that happened consistently, all within the same space, showcased the power of our diversity in creating the conditions for healthy change in our local community. We tapped into a collective inner harmony that came from our natural differences.
And isn’t that the Holy Grail of a shared existence.
The Spiral Grows – Supporting Life’s Transitions
Cultivating Inner Knowing
Since the beginning, we operated more like a non-profit but chose to use the for-profit model as a way to test the concept and protect the mission and path of evolution. By the middle of 2022, we realized we created something really special but within the confines of a system that was not financially sustainable. With this understanding, we knew we had to address our failing financial model to keep our space open. The time had come to convert our business entity to a non-profit. Over the next year, our small but mighty team began migrating to a non-profit structure. Then in July of 2023, my work at Creators Space came to a halt with my father’s diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer. Just days after he was admitted to the hospital, I was sitting in the atrium of the VA center with our grant writer. We were at a critical time in our fundraising efforts, submitting grant proposals to secure the funds needed to stay open. We have been working towards this moment for the last 8 months. He was gently pressing me to finalize our 3-year budget needs. In that moment, sitting with these two things, both of great importance, in a situation of having the capacity to serve just one, so I chose. With teary eyes, I said to him, “We are done”. I was needed elsewhere and won’t put the burden of our financial situation on others to solve. It was just too big. I gave up Creators Space to spend the limited time I had with my Dad. He was an artist and wise elder within our community and dedicated his retired life to Creators Space. He supported me throughout the 7 years by investing in the space, helping with the daily operations, creating art, and most importantly engaging with the community. He was just as vested in The Call to build a creative utopia as I was. As I would come to find out, Creators Space was a convergence of our legacy-making footpaths coming together in a shared call. My father’s funeral was on October 27th and Creators Space closed its doors just 4 days later. If I am being completely truthful, I had known for quite some time that Creators Space was temporary. The creative energy I experienced during that time always felt airy and fleeting like something I could feel flowing between my fingers, but couldn’t quite grip as an earthly solid. I had plenty of signs that I chose to ignore and do everything in my power to fight against until my inner knowing was validated in late July. When I stopped resisting the whispers and surrendered to my current situation, I released the grip of the outcome I wanted and stepped back into the flow of my greater purpose, for it lives just upstream of my newly diverted path.
Cultivating Inner Calmness
As I made my way through the grieving process in an attempt to find closure, I came to realize that building Creators Space with my father wasn’t the end point of my calling, but a temporary creative chrysalis that served as a vessel for our collective metamorphosis. Creators Space was a sacred place of creative abundance fueling the trip to our new lands of exploration. It was always meant to be a temporary place to park for a few years that held a special kind of magic to help us discover and cultivate our inner foundation. The space within us that holds our undiscovered superpowers. We were never meant to stay, for if we did, we wouldn’t jet off to the new lands of opportunity. The places we need to be, to use our gifts, to contribute to the collective evolution of our culture. We are meant to be out in the world doing our part to create a shared existence where all can thrive. And I believe that my father is doing the same in his own way, exploring the new lands on the other side of the veil and using the inner artist he cultivated to contribute to the magic on the other side. See you on the flip side Dad. The closure process provided an opportunity to find an inner calmness that even with these challenging events, provided the knowing that things will be ok in the end.
Cultivating Inner Self-Knowledge
Through the events of 2023, I came to realize that all the things have contributed to the development of my personal mythology. I just needed the stillness within the grief to see it. My losses and gains, my struggles and suffering, my compassion for humanity, my connection to nature, my gifts of listening and seeing the hidden abilities and potential in people, my deep love for family and community, my 20 years of experience in corporate business, my 401k that provided the resources to start Creators Space, my evolution as an artist, my Father’s passing, and the closure of Creators Space. They all belong. From the beginning, I gave my inner artist the time and capacity to explore, expand, make mistakes, and try again. I gave her compassion and support to learn and evolve. I gave her control of my senses to integrate her insight into my perception of how the world works. All these conditions provided the means and methods of my legacy-making and I am not done yet.
Cultivating Inner Personal Freedom
An act of creative expression is one of the purest forms of inner personal freedom. It captures a lived experience from many vantage points articulated into an expression of meaning. When we create this type of art, it communicates through all our senses, speaking directly from our spirit. I share this reflection because of an undeniable need to get my lived experience down on paper. A request coming from my inner spirit to get this tangle-ment of raw conceptual thinking out of me and into an articulated form of creative expression, woven together by the experiences of a compassionate wounded soul and the humbleness of a vulnerable artist. I offered up this creative expression as a way to communicate the role you all played in cultivating Creators Space and how it has inspired me to keep going. My transition story is unique to me, but has the same hidden agenda as all situations of forced change. It is the Universe’s way of saying “You have more to learn and more to do - And now is the time”. So, I find myself once again in a similar place to where I was at the beginning of this story, but this time I have the wisdom to know I am right where I need to be. I am here, walking with you as an active participant in life’s journey, doing our part to contribute to our collective evolution, all in our own way. I thank you for contributing to the shared magic and look forward to seeing you again when our paths once again converge.