This is a guest post by Naomi Alyssa who is leading the Unlocking Your Inner Artist: A Creativity Retreat in Bali at Floating Leaf in March 2014.
“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” – Emily Dickinson
What is your ecstatic experience? What are the moments when you feel the most joy, the most freedom, and the most peace?
For me, those moments have always occurred in travel. Sometimes, they sneak up on me – like while walking the streets of a new city, or seeing the first curvy letters in a foreign alphabet – but they always arrive at the moment that I discover something new. There’s something about being reminded of just how diverse the world is that causes me pure bliss, because it’s a testament to how vibrant and interesting our planet is – and a reminder that there’s never a reason to be bored in life!
For the past three years that I’ve been living, working, and travelling through Asia, I’ve been chasing these ecstatic experiences by searching for creativity. Sometimes it’s through the local music scene, or the street art, galleries, fashion, performances, or architecture, but the creative scene of a country is a glimpse into a very real, very relevant side of a culture, and always features that newness I crave.
I explored it in Seoul when friends and I followed a local artist collective to an abandoned, demolished neighbourhood that they’d taken over, hiding sculptures and murals within crumbling buildings. In Luang Prabang, the traditional art forms still rule, and weekends were ideal times to bicycle out to the neighbouring villages and see workshops making textiles, metalworks, silver jewellery, wooden statues, and buffalo-hide stencils in traditional ways. And now, in my new (but temporary) home of Melbourne, creativity oozes from every angle: I find it in the massive alleyways full of street art, the sidewalk buskers playing entire concerts for enthralled audiences, the vibrant mural on the side of the nearest cafe, or the ‘tiny library’ erected by a local resident near my metro station that offers free books to commuters, no questions asked. To see this creative energy everywhere is enlivening, and ensures that I keep feeling those little ‘ecstatic experiences’ that Dickinson wrote about.
Join Naomi Alyssa for Unlocking Your Inner Artist: A Creativity Retreat in Bali ~ March 21-29th
Travel gives you self-reliance, while creativity gives you self-expression. ~ Naomi Alyssa
Now, exploring creativity and art during travel has started to show me something I hadn’t realized before: that travel and creativity are essentially two sides of the same coin. Travel gives you self-reliance, while creativity gives you self-expression. Creativity aids your problem-solving skills, and travel gives you the time to practice them. In fact, travelling is inherently a creative endeavour, because you often have to think outside of the box and roll with the punches. The magic of creativity and the magic of travel are so similar, and exactly the reason why I feel it’s vital to encourage and nourish creativity – just as I think it’s vital to travel. Without travel and art, life has so much less of those ecstatic experiences. And what is life without ecstasy – or exploration?
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