25 Creative Quotes on Giving & Gratitude

The Thanksgiving holiday will soon be here, which encourages me to reflect on & share this collection of new quotes I’ve gathered that embody the act of giving, creating, and gratitude.  These musings of thankfulness, graciousness & the power of art are wonderful to remember no matter the time of year!  I believe this lens can also help offer some creative counteraction to fear, judgement, and shame during times of distress, suffering, and sorrow.

What creative quotes or practices help ground you in gratefulness & generosity?

• The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

• All art arises out of gratitude, a deep pervasive feeling that you are glad something exists outside yourself, that something can complete you.  ~Dorothy Koppelman

• Gratitude is a way of creativity. ~ Apollo Matrix

• The art of appreciation begins with self appreciation. ~Amit Abraham

• Gratitude is an art of painting an adversity into a lovely picture. ~Kak Sri

• Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion. ~Mindy Kaling

• Gratitude in advance is the most powerful creative force in the universe. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

• I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.  ~Vincent van Gogh

• Artists are among the most generous of people. Perhaps inherent in the appreciation of creativity comes a deep, underlying love of humanity and our Earth.  ~Kelly Borsheim

• Gratitude opens the door to… the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. ~Deepak Chopra

• I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. ~Keith Haring

• I am filled with gratitude for the ability to live the artist’s life. In my studio. Being an artist. Everyday.  ~Mickie Acierno

• I’m very grateful for an entire lifetime spent involved in this creative process.  ~Ron Howard

• Those works I have most profited by are the ones I have given away. ~ Joseph P. Blodgett

• Music and art both spring from a grateful heart.  ~Katie Wood McCloy

• Make a gift of your life and lift all mankind. ~David R. Hawkins

• I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. This world would be unlivable without art. Thank you for inspiring me. ~Steven Soderberg

• Picasso said that the sale of every one of his works was like having a little piece of himself taken away. In this sense, he could be regarded as a very generous person. ~Marvin Humphrey

• Gratitude is a many-colored quality, reaching in all directions. It goes out for small things and for large.” ~Faith Baldwin

• Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. ~ Melody Beattie

• Art is the giving by each man of his evidence to the world. Those who wish to give, love to give, discover the pleasure of giving. Those who give are tremendously strong. ~ Robert Henri

• There is no better opportunity to receive more than to be thankful for what you already have. Thanksgiving opens up the windows of opportunity for ideas to flow your way.  ~Jim Rohn

• The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. ~ Dale Carnegie

• An artist gives. Gives visually, gives through courses, or with free advice, through generosity of spirit and through a need to share.  ~Veronica Roth

• The act of giving something to others is an art of flowering your heart. ~Vinayak

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours! Many thanks for everyone’s support throughout this year!

Purposeful Parenting & Creativity

July recognizes Purposeful Parenting Month, which highlights the significant relational value of parents and children having resilient and meaningful connections with one another. Purposeful Parenting embraces understanding, unconditional love, and empathy with the consistency of structure, safety, and healthy boundaries. To parent with purpose is to be an active contributor in sustaining rapport, connection, and intention with your child or teen.

An offering I have facilitated is an art therapy group for moms living in a shelter with their children as they work on transitioning out of homelessness. This art therapy group was part of the shelter’s trauma informed parenting support program as an opportunity to receive nurturing assistance during this challenging time to strengthen coping, self-care, and explore empowering ways to sustain an affirming relationship in their child’s lives. The power of art and the creative process offers a safe place to address these topics.  Over the years that I was involved with this program, I met moms of amazing strength and resilience, not only committed to creating healthier relationships and attachments with their children, but often working on their own trauma recovery.

For children who have experienced trauma and loss in their young lives, having adult attachments that engage with purpose and compassion can be a key component to their healing. Perry & Szalavitz (2006) speak to how a child’s relationship with the adults in their lives has an essential component to how they react to trauma. They also note that if a child is surrounded and nurtured by caregivers who are safe, comforting, dependable, and present; this can help protect youth from the adverse effects of trauma, as well as strengthen their ability to recover.

“Recognizing the power of relationships and relational cues is essential to effective therapeutic work, and indeed, to effective parenting, caregiving, teaching, and just about any other human endeavor.” (p. 67, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog).

Ohio’s American Academy of Pediatrics identities six components to purposeful parenting for parents and caregivers to keep in mind. Being Protective, Personal, Progressive, Positive, Playful, and Purposeful in our relationships decreases the impact of chronic stress exposure and ultimately supports a child’s fullest potential and well-being.

The foundation of purposeful parenting and fostering relational enrichment inspired me to reflect on some fun and creative activities for families (and adult helpers involved in children’s lives) to engage in together that encourage affirming experiences and supportive interaction. Creative experiences can be an enjoyable way to foster connection, develop interpersonal ties, and positive memories:

• Painting with Bubbles or Shaving Cream: These sensory-based twists on painting can encourage play and experimentation between child and parent using simple, inexpensive materials. Levine & Kline (2008) cite that activities involving art expression such as painting and drawing are great bonding opportunities for parents to engage in alongside their children.

• Sidewalk Chalk: Grab a bucket or box of sidewalk chalk, head outside and take a break to chalk it up together—at home, a local park, or playground! Suggested ideas to support collective participation in this activity include drawing where the child and parent can add to one another’s images, marks, or doodles. If you are up for making your own sidewalk chalk, here’s how. Families can also play these classic sidewalk chalk games.

• Nature Walk & Scavenger Hunt: Parents, young children, and teens can benefit from unplugging and taking time to enjoy the outdoors, fresh air and reconnect! Take a walk in nature, go biking or hiking together. Create a scavenger hunt of different nature items that the family can look for and find as a group or in pairs.

• Homemade Play Dough and Goop: Spend a morning or afternoon making a batch of play dough together, or for older kids goop recipes can be equally as inviting and fun. You can even make scented play dough, which can add an additional sensory component to this experience.

• Visit an Art Museum, Art Festival, or Creative Community Event: Check out your local art museum or art event as a family outing. Many museums have family related programming or guides that can help enhance your experience!  Here in Cleveland, the Cleveland Museum of Art offers a hands on, interactive family-friendly art space called Studio Play.  For young children (ages 2-4), this mail art program allows caregivers and kids to engage at home with art. And it’s free!

No matter what the month or season, there is true power in the relationships we nurture for the children and teens we care for, either as parents, caregivers, or helpers. It’s important to keep enriching these healthy attachments by cultivating safe experiences and moments of meaning all year round.

Recommended Reading:

Levine, P.A., & Kline, M. (2008). Trauma-proofing your kids: A parent’s guide to instilling confidence, joy, and resilience. Berkeley : North Atlantic Books.

Perry, B.D., & Winfrey, O. (2021). What happened to you?   Flatiron Books.

Perry, B.D., & Szalavitz, M. (2006). The boy who was raised as a dog. New York: Basic Books.

Resources:

Introduction to Purposeful Parenting (PDF) | Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics

How to Approach Mindful, Purposeful Parenting

The Purposeful Parenting Mindset | PsychCentral

Purposeful Parenting Month: A Time to Learn and Grow

The Artful Parent

A Happy New Year Gift: Empowering Your Creative Values & Strengths

To celebrate the New Year, I am re-sharing one of my free and favorite e-workshops from a couple of years ago!

Creative Covenants

How would you define your creative covenants?  Your creative covenants are values that you believe are core to the way you create, practice, and live as a creative and artful being.  When you know your own creative values, you can activate them to empower your creative life.  In this e-workshop, you are invited to create an inspiring book made from a series of permission tags that honor these promises to our creative self and practice.  Content in this workshop will also be nurtured through a series of prompts exploring what celebrates, challenges, and empowers the creative goodness in each of us!

This free workshop download includes a PDF & video offering and is available here:

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An oldie, but goodie New Year’s creative practice I’ve enjoyed for almost 10 years now:

Ready for Revo’lution Art Journaling

Check out these freebie downloads below from archived Creativity in Motion posts that are still available here:

Creative Goodness with Gluebooks eBook

The Art of Emotional Resilience

Art Journaling’s Visual Voice in Trauma Intervention

Paper House Making with Youth Exposed to Domestic Violence

Best wishes for a great 2018!

 

Creative Resilience Link Round Up

make&do 365: Resilient Insights

I’ve put together a round up of recent links and posts that highlight the role of creativity in managing challenging times, finding hope, and empowering resilience. I hope you find them as inspiring and helpful as I have.  As I was reading these posts over the last couple of months, they have been comforting messages about the importance of creative expression to make sense of new shifts, uncertain moments, and distressing times. They have also been amazing reminders of the power art and creative expression hold to connect us to our voice and each other.

On this day, I am grateful for all of this.

• Resilience and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election-Using Creativity to Move Forward
• How To Create Art And Make Cool Stuff In A Time Of Trouble
• Creativity is Often a Means of Understanding the World
• A Message for Artists — and for the Artist in Everyone
• 4 Ways to Use Creativity in Crazy Times
• The Holy Dwells in Dark Places: Using Creativity to Connect with Hope

 

make&do 365: Change Agent: Artful Entry

 

make&do 365: Creative Evolutionists

Creative Deeding in Action

This past month has seen much creative deeding!  The Hope-filled Postcard Art Exchange that Nancy Lautenbach and I organized went super well with almost 100 participants swapping art across the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Asia— You can check out some of the postcard art submitted on the 6 Degrees of Creativity Facebook page and on Instagram — So much hopeful energy and positive vibes shared through the handcrafted images made specifically for this collaborative effort! These blog posts from art therapists who participated in the exchange described more about their process: Carolyn Mehlomakulu’s  The Power of Hope-filled Art  and Sally Swain’s Clouds of Hope.  Thank you to everyone who contributed to this project!

I also recently received word that undergraduate art therapy students at Millikin University implemented their own creative deed project for their Materials and Methods class, inspired by last year’s 365 project.  It was awesome to learn about their efforts from their instructor, art therapist Serena Duckrow and to see the art and creative goodness they were spreading to others on their campus.

In addition to the art that was made for the project, the students also used photography, video, and video editing to document the experience. They really valued the role that digital media played in their process. I love the idea of video being part of the project and seeing the different locations creative deeds were released. Below is a video that the students made to showcase their project, which they called #MUCreativeDeed. Enjoy this dose of uplifting art and messages of encouragement, self care, and support….

What is great about creative deeding is that anyone, anywhere, anytime can do it! Creative deed on! 🙂

 

 

 

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Steller: Storytelling Meets Social Media

I recently began publishing on Steller, the mobile storytelling app that allows users to share photos, video & text to share experiences and moments:

I am curious to see this growing social media platform continue to grow and as a way for artists, creatives & art therapists to share their voice! 🙂  What do you think about its creative possibilities?

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Creative Refuge

Truth.

 

For lots more artsy quotes and images , check out this collection on Pinterest.

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3 Good Things Takeaway: Creative, Messy, Contained Workshop

I had a great time at Lani Gerity‘s workshop this past week-end at the Mid Atlantic Play Therapy Institute: Visual Art Journaling for Teens and Adults in Treatment: Creative, Messy, and Contained.

The day was an artful exploration of resilience building, flourishing, intention setting, strength reflection, and lots of creative goodness to fill our handmade art journals that we made from hanging file folders, basic manila file folders for the signature pages inside, and a simple pamphlet stitch to bind it all together.

I really enjoyed using the various supplies I brought in my mobile art stash– as well as sharing them with my tablemates so they could experiment with them in different ways. It was very inspiring to work in this community. We even did a table exchange of mini art in the form of artist trading cards, index cards, and craft tags to honor the concept of art as a gift, one of Lani’s prompts to explore practicing kindness and sharing joy with others through our art.  I was lucky to be gifted this art from Mary during our table exchange:

Art as a Gift

 Upon returning home, as I was unpacking my supplies, handouts, and art from the workshop, I reflected on Lani’s teachings from the day prior and the power of art making to help us cope in distressing and challenging times.

This reflection also prompted me to summarize a list of 3 good things (so many to choose from!) from content introduced during the workshop- and ways to help instill hope, gratitude, and self-care into our lives:

• Three Blessings Exercise– Dr. Martin Seligman suggests this practice as a way to foster well-being and decrease depression.  This exercise encourages us to make note of three things (for one week) what went well throughout our day and to reflect on why they went well (i.e. “why did this happen?”). According to the research of Dr. Seligman, focusing (and dwelling) on our blessings (what is good, going right with life) helps increase our well-being and decreases anxiety, depression that dwelling on bad events can actually make a lot worse. Lani puts an art-based spin to this exercise by suggesting to create art about three good things (collectively in one image or in separate images).  In one of Lani’s Happy Artist’s Life Workshops a few years ago for 6 Degrees of Creativity I even made a Pinterest board to collect images and content inspired by things that made me happy.  Re-visiting this board made me thankful that I created it— and maybe it is a good time to start adding to it again.

• Daily Creative Practice– Citing the work and practice of art therapy pioneer Edith Kramer, Lani shared that creating art everyday helps guide skillfulness (mastery). This type of practice has a direct connection to nurturing our resilience, regulation, and inspiring us to be and do the best that we can.  I love that this reminder was included as part of the day’s offerings- and very much agree with these findings!

• Sensory Relief Art- This prompt (originally to create an image representing a mini vacation and to incorporate the senses) inspired a collage that was connected to the importance of self-care, focusing on the here & now, and finding refuge & breathe in this space. I used a photograph of an old collage I created, pieces of torn (blue) magazine pages, distressed ink, and paint pens. Lots of relief in this image!

Self-Care © 2016 gretchen miller

Thanks to the Lani, all the participants I met at the workshop, and the small group of fellow art journalers that I worked with throughout the day.  I look forward to incorporating content we learned into my groupwork and adding it to my art journaling ideas and inspiration.

Related Posts:

Happy Artist’s Life Art Journaling (VIDEO)

The Art of Emotional Resilience

Journey to Resilience: Takeaways and Creative Offerings

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Art Bridges

This month the Hildegard Center for the Arts published an inspiring, free resource of art-based ideas chock full of creative goodness called Art Bridges— Definitely a great collection (over 70 downloadable PDFs!)  for art therapists to use with their groups or individuals, as well as teachers or anyone interested in creative enrichment with youth!

Some of the ideas were contributed by members of the art therapy community- including myself- I was delighted to be invited to add a favorite gratitude art idea that I featured on this blog in 2012.  Since this post’s original publishing, I’ve used this idea with youth & women I’ve worked with in shelter- as a creative, affirming way to explore the concept of thankfulness in their own lives.  Often instead of making leaf shaped “blessing tags”, we would make different size and colored hearts to write on and hang from the mason jar’s branches.  It was a great community piece– the tree kept “growing” with new additions as more people add to it.  Others can also read the reflections previously shared.

The Art Bridges resource also suggests that therapists could also use the idea as a Courage or Healing Tree… a great idea that I may introduce into one of my groups!

Thank you Hildegard Center for the Arts for putting this resource together and making it so accessible to us all! 🙂

Related Posts:

20 Creative Quotes on Giving & Gratitude

Garland of Gratitude

Self Care through Creative Practice & Intention: Gratitude

A Happy 2016 Gift To Your Creative Self!

To celebrate this first full week of 2016, I am excited to announce that my e-workshop Creative Covenants is now available through this blog!

How would you define your creative covenants?  Your creative covenants are values that you believe are core to the way you create, practice, and live as a creative and artful being.  When you know your own creative values, you can activate them to empower your creative life.  In this e-workshop, you are invited to create an inspiring book made from a series of permission tags that honor these promises to our creative self and practice.  Content in this workshop will also be nurtured through a series of prompts exploring what celebrates, challenges, and empowers the creative goodness in each of us!

This free workshop download includes a PDF & video offering and is available here:

Enjoy!  Wishing you all an artful 2016!

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Check out these freebie downloads from past Creativity in Motion posts that are still available here:

Creative Goodness with Gluebooks eBook

The Art of Emotional Resilience

Art Journaling’s Visual Voice in Trauma Intervention

Paper House Making with Youth Exposed to Domestic Violence