The Purpose of the Beehive is Creative Reconnection
Our collective problems won't be solved by linear, individualistic, binary thinking. We need each other's fullness, wholeheartedness, and weird creativity!
Nobody is coming to save us. Everyone is coming to save everyone." - Sophie Strand
At the Beehive, we're oriented around the deeper, healing, potential of art as communication — different ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to ourselves, each other, and the natural world.Art is the oldest thing.
Our creativity and imagination make us human.
Bees make honey. Birds sing. Humans make art, sing, dance - it's our thing.
Art is how we communicate in our own language.
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Modern industrial culture is marked by an imbalance toward rational, left-brain processing.
Creative Reconnection is about returning to balance by consciously engaging creative, right brain processing.
We need right brain attunement and creative communication to inhabit and express our full humanity.
The right hemisphere is where we experience:
- subtlety and nuance
- emotional perception
- metaphorical thinking
- symbol, image, story
- gestalt understanding / intersectional systems thinking
- creative inspiration / insight
- flow-states
- timelessness
- belonging
- wholeness - all of life as a whole and ourselves embedded in it.
- a sense of wonder
And...right brain states and activities are soothing and regulating to the nervous system.
And...the self-connection that comes from a sustained practice is foundational to overall emotional well-being.
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In our culture, we get a lot of praise for external productivity. Even in art education, the focus is sometimes on linear progression towards technical and aesthetic goals.
There's nothing wrong with this, but if we collapse the definition of art down to technique, it limits our access to the fuller, healing potential of our creativity.
We love working toward aesthetic and technical goals and we do a lot of it in the Hive, but our primary focus, and our soul purpose, is Creative Reconnection.
For this purpose, we balance the structure and direct instruction of traditional studio classes with space for:
- Curiosity
- The Unknown
- Spontaneity
- The slow firing of emotional neurons
- Change of course
- Noticing
(Hermann Hesse referred to artists as 'noticers' in his book about trees and those who love them.)
- Risk-taking
- Circuitousness and experimentation
- Open-ended exploration
- Vulnerability
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The threads are unraveling. We are in an unprecedented time of both danger and potential for change. We need to be able to access the healing potential of our own creativity now more than ever...
"We can't solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller
Personal favorite:
"If you think we're getting out of this s---show without art, you're mistaken!" - Brene Brown
We need to be able to access different ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to ourselves, each other, and the earth.
We need Creative Reconnection.