Creating Art as a Listening Practice

Opening your awareness through creative expression.

I’m not sure when I started writing poetry but I know when I started writing poetry with regularity. When my oldest daughter was born I decided I would write a poem every day of paternity leave. The practice had a way of increasing my awareness. I looked for moments worth capturing in a poem: the cute little noises she made, the first moments our eyes locked, the way the sun shone through the dew covered pine needles on the trees outside. All of these moments birthed a poem.

Creating art is a practice of observation and interpretation. Country and Americana singer/songwriter Charley Crocket once said, “Musicians are anthropologists. We study people and interpret [them]… If you’re aware and conscious in this era, the inspiration is endless out there.” If you create art with some amount of regularity you’ll become a better listener.

Here’s the good news. You don’t have to create good art (if there is such a thing) to improve your attentiveness. You just have to create it often. It’s the act of repetition that will open your eyes and ears to your surroundings. If you commit to creating regularly, you’ll run out of ideas pretty fast. You’ll have to start looking for inspiration. Hence the attentiveness dial gets turned up.

Martin Bond is a photographer from Cambridge, England who has committed to posting a picture of his hometown every day for the past 11 years. By posting a picture every day he’s able to get deeper into the city than most. He writes of the project, "[Cambridge] holds a more secret majesty. I am trying to capture that.”

Let’s make a deal. This August, create something every day. It can be anything: a poem, a sketch, a short story, a song, it’s up to you. Open your eyes and ears to your surroundings, even the mundane things, ruminate on them, and interpret them through creativity. I’ll check back in at the end of the month and see what you created and what you learned.