The gestation period for a typical student at the SCA is around 10 months.  During these three terms we are held in a collective creative womb. As Honey approaches the end of the SCA experience, I have been thinking about the cycle of creative life and death. 

Creative expression can be so playful and effervescing with joy. But the labour of breathing life into a thought, is painful.  For an idea to live in the real world, some kind creative parent has suffered. 

Marc and our mentors push, cajole, occasionally berate but always inspire. Birth is a transformative force that emerges from the crucible of pain. Pain is the catalyst for that growth. 

Almost as painful as birth is death. You are told to ‘kill that baby’, creative infanticide is traumatic.

Every day is a perpetual birth and death of the self. It is through pain that we confront our vulnerabilities, grapple with our deepest fears, and confront the demons that haunt us. Pain can become the fertile soil in which resilience takes root. If we can channel our pain, we can harness creative energy and take joy in the babies born from our insights.

Births, deaths, starts, finishes, beginnings and endings. In a sense your last day at the SCA is your creative birthday. You leave the creative birth canal kicking and screaming and it is your first day seeing the world with fresh, fully developed eyes. Touching with newly fashioned hands. And feeling with a heart anointed in joy and seared by pain.

@simplyp85

To honour the process of birth (whilst being fully aware of my own low pain threshold and the benefits of modern technology) I have instructed Midjourney to generate an image of Saraswati, the Indian goddess of creativity holding a baby.