"The opposite of war isn't peace... it's creation"
Keeping creativity (and a bougainvillea) alive in winter
When I think of my grandmother, I picture a pink bougainvillea.
She kept it in her sunroom in Andover, Massachusetts. Its name was Boug. I didn’t realize it at the time, but keeping a bougainvillea alive in Andover is no small thing. Bougainvillea are tropical. They need heat and sunlight. They are not designed for New England winters, even in glassed-in sunrooms.
Keeping Boug alive was a family joke. It shouldn’t have survived.
When my grandmother died, it was in full bloom.
My grandmother was an artist. She went to art school, met my grandfather, and got married. After that, I’m told, she became “Mrs. McLean.”
She gardened. She whittled. She raised four children. She did not paint at home.
It wasn’t that she lost her creativity. It was that her creativity was channeled elsewhere. Into schedules. Meals. The ten thousand small acts of running a household.
According to family lore, one day, my grandfather went away on a business trip. And my grandmother went down to the basement and started painting again.
The work she created in her later years hangs in our homes now. Our lives are richer for it.
Years after she died, I found myself in Costa Rica, in a taxi pulling away from the airport. I did a double-take. Bougainvillea everywhere. Cascading over walls. Blooming in bold, celebratory pinks and purples.
Thriving.
This was what my grandmother’s creativity looked like in her later years.
And I thought of Boug in that sunroom. Carefully tended. Slightly improbable. Blooming anyway.
In one of my coaching groups last week, someone quoted Rent: “The opposite of war isn’t peace… it’s creation.” I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
We may not all be artists. But we all create.
Creation is generative. It pushes back against depletion.
My grandmother made things and gave them away. I have a painting of hers in my dining room. Two signed woodblock prints. One unsigned print. A children’s book she made for me out of old file folders. A chair and a toy box with my name on them.
She painted, and she gave it away.
These days, I make chili crisp and give it away. I bake muffins. I draw with Sharpies on card stock. I disappear into the Phillips Academy archive, trying to understand my family story.
Some of this looks small. Domestic. Unfinished.
It is still creation.
For the mothers I work with, it doesn’t take much to light them up about what they want to create. A children’s book. A pair of mittens. Woodblock prints. A crocheted blanket. They want to make something.
In one coaching group, we realized that every single member was a knitter. Mostly dormant. A few picked up their needles again.
It’s okay if creation looks like reorganizing a child’s dresser. Or making a really good pot of soup.
Creation does not have to be riotous to be real.
But do create.
Please.
Especially now.
🕊️
SAM