My Favorite Trick to Unlock Your Creative Potential

My Favorite Trick to Unlock Your Creative Potential


Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  YouTube

I Heart Radio  |  Amazon Music  |  Deezer

 

This is all about renewal and creative expansion, a celebratory finale for our first season of Called to Bloom, where I am sharing with you a trick I discovered along the way that always returns me to that playful and infinite source of creative possibilities. 

The goal is to open new pathways to explore, nurture, and refresh your creative practice with a new perspective that empowers you to find cues and inspiration in the whole world around you. 

What catches your interest or makes you curious? What are you passionate about? What method, practice, study, art form or industry do you know like the back of your hand? 

This is all a wealth of inspiration that you can use to inform and transform your creative process as well as what you create. And it's time for you to have this trick up your sleeve now too.


In This Episode, We Cover:

  • Discovering the Tool of Creative Translation
  • A Step-By-Step Guide for How to Use This Trick
  • Examples & Uses of this Creative Tool in Action
  • The Origins of This Creative Tool For Me
  • Expanded Translation Tricks to Try


Mentioned in This Episode:


Resources:

Details from Our Sponsors:


This episode of the Called to Bloom podcast is brought to you by the Poetry of Flowers  holistic online floral education.

Learn how to begin, uplevel, and deepen your practice in all types of foam-free, lush, and airy floral designs — from hand-gathered bouquets to centerpieces and urns to impactful floral installations, wedding floral design and event management, the business behind floristry, and more. 

Use code CALLEDTOBLOOM for 10% off your Poetry of Flowers course bundle or (single-payment) all-access membership.



Keep in Touch:


Thank you so much for being here, and for being part of this radiant community as we step into these creative callings together. If you enjoyed this episode:

 

 

Episode Keywords

creative play, inspiration, translation, floral design, astrology, creative process, synesthesia, artistic expression, holistic methods, personal transformation



Episode Summary

In this episode of the Called to Bloom podcast, Jen Cavender explores the concept of creative play and introduces a unique translation trick that can help individuals find inspiration in their surroundings. She discusses the process of translating cues from various sources into creative work, using examples from astrology and personal experiences. Jen emphasizes the importance of staying open to creative breakthroughs and encourages listeners to explore other fields for inspiration. The episode concludes with advanced techniques for applying the translation method in artistic endeavors.



Key Takeaways

  • The goal is to return to creative play.

  • Translation is a process of interpretation from one medium to another.

  • Using translation can help you tap into new creative possibilities.

  • Creative translation can be applied to various artistic fields.

  • Stay open to breakthroughs and discoveries during the creative process.

  • You can use any source as a cue for inspiration.

  • The emotional impact of a source can guide your design choices.

  • Synesthesia can enhance creative expression and inspiration.

  • Advanced translation techniques can refresh your creative practice.

  • The world is a rich source of inspiration for your creativity.



Sound Bites

"The goal is to return to creative play."

"Stay open to breakthroughs and discoveries."

"Let it refresh you, let it renew you."




Chapters

00:00 Creative Renewal and Playfulness
06:33 The Tool of Translation in Creativity
09:18 Steps to Implementing the Translation Trick
16:15 Examples & Uses of this Creative Trick
20:21 The Origins of This Creative Tool
22:48 Exploring Synesthesia in Creativity
26:20 Expanded Translation Tricks to Try
31:20 Closing Thoughts

 

 

Full Transcript

This is all about renewal and creative expansion, a celebratory finale for our first season of Called to Bloom, where I am sharing with you a trick I discovered along the way that always returns me to that playful and infinite source of creative possibilities.

The goal open new pathways to explore, nurture, and refresh your creative practice with a new perspective that empowers you to find cues and inspiration in the whole world around you.

What catches your interest or makes you curious? What are you passionate about? What method, practice, study, art form or industry do you know like the back of your hand?

This is all a wealth of inspiration that you can use to inform and transform your creative process as well as what you create. And it's time for you to have this trick up your sleeve now too.

 

*

 

Welcome to the Called to Bloom podcast. I'm Jen Cavender, founder of Nectar & Bloom and your host as we explore tools and holistic methods that empower you to craft an inspired career and a fulfilling creative life.

I am a floral artist and educator who left an academic career to build my dream floral design studio. Now I empower flower lovers, florists, and creative entrepreneurs like you to find your aligned path and to build your dream.

Together we go deep into topics covering creative entrepreneurship, health and wellbeing, sustainability, personal transformation, the art and business of working with flowers, and practices for manifesting a life you love.

If you are ready to feel inspired and empowered as you build your next aligned creative chapter, you are in the right place. Now, let's bloom.

 

*

 

The trick I love so much that I am sharing with you today is a form of translation. And I'm going to teach you how to use it as a tool to turn everything around you into inspiration for your creative work.

Using this trick, you can allow the whole world to become a source of guidance for whatever you are creating. I like to think of it as an energetic transformation as we translate the details from one thing into cues to create another. And I'm going to share with you exactly how to do it.

Translation itself is a process of interpretation from one type of media into another, essentially drawing details and meaning from one thing and recreating them as something new.

It shifts your mindset out of what you know and do by heart or habit and helps you tap into a new and renewable source of creative possibility.

This tool is perfect for when you feel stuck in a rut, when you creatively sapped, or when you feel like you've reached a plateau in your work.

Part of the problem this creative tool solves is the feeling that you have to pull something original to create out of thin air.

Sometimes inspiration just flows, and it's amazing when it does — when an idea hits you or you happen to drop into that magic flow state where the work seems to just emerge through you. When that happens, catch that shooting star of creative genius and soar with it.

Other times you feel completely empty or adrift or stuck creating the same thing, whether that's a certain style of floral arrangement, a method for your team, or a meal for your family.

That's where this creative translation trick comes into play, making things interesting and playful again, as playfulness is the energy of creativity.

The game is to pull from sources of inspiration that you may not have considered available before and to use them to guide and infuse your creative work with fresh energy and inspiration.

What I love about using translation as a design trick, beyond that it can be used anywhere and with anything to elicit creative inspiration, is that it works for everyone, for entrepreneurs, floral artists, business owners, event planners, teachers and guides, parents, and anyone building a conscious creative life.

Let's step into how to utilize this trick, as well as examples of it in use to illustrate how it works and how to invite the expansive effects it has into your creative practice.

 

*

 

Today's episode is brought to you by The Poetry of Flowers.

As a poet with a master's in creative writing and as a former professor of English, when I found myself in a huge pivot and newly called to work with flowers, I also found myself channeling what I knew well from the forms and structures, the musicality and moves of poetry into how I taught myself to craft arrangements in flowers.

Poetry is the craft of composing art with the sounds, meanings, and images of verbal language. Floral artistry is the craft of composing art with colors, shapes, textures, and gestures of flowers.

Poetry was something I knew well and could draw from easily as a pattern or a source of inspiration in my floral work. And in turn, it also informed how I could teach intentional and impactful floral design as an educator.

Flowers, like poetry, are a language, a body of emotion and meaning that we arrange into intentional designs that invite elevated, inspiring, and emotionally moving experiences.

When I decided it was time to distill the techniques and the guidance, methods and advice that I teach in my workshops and mentorships into a holistic educational experience of online courses that could be accessed anywhere in the world, I named the platform, The Poetry of Flowers.

Inside Poetry of Flowers, you will find a suite of a la carte course bundles on topics from how to begin in floristry, to hand-gathered bouquet designs, to large-scale and foam-free floral installations, or wedding design and production, and the business of floristry and more.

You can select an a la carte course bundle on a topic of choice or get access to all course bundles plus a bonus resource library with a Poetry of Flowers membership.

Go to nectarandbloomfloral.com and head to the Courses page to learn more. That's nectarandbloomfloral.com and head to Courses.

And as a Called to Bloom listener, you can get 10% off your Poetry of Flowers holistic online course or membership with code CALLEDTOBLOOM — that's C-A-L-L-E-D-T-O-B-L-O-O-M, one word at checkout.

And now back to our episode.

 

*

 

Anyone who has studied or learned another language other than their own native tongue knows firsthand how we can definitely translate meaning across the process requires an understanding of meaning, not just a substitution of word for word, in order to capture the effect.

Different languages have different forms and rules, so successful translation requires a deeper understanding below the surface of the words that carry its meaning.

Similarly, for our purposes today, I want to expand the notion of translation into something we can do across languages of art, creativity, and design.

When we draw inspiration from something unrelated to what we are creating, we translate details of that source inspiration by reading its emotional impact, its sensory cues, and its details, and using the meaning of those cues and details to inform our design choices in another art form.

I'll share with you an example here to help illustrate this tool in action. Several years ago, I made up a fun little ongoing creative that I call Astrology in Flowers, which you might know if you follow along on Instagram or subscribe to my monthly newsletter, Collect the Nectar.

In astrology and flowers, I essentially create a floral arrangement each month that represents the astrological sign of the zodiac that we enter in that month.

I draw my colors, flower varieties, design elements, and guidance for how I craft each arrangement from the details and characteristics of each of the 12 astrological signs.

For example, Capricorn is the sign we are in right now as I record this episode. And Capricorn season goes from around December 21st to January 20th.

Capricorn is characterized by being practical, motivated, disciplined, realistic, grounded, reserved, moral, perfectionistic, and self-sufficient,

which gives me a whole list of words to work with that are pulled from the meaning we understand about Capricorn as a sign.

Capricorn, therefore, is my source cue, and its characteristics are the details I work with to guide the design elements and moves that I choose.

When I most recently translated Capricorn into flowers, which you can find on Instagram or in my post for Capricorn and Flowers on the Nectar & Bloom Journal, I created a floral arrangement that embodies Capricorn's features. As the half goat, half fish, I made Capricorn bloom with fish scales of purple acacia, ruffled and reliable lisianthus,

sturdy chrysanthemums in a deep wine red, energetic nandina berries, and climbing clematis to embody Capricorn's ambition.

The whole arrangement is low and densely layered, creating Capricorn blooming from a celestial blue bowl in a practical posture of grounded self-sufficiency.

It's a lot of fun and it shakes me up creatively to do this, giving me playful creative guidelines and something to push against or stand on, so to speak, as I design.

 

*

 

So with this example in mind, let's look at how you can use this translation tool in your creative work step by step.

The first step of this translation trick is to find your cue. How do you do that? Read everything.

Notice and be open to a cue of any kind, even in the least likely place. Pull from other sources, art forms, disciplines, and experiences. Pull from your environment, your surroundings, or the season.

Consider, for example, how the season of winter comes with all kinds of associations, details, experiences, feelings, colors, and gestures. Identify and pull from those.

Even something totally uninspiring like a parking garage could lend us a set of cues to play with in our design work. Think about a parking garage. Such a funny example. Think about a parking garage and its starkness, its structure, the layers and marked sections, or just how it feels to be inside one. Not a feeling that I love, but again, we're eliciting details from this as a cue.

Granted, this example would be more challenging than using something you do find inspiring or intriguing, but I mention it just to emphasize that you can truly use anything as a model or cue.

The second step is to translate your cue into a collection of words. Often the words are adjectives or descriptive words, but they could also be verbs or nouns too. If we went with winter as a seasonal cue to translate, we might come up with a list like this: "cold, dormant, peaceful, sparkly, festive, muted, slow, receptive, reflective, stark, grounding."

You could also come up with an entirely different list for winter, such as "soft, cheerful, rosy, close, intimate, held, lit, chaotic, full." This is a subjective process and it's up to you to interpret the feelings and details from your cue.

Perhaps instead of using a season, you want to use a month of the year. So what does January feel like, for example? What does January mean for you? Using January as a cue, you might come up with a list like this: renewed, reborn, resting, dreamy, reflective, moody, slow, curious, light, or even a color you associate with January, like crimson. January is a rich red color for me, but we'll talk about why that is in a moment.

If we look at astrology, as I do in my astrology and flowers designs, we can pull from any of the signs. So let's say we use Aquarius, which is the sign we'll be in when this episode is known to be unique, independent, innovative, intelligent, humanitarian, rebellious, unconventional, free-spirited, quirky, visionary, compassionate, social, and original — which right there gives us our list of words pulled from Aquarius as a cue.

The third step is to translate those words into your design elements. Allow that collection of words to guide your choices, whether those are colors, tones, shapes, lines, textures, clusters, space, flavors, sounds, or otherwise.

These words get to direct you as you choose what elements go into what you are creating, what moves you make in your design process. And that can be from a floral design to an event theme to a dinner gathering and beyond.

Using my Aquarius in Flowers design as an example, my design elements included the flower varieties I chose, the color palette, the vessel, and the overall shape and construction of the design.

I try to choose flower varieties that are growing during Aquarius season wherever I can, as this captures a literal translation of this time of year into my work.

But I also select flowers that have colors, shapes, and gestures that reflect those words I collected from Aquarius, like unique, independent, rebellious, visionary, humanitarian, and so on.

Of course, there's no objective and universally agreed upon color for a word like unique or independent. But here's where you tap into your creative spirit.

You get to make creative leaps here. This is where we open up to creating something new. You get to feel within yourself to sense and discover what colors, shapes, and textures evoke these feelings and details.

Someone else's Aquarius in flowers might be quite different from mine, which is part of the beauty of this tool and creative exercise.

But I guarantee that by using the same collection of descriptive words for our cue, Aquarius, we will all create designs that reflect those words and that cue, and that will be recognizable as that source cue, even if very different from one another.

In other words, you could have a whole room of designers create an Aquarius in Flowers design of their own based on the same cue and words. And two things would happen:

One, each would look unique and different. And two, each would still capture in its own way the essence of Aquarius.

I mean, should we do a floral workshop of this? Would you come? I've been thinking about what direction I want to take with my group workshops this coming year, and this genuinely just came to me now as I'm speaking to you about this design trick that I love. If you would do this, make sure to reach out to me either through my site or Instagram or just email me directly at jen @ nectarandbloomfloral.com. I would love to hear from you. Keep an eye out. This might be happening.

And the fourth and final step in this creative translation process is to stay open. You want to go with your intention, your cue and descriptive words to guide you, but don't be rigid. Trying to control any creative output too closely will crush it.

We all know the feeling when we are getting flustered and frustrated, which often makes our bodies tight and our breath shallow, our minds more critical, and suddenly the whole process feels heavy and the work feels constricted and falls flat. Creativity needs room to breathe. So while you use this technique, part of using it is to stay open to breakthroughs and discoveries that naturally happen along the way. You are translating and transforming one thing into another after all.

Just like when water heats into steam, the transformation of that gives off energy and changes shape, structure, and consistency. Water can't stay water and become vapor at the same time.

 

*

 

So as a little review for how to use this trick:

first you choose your source cue, the thing you are going to read and translate into your creative medium.

Second, you will translate your cue into a collection of words that describe or evoke what that source cue is.

Third, you will use those words to guide your selection of design elements. Remember that design elements can be anything that goes into your creative work, from the materials to the methods.

For a floral designer, that could also mean the vessel you choose, the type of mechanics you use, and any other tablescape elements you curate to go along with the flower varieties and colors you select based on your cue's description words.

And lastly, you will let yourself experiment with flexibility and curiosity in the balance.

Your goal is not to be rigidly adhered to your cue, but inspired by it and open to the breakthroughs or discoveries that this tool can provide for your creative work and process at large.

 

*

 

Translation as a creative expansion tool works for all kinds of creative work. Your floral designs if you're a floral artist, your photography if you are a photographer, your jewelry if you're a jewelry designer, your garden if you are a gardener, and so on.

You can also use this tool to refresh and expand how you create what you create and for rethinking systems in your work or planning your year or creating a marketing calendar or clarifying your goals.

It's a really versatile tool, and that's why I love it.

So look into other fields, other industries, other structures, and other methods to find cues and details to translate into your own systems and practices like to pull from:

Poetry and its emotional expressiveness, concise forms and structures, and refinement often informs how I design with flowers.

In turn, I also sit with floral arrangements and interpret or translate the colors, gestures, and emotional expressions they evoke into lines of written poetry.

I also like to look to Ayurveda too, with its many holistic guidelines for balance and harmony, to inform my workflows and my marketing calendar. There is a lot of harmony and balance to be found in working with the seasons and cycles of nature.

Go have a listen to episode three, "the holistic system that reshaped my life and business" to learn all about Ayurveda. And also episode nine, "self-care for balance, the renewal you've been seeking" for getting in tune with the cycles and rhythms of nature.

I also like to look into the teachings and philosophies of yoga for what I can interpret into how I approach my work, my life, and all of my teaching, from teaching yoga classes to how I teach my mentorships and floral workshops as well.

And my work in flowers, in forms, and is interpreted into how I design and style my studio and our home.

For interior design and styling, I think about the same design elements from clusters and layers to negative space and gesture for both.

Everything I write is nourished and informed by everything else I study, read, listen to, share, discuss, and practice. And when you think about it, I bet it's the same for you.

From the architecture of a building to the way trees grow in a forest to the patterns across the sky hour to hour, season to season, everything offers us cues we can read and use for inspiration. What a gift.

 

*

 

Here are a few other examples to illustrate and explore this tool in action.

First, try playing any song that you love, listen to it, and then ask yourself, how does that feel? What can we say about it? What words, colors, gestures, or style can we pull from that song and the way that song makes you feel?

Here's another example: In college, one of my English professors required us to memorize the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in Old English. It's like a different language. I still remember them, and while I won't recite the whole thing, I want to use this as a source cue for us just for fun to illustrate how we can pull meaning and words to translate into our design work, even with something that is not modern spoken English. It begins like this. And just listen for the feel or the associations you have:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,"

And I'll stop there. But as you listen to that, think about using that as a source cue just for fun. I'm just pulling poetry that I know for us to play with.

How does that feel? What words or colors or gestures or style could we pull from it?

What is it about this interesting textured incantation that we could use in a different art form?

You can do this with a poem you love, a movie or a show you adore, a concept that you find interesting, a dance practice you know, or any other

inspiring or noticeable structure or source cue that you choose. I would actually love to hear where you go with this, so email or DM me and let me know.

 

*

 

So where did this idea come from to use translation to unlock infinite creative inspiration? I can trace my love for translation as a creative tool back to my studies in poetry during my graduate MFA program in creative writing.

Translation was a huge part of the program as we studied the craft of poetry. We did literal translations, translating a poet's work from another language into English, and we also did creative translations that deviated intentionally and leaned on imaginative leaps you can make when imitating something about a given poet's work, from their voice, their tone, their rhythm, their subject matter or their poetic form.

We also did figurative translations where you pull ideas and cues for a poem from a tangible art form, like a sculpture or a painting. A practice that's called ekphrastic poetry, where poets write poetry inspired by visual art.

This method thrilled me as it transcended the field of poetry and writing and used instead objects from other forms of art that the poet then wrote, either in response to or giving voice to or in contention with that tangible object of inspiration.

A classic example of this is Keats' poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, where he's writing in response to and in celebration of, and while pondering an ancient Grecian urn painted with scenes that tell a story of a long gone time.

There are also poets like Sharon Dolan, who wrote a book of poetry called Serious Pink, in which all of her poems are written in response to colorful abstract paintings by painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Howard Hodgkin.

This practice of ekphrastic poetry guided me as I wrote poetry in response to the visual art of floral arrangements that I I was first writing captions for posts of images of my floral work.

If you've been with me since the beginning, you'll probably remember some of those poems. And I think I need to bring them back. It was a really fun way for me to share the floral work I was creating and to respond to it and create a verbal element with lines of poetry that were reflecting it or that were written from it or inspired by it.

Through my master's program in creative writing, I began to realize that translation is what I was doing all the time. Translating the sky and its colors and emotional impact into words, or translating the pain and confusion of breakups and relationships in my 20s and learning about love, or translating things like what it feels like to run in the wind along a dirt track beside a body of water lit to shining tin foil to create a poem.

 

*

 

There's also a very cool and very odd thing that many of us have to one degree or another, a unique neurosensory experience that is called synesthesia. And this takes us back to having January have a color.

Synesthesia causes us to have concomitant or simultaneous sense responses, like hearing a color or seeing a sound. Pretty cool, right?

But let's unpack it a bit because it also makes a fascinating channel for interesting translations and transformations in our creative work.

With synesthesia, some people see or sense color in response to physical touch. I myself have seen colors during a massage, for example. Some hear color, like when I walk by a blooming hedge of bougainvillea, hot coral on emerald green in the sunlight. I hear in my being a kind of musical note or singing from that site.

Days of the week, months of the year, and numbers have colors too, a subtle sensory experience that a lot of people have as well. The funny thing is that people have this experience entirely subjectively,

While pretty much anyone you ask, when shown a stop sign, will recognize the color red objectively, with synesthesia, the simultaneous sense responses are internal and subjective. One person's Monday could be red, while mine is definitely blue. Tuesday for me is light green, Wednesday is a sunny yellow, Thursday a dark teal green, Friday a citrusy orange, Saturday is a crimson red, and Sunday is like an ivory silver color.

If you have synesthesia too, you are probably leaping out of your chair or jumping up and down and saying, no, Monday is this color or that color. It's a very amusing thing to share about and debate.

And as I mentioned, it happens with numbers too. When Carr and I were choosing our date for our wedding, we asked our venue about September availability and they gave us September 17th, 9.17, which simply would not do for me. The number nine is a deep royal red while 17 is an evergreen tone, totally clashing. Besides, we were getting married in 2016 and the number 16 is lavender for me.

That date, which is significant to a couple for the rest of their lives, just simply could not be the one. So we looked into October and found 10-1-16, the date that we actually did choose for our wedding day. And this was great because for me, 10 is silver, one is white, and 16 is lavender. I'm good with that. That feels nice.

Whether or not you have this interesting and for sure a little odd experience, or whether or not you've noticed it yet, it's useful for us in this playful quest for creative inspiration from the cues and details of the world around us.

Ask yourself, if Monday had a color, what would it be? If today's date had a color, what would it be? If this color were a feeling, which would it be? If I am to evoke a certain emotion with my design, which colors should I select to do that. Color is deeply linked to emotion, so feel into it for answers.

Also keep in mind that you have to give yourself permission to be playful, to explore and be silly or mysterious or odd. You can't hold rigidly to your adult sense of self or concern for making sense in this creative exercise. I know objectively, Monday does not have a color assigned to it, but give yourself full and unconditional permission to step into your infinitely creative inner child self or your inner puck or fairy or trickster of choice — that curious, creative inner being — and let this be fun and transcending for you.

This is where great leaps and growth can happen.

 

*

 

Here are a few advanced or expanded translation tricks as well, beyond our primary method of translating experience into words and words into design elements. Try any of these for a bit more of a challenge or a creative refresh in your art, in your life, or in your work.

One, create a rule. This is playful and it often takes the shape of a commitment like, you can't do X or you must do Y. In writing poetry, this could mean something like, you can't use the letter E. Imagine how you would have to write if you committed to trying out that rule. That would definitely shake up how you use language.

In floral design, you could create a rule that you must work with the color purple no matter what. That will definitely inform and change your color palette and the flowers you choose to explore it.

Two, choose a form. A second expanded translation technique is to choose a form as a challenge. This means you would choose a poetic form like a sonnet or a villanelle or a specific shape of vessel for a floral arrangement like an urn or a pedestal, a color or a type of food or flavor that is the crux or foundation of your creation.

Let this form be the shape of what you create. For example, choosing a form could be: You're creating a centerpiece, but it has to be built inside of a woven basket. Or you're creating a dinner or dessert dish, but it has to be, or be inspired by, a breakfast food.

The third expanded trick I have for you today is to make an omission or a restriction. This could be something like you can only use one type of flower or you can only use one color. Or you can't use your favorite color, flower variety, or a particular tool.

Number four, do the opposite. A fourth expanded translation trick is to try doing the opposite. In this exercise, you find a source example or cue, maybe even an image of a design you love, and now you have to create its opposite.

This is a challenge to read and interpret the details of your source cue and instead of imitating or using them directly, you choose the opposite details. Again, this is going to be subjective, but it's a playful way to get out of your head and jump into creative leaps.

Lastly for today, another of my favorite expanded creative translation techniques is to create an imitation of work you admire. When I was in graduate school for my MFA program in creative writing, one of my professors, the amazing poet Ilya Kaminsky, had us create imitations as a creative exercise to strengthen and expand our language and meaning making skills as poets. Here's how:

First, we had to read an exorbitant amount of poetry, the classics, the modern poets, contemporary poetry, and everything in between. While reading, we also had to collect and write down lines that we liked from what we read in a typed or written log. That was our source material.

Then we had to create imitations of those lines, which meant writing our own lines of poetry that were in some way inspired by or informed by some aspect of the original line, maybe the structure, maybe the tone, maybe the emotions, or any other chosen detail of the lines we had collected.

The beauty was that, just as with every version of this tool I'm sharing with you today, the results weren't necessarily a finished product. The act of doing this exercise produced little breakthroughs and discoveries that might lead to or inform a future poem that broke away from the effort at an imitation.

The imitation was the translation tool to inspire something new. Ilya was all about how to find something fresh within our creative medium of language, and I have found that floral artists, photographers, graphic designers, and creatives of any kind can use this tool to find something new and fresh in our own medium of art and design too.

As a note, anytime you create an imitation, it's always important and also powerful to reference in some way the artist and work that inspired you, especially if your imitation retains some of the obvious aspects of the source material.

Ideally, you tweak the work to really become something of your own. But it's also really empowering to add to your caption either way some kind of acknowledgement of the artist who inspired you. Poets often add a little epigraph or a small note after a title like "for (insert person's name)" or "from (insert title of work)". This acknowledges and connects you to the work of the artists you admire.

And it also makes sure that you're not stealing, you're honoring and imitating and learning from someone you admire rather than taking something of theirs and pretending it's your own. So keep that in mind.

The goal with this trick overall, this trick of translation as a design tool for infinite inspiration is to free yourself into more expansive awareness of and access to your creativity. It is right there for you, and you don't have to pull it out of thin air. Instead, you can pull inspiration out of a rich, fertile and infinite bounty when you treat the whole world as your potential source of inspiration.

Some of this is just to experiment and find freshness. Some of this will lead to really interesting breakthroughs, which can reinvigorate your creativity and give you new directions to explore as you step deeper into your calling.

 

*

 

As we draw this episode to a close, here are a few reminders and pointers for using this translation trick in your creative work.

Allow this tool to open up new avenues of possibility. Keep in mind that your goal is to be refreshed by an abundance of new inspiration. More than creating some kind of devoted replica, we are inviting that breakthrough or that discovery of new possibilities in your craft.

You may start out aiming to translate January into a color palette, for example, but you may find along the way that the exercise of doing so actually makes you discover something even better. Let that happen.

Use this tool to shake things up and discover something you didn't yet know you could do or had in you. It is a method for breaking free of what feels overdone or has grown stale so that you can get playful and use the details of one thing to interpret into another.

Most of all, this is a creative tool for getting out of your head and getting back into the infinite flow of creative possibility. It is a playful, curious, creative act. It is kind of a game to play and see what's possible to remind you of that fun and fascinating rush that called you to create in the first place.

Let it refresh you. Let it renew you.

 

*

 

Beautifully done. You just completed another episode of Called to Bloom, another step forward on your creative journey. Finishing any resource that nourishes your being and makes you feel more connected is one of the most empowering things you can do for your business and your creative calling.

Now to expand your experience, hit follow so you never miss an episode. And also please leave a quick review. Your words are so powerful in helping other creatives like you to discover the podcast. Plus they just mean the world to me.

Then head over to calledtobloompodcast.com to find show notes, resources, discount codes, and details from our sponsors.

If you're ready to deepen your practice with classes and immersive experiences in flowers and wellbeing, head over to nectarandbloomfloral.com and explore my workshops, one-on-one mentorships, Poetry of Flowers online courses, wellbeing experiences, and my original tarot of flowers deck.

You can also find me on Instagram @nectar_and_bloom for more inspiration, tools, creativity, and like-minded community.

Cheers to your creative expansion. And thank you so much for being here in season one. I can't wait to connect with you again in season two. If you have requests for what we talk about in season two, for topics that I cover, for things that you're interested in or things you want me to follow up on, please reach out.

You can DM me on Instagram, you can connect with me through my website contact form, or you can email me directly at jen @ nectarandbloomfloral.com. I can't wait to hear from you.

For now, keep blooming. The world needs what you are here to create.

 

 

*

 

Cover image captured by Sposto Photography.

 

Back to blog