Your Own Creative Change-Making

A container of joy

Bread and Puppet—a 60 year strong theater company that turns any protest into an epic celebration of the human spirit.

As a reader of this newsletter, you’re likely artistic, creative, or a big fan of art and creativity in some way, shape, or form.

And since you’ve continued to subscribe since the election, it’s also highly likely that we share a lot of the same civic values. Which means you’re finding this political moment extremely stressful and are probably calling your congresspeople; participating in whatever boycott gets organized; or looking around to find your right role in whatever way the emerging “resistance” may materialize.

However, if you’re also like me, you make those calls or send out those postcards, but you don’t really enjoy it.

I do it—and I will continue to do it—because I believe it’s my civic duty and I’m scared about the future of my country.

But honestly, I find these activities kind of draining and unfulfilling. It takes willpower to do them and willpower is not humanity’s best means for continuing to take any action long term.

Thinking about this brought me back to the memory of the powerful organic joy of the 2017 Women’s March that I wrote about last week.

It made me realize that to sustain my activism in this extended political moment, I also need to be joyful and creative in my resistance. I need my actions to feed my soul and be fed by my soul.

But how?

A Shared Container

The global 2017 Women’s March was, at its core, a gigantic shared container of joyful change-making. A loose structure carved out in time and space that allowed all that pent up life-affirming energy to assert itself.

And while we’re in a different and perhaps energetically darker time from what was happening in 2017, I believe we must start cultivating that joyful creative change-making spirit in our own lives and communities in any way we can.

Because the existence of little flames of joyful resistance dotted across the globe can help spark a bonfire of cascading events—like the multiple Women’s Marches—when their moments arise.

These bonfire moments can turn tides. But they all require a spark. Many sparks.

And that’s what I’d like to offer my fellow Pink Teacuppers—a spark—in the container of a workshop—to grow, and nurture, and energize our creative change-making impulses. A time and place to brainstorm, plan, create, and imagine a whole range of joyful acts of resistance—be they big or tiny, deeply personal or grandly communal.

Because often all that is required for a creative idea to take shape and become real is a little structure and some comraderie. An uplifting container that helps foster connection and generativity to help you turn your abstract intention into a concrete reality.

It’s called Creative Change-Makers and it’s happening over Zoom on Thursday April 3 at 5pm Mountain Time.

It’s free for paid subscribers and I’d love for you to be a part of it.

How it Will Work

First, we’ll discuss what it means to create your own joyful bit of resistance. I’ll share examples from my own experience and approaches for bringing both art installations and protest projects into full fruition. Then I’ll lead a group brainstorming session where we explore and imagine various creative and fun resistance projects we might try, and I’ll help you think about first steps you could take to make your idea a reality.

We’ll then take time to mind map our individual ideas to see what feels viable to develop further. After that, we’ll break away to work on our own for a bit—taking a tiny first action step or two in our creative joyful resistance expression. (If you’ve ever done some online co-working, it’ll be like that.)

Afterwards, we’ll reconnect and talk about our nascent baby ideas and how it went to work on them. And we’ll lean on the group mind for any help or expertise that might come in handy for each other.

When the workshop is over, you should have a roadmap of sorts for bringing your idea to fruition. I’ll also create a thread in Substack where participants can to share progress or ask each other questions and further their projects.

If it goes well and it seems helpful, we can do another one at a later date.

It’s All Good

Remember, your project or plan doesn’t have to be an artwork or art idea—creativity is much larger than art.

Your idea also doesn’t have to be momentous. It just has to fill you with joy or a feeling of empowerment. For me, that often involves including my sense of humor or giving me a small sense of mischief.

To help you better imagine what I’m talking about, I thought I’d share a quick list of potential ideas for what your creatively joyful resistance project could look like:

Ideas to Spark Ideas

• Print, paint, or sew a flag of resistance or solidarity that hangs outside your house or apartment window.

• Write a zine about vote suppression that you casually leave on coffee shops tables.

• Bake blue and yellow iced Ukrainian flag cookies that you bring to work for your right-wing coworkers to enjoy unbeknownst.

• Make “did you know” single-fact flyers that you stick on car windshields in a grocery store parking lot.

• Design a saucy bumper sticker, a righteous pin, or an audacious t-shirt that you share with like-minded souls.

• Weave nature crowns or construct witches hats to wear with friends at your next protest—or plan a crown-making party where you’ll invite your local friends to come to your place to create them with you.

• Paint handmade signs that are funny or wacky or graphic or gorgeous to bring to protests and share with folks who showed up without one.

• Write a checklist of immigrant rights and legal aid numbers to leave at your library or local bodega and then make it fun and funky with weird fonts or pretty graphics or calligraphy. Or draw little hearts all over it.

• Order custom “democracy” M&Ms or “Rule of Law” conversation heart candies and put them out at your PTA meeting or church coffee hour.

• Choreograph a public dance project that celebrates reproductive rights.

• Stitch a quilt to auction at a fundraiser for the displaced.

• Make tiny protest messages that show up in unexpected places in your community—perhaps left in a grocery store shopping basket or taped to a bathroom stall at a rest stop or the gas station mini mart.

There is no wrong, no too small, no too wacky no too mundane. If it excites you, or feels fun, or, if you’re like me, it makes you involuntarily raise your eyebrows while you smile mysteriously, that’s all that matters.

If you want to come but are worried you don’t have any ideas, we’ll do a lot more brainstorming and idea swapping on the call and I’m sure you’ll find something to try. If not, you can listen and be a wonderful support. Or help spread the word.

If you’d like to be a part of it, you just have to be a paid or founding subscriber to The Pink Teacup.

Right now, being a paid subscriber is only 36.00/year which is 3.00/month.

To upgrade, just click on the link below.

And if you don’t want to be a paid subscriber, I understand! Perhaps this post has sparked some new ideas of how you can be a creative changemaker on your own or in your local community in ways you hadn’t considered before. That is wonderful.

Logistics Recap

1. The workshop is on Thursday, April 3 at 5pm Mountain (4pm Pacific, 6pm Central and 7pm Eastern).

2. I’ll be sending an email out to my paid and founding subscribers both this week and next with a link to register so I know how many folks are planning to attend.

3. I’d really appreciate it if you could spread the word by forwarding this newsletter to like-minded friends you think might enjoy participating in this kind of thing.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts—please leave a comment!