When humans create art – in contrast with AI-generated attempts, the process is often messy, unwieldy, time-consuming, full of avenues started and perhaps abandoned, perhaps diverted. We so rarely end up exactly where we intended when we engage in the practice of creation. Which is precisely why it is so exciting and so full of possibility.

Recently, The BTS Center offered a public program with three incredible artists, each of whom spoke of offering their creativity into an aching world as an act of joyful resistance to the commodification of life.

• Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, poet and educator, writes a poem each day and sends it into the world — not, as she reflected, in pursuit of some kind of artistic perfection, but rather as a way of naming the next true thing, of being in relationship with the magic and the grief of life.

• Madeleine Jubilee Saito, a visual artist and cartoonist, and Aly Halpert, a musician, both spoke of how, once released into the world, their work takes on its own life, weaving into different lives, communities, and places in ways they might never predict.

Whether poem, comic, song, or something else, these creations are lovingly offered so that they may take flight, touching and inspiring and creating ripples of meaning across many lives. When we name what is true within ourselves, in words or images or melodies or movement, those truths move out to touch other truths in a rippling tide of possibility.

The creative process of birthing such beauties offers a powerful alternative to the capitalist framework of ever-increasing consumption. Whether we’re creating or engaging with these embodiments of imagination, the process is relational, beckoning us toward different ways of seeing and understanding one another and the world, giving us permission to be messy or uncertain, allowing us the space to be our fully human selves rather than consumers in the machine.

For the weary, the hurting, and the rageful living through late capitalism and the rise of authoritarianism, seeing the violence against our neighbors and our sweet planet, we come together to push back through our creativity in community. I think of the singing resistance movements springing up in protest of ICE occupations and of the puppeteers who braved sub-zero temperatures in Minneapolis, using their art to say: There is another way. Let us seek it together.

I was so lucky this spring to have co-facilitated, along with my friend and colleague Rev. Eileen Gebbie, a book study in which we engaged with poetry from the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón. Each week, I was surprised and delighted to find how the poems we read land and resonate so differently with each person.

I’ve come to think of these poems as seeds — how they sprout and grow depends on what each of us readers offers in our own soil. Each poem (or song, or image, or dance) blossoms into a different iteration for each of us because we — individual and unique — are in relationship with it in our own special way.

Perhaps the power of art as a means of resistance lies in its embrace of both the uniqueness of the individual and the power of the collective. Art encourages us to express the full range of our emotions and to exercise our imaginations, not in a vacuum but in a way that invites participation and relationship with one another. And also, art encourages us to move away from easy (and often false) certainties toward a stance of receptivity and unknowing, a generative space in which we can sit with our discomfort or lack of control in a way that invites a different kind of participation in our own lives and the lives of others.

Art, in its ferocity and tenderness, its beauty and perplexities, is an invitation to touch our humanity, to become more human in this more-than-human world. To stitch together a shimmering, ever-expanding quilt of our brokenness and our magic that strengthens the bonds between us and all creation and refuses to be swallowed by the forces of destruction.

In her poem “Dead Stars,” poet Ada Limón writes:

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

Creating art, no matter how “good” it might be judged, is a means of doing this: surviving more, loving harder, standing up to the rising tides. These conversations have invigorated my creative practices. I hope they did for you as well, so that we may collectively name the truths and weave the possibilities of this time.

Rev. Ash Temin is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) who serves as the Staff Writer + Program Manager at The BTS Center. She also offers spiritual direction through her independent practice in Portland, Maine. Ash is a graduate of the University of Virginia (BA), the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin (MPhil) and Harvard Divinity School (MDiv). Her time at both the ISE and HDS sparked a passion for ecological theology and prompted her to begin delving more deeply into the experience of ecological grief.

Prior to moving to Portland, she served as an Acting Associate Pastor at Hope Central Church, a UCC/DOC congregation in Boston. Before answering the call to ordination, Ash worked in various administrative roles at Harvard University. She also has worked as a hospital and hospice chaplain, an adjunct professor, and a freelance editor. After time spent living in Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Ireland, and Massachusetts, Ash is grateful to make her home in Maine, where she lives with her husband and two cats and spends part of most days walking on the shores of Casco Bay. When not absorbed in work, she can be found cooking with friends, laying in her garden hammock, hiking in the woods, playing in the ocean, or attempting to learn the Irish language with a cat on her lap.