Embrace the Mess

Trusting the process

There is wet colorful paint on top of dozens of paintbrushes. They’re held by kids who move around as if they’ve forgotten that their appendages exist until they bump into someone else. Someone kicks the water bucket on accident sending purple/grey saturated paint water flying across the floor. 6-10 kids are waiting for help getting more paint or a different paintbrush or asking you how to mix a color as you search for the paper towels that someone moved, that are needed to keep everyone from slipping on the spilled water.

Making art in community with kids is a particular type of chaos and mess.

Embrace the Mess.

I drew this image of my frequent co-collaborator, and dear friend Steph Balón and her son.

To me, it means for things to change, they ARE going to get messy. It means that to make space for the gorgeous flower, the bright glowing sun, the expressive face that some 6 year old pulled out of their brain and translated onto this grey dingy wall (an act that continues to feel like pure magic)- it’s going to get a little chaotic.

Certainly we can reduce the mess- put down a tarp, create parameters, and “guidelines.” But put too many guidelines and you squash the space for something new to emerge. What might be “easier” as a facilitator -“Kids paint inside this 2” x 2” square, and don’t go out of the lines, and only use these 2 colors of paint and don’t move your feet from this 24” circle taped on the floor ” is going to limit a lot of ideas. Ideas that lead to medicine for us all.

Creativity needs space to emerge. Change and transformation need space to find their way. And they require us to open to the unknown of what is to come and believe in the potential of it.

Apparently if you were to cut open a caterpillar in the midst of their transition, a literal mess of goo will emerge.

For me, one of the hardest parts of the creative process is trusting the mess and sticking with it. The mess is where things get interesting. The mess is where the poetry lies. The mess is where we feel into feelings that are too hard to talk about, too hard to vocalize. The mess is uncomfortable and painful. It’s where you doubt everything and question what the point is. It’s where you wonder if it’s possible that you have made the ugliest, most dysfunctional creation known to humankind, where you wonder what you were thinking when you signed up to lead 400+ kids through a mural painting process that is currently a complete disaster.

And the the mess is a part of every transformational process- the teacher watching a brilliant lesson plan not unfold as expected, the lawyer preparing a case staring at stacks of evidence and doubting the through line, the activist disheartened by the pace of change and the laws reversing the anticipated progress, the engineer watching months of design work short circuit.

How do we keep from panicking? How do we embrace the mess instead of hiding, ignoring, or running away?

Embrace is a hug. How do hold on to what the mess is teaching us in those moments when we want to give up?

How do we trust ourselves enough to be able to navigate goo? And even before then, how do we trust ourselves enough to choose the risk of mess- for the potential of creative brilliance, for small individual change, for collective transformation?

These are some of. the big questions I’ve been sitting with.

What mess are you embracing? What has the “mess” in your life taught you? What has it allowed you to do? to create? to imagine? Please share if you’re willing- I’m always so grateful when I receive comments on these posts or replies to the email.

Here’s to the beautiful unknowns that emerge from the goo,

Jen

P.S. Embrace the Mess is now available as a print or cards in the shop!

A detail of the mural that came from 400 kids’ embracing the mess.