Dear Musea Members and readers,

We are continuing along in our exploration of IDENTITY as a membership community, and we’ve had some wonderful insights come through some of our community members. Last week, Milagros Suriano-Rivera and Amber Samaya Gould, hosted a #CreativeConversation in the Red Thread Café in which they invited Guild Members Sumaiyah Wysdom Yates and Marva Collins to share with us their experience of being in an accountability circle together, and the deeply powerful impact it has had on their lives!  This is connected to IDENITY in surprising ways, as our ability to rise stronger (as individuals) happens when we supportively join together! Your wellness is connected to my wellness. Your wholeness is connected to mine. When women come together in that spirit, incredible things happen in their INDIVIDUAL lives that would not be possible without the collective embrace.

We invite you to watch the inspiring 15 minute video segment below, full of wisdom and great insights into the value of having women join together in the spirit of care and community to catalyze one another! 

In the origin story of Musea and intentional creativity, there is a through line of women providing unreasonable support, love and care of one another. This enabled each of them to find success, wholeness, and greater joy in their lives. This is exampled so beautifully by art ancestor Lenore Thomas Strauss, who chose to become the legal guardian of Sue Hoya Sellars – one of the root teachers of Intentional Creativity – when she was just a teenage girl. Sue came from a difficult childhood and home, and yet had so much potential and natural talent in the arts. Lenore, an accomplished sculptor and writer, recognized that Sue needed nurture, a good home, and art mentorship in order for her to become the accomplished master painter that she later grew into. Choosing to take Sue into her home and adopting her as part of her own family was a transformational part of Sue’s story and journey into her own artist archetype.

Later in life, Sue also became a second mother to Curator Shiloh Sophia, taking her under her wing, becoming her art mentor, and which Shiloh Sophia calls her ‘art mother’, throughout most of her life. This mentorship, care, and deep friendship catalyzed Shiloh Sophia to find her true voice as an artist, to connect with the significance of putting intention into her artwork, and to fully develop the framework and philosophy of Intentional Creativity, which is now practiced internationally by hundreds of thousands of people.

At MUSEA, we believe that being an artist has very little to do with being talented, and much more to do with harnessing the generative power of creativity, having a devotional relationship to ‘making’, and believing that your creative contributions matter – that YOU matter. Without that sense of dignity and purpose, creativity may be hard to access, or can feel like a chore.

As our membership community is undertaking a month-long exploration of IDENTITY, a beautiful paradox has come into focus for many of us. In order to be an artist, we must individuate and access our artists archetype. We must connect with our self, our soul voice, and allow the creative energy of the universe to flow through us as a unique medium in this world. On the other hand, we so deeply need families, communities, close friends and confidants, ecosystems, animals, air and water – all those beings that support us in our creative acts, and inspire us with their own unique and beautiful creativity and essence. There is a reciprocation, a flow between, the I and the We that is at the heart of mattering. Being a part of the Musea membership community provides each one of us the opportunity to both individuate, to hone our craft as artists, to step deeper into our artist archetype, as well as see ourselves as a part of the whole. After all, for many of us, when we create, we are actually creating for each other, even more than we are creating for ourselves. It is a beautiful human impulse, that when we see beauty, that when we make it, we want to share it. That really ends up becoming the point of it all.

So this week I encourage you to consider this gorgeous paradox – that in the act of creating, you are individuating, and you are also contributing to our collective beauty. In the words of the poet Rumi, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” There is incredible possibility and unique potential within each one of us as individuals, and yet it is community and connection that inspire, catalyze, and often become the ‘why’ behind us living into these possibilities.

Well, what’ya know. I matter when you matter. You matter when I matter. We matter.

In the spirit of I and WE,

~ Amber Samaya