Do you have a covenant with your creativity?

An invitation to focus less on seeking inspiration and more on deepening attention

Jun 02, 2025

Choosing to believe that your creativity matters

Throughout the month of May, the KOLO group was working with the creative practice of “Mattering.” We talked a lot about why it is so difficult, and so essential, for us as creators to hold fast to a sense of knowing that we matter, that what matters to us matters, and that our creating practice matters.

In the context of our conversations on Mattering, I shared some provocative language that I lifted from Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers. The setting was Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert podcast, and Dax was asking about whether the Avett Brothers, who have been songwriting and performing for over 25 years, ever feel like they are running out of new ideas.

Scott Avett’s answer struck me as so profound that I stopped the podcast and replayed it multiple times, frantically transcribing it into my journal. Challenging the premise that the goal of creativity is to continually tread new ground, he said:

“I think about our covenant with our creativity. So, our commitment.
It’s not about having ‘new thoughts,’ it is about returning to the same ground within that covenant of commitment to it. So in a way there’s not necessarily a need for anything ‘new’…it is our commitment that sustains us over time.”
- Scott Avett (Armchair Expert Podcast, July, 2024)

Avett is using the word “covenant” here in part as a synonym for commitment, but with its religious roots, “covenant” conveys to me something a bit more profound. A covenant is a sacred agreement that emerges from an unbreakable bond.

I know that sounds pretty heavy, but I don’t think a covenant has to be worn like an old, heavy cloak. I believe it can be worn more like your oldest, softest t-shirt that slides on like a second skin and instantly makes you feel more like yourself, or a softly worn sundress that lightly and playfully allows and entices your full range of motion.

What does it mean to have a covenant with your creativity?

At minimum, I think it means to pay attention to your own creative yearnings and impulses. It means listening to what your soul needs and doing your best to honor those needs.

This can, of course, take a lot of different forms. It can look like devoting your whole life to your creative work, or it can look like taking jobs that leave emotional and mental energy leftover for your creative play, or it can look like creating in multiple different ways that complement and balance each other.

Sometimes, it might mean speaking lovingly with your creativity, saying “The demands of life mean that I can’t give you all that you deserve right now, but I have not forgotten you, you matter to me, and I will return.”

What so struck me about Avett’s words is that he gives the sense that to have a covenant with one’s creativity is to make a profound, lasting agreement to organize yourself around the things, people, ideas, themes, questions, that fuel and sustain your creativity. It is about a deep relationship of reciprocity in which you accept the responsibility for being a good steward of your creativity, and in return, you trust your creativity to lead you where you most need to go.

That means following the path that brings your creative self alive, it means trusting that your creativity is your ally and your gift, and it means believing deeply in the value and importance of what you are here to create - not because it changes the world in any grandiose way, but because it is the truest thing you have to offer and it matters to you.

Committing to your creativity is not a commitment to newness

And - here’s where the question of “newness” comes in - Avett points to the way that a covenant with one’s creativity does NOT mean an agreement to chase after whatever is new and shiny. In fact, despite our capitalist culture’s adulation of the latest thing and tendency to conflate creativity itself with originality and “the new,” “newness” does not seem to be a value of mature creators.

Avett’s phrase “It’s not about having ‘new thoughts,’ it is about returning to the same ground…” suggests that to forge a covenant with one’s creativity is to honor, over time, the field of themes and questions that are yours to explore.

Seasoned creators of all kinds seem to share this notion that their work is to continually till the soil of the terrain that they find compelling. They are not rushing around seeking new ground, they are paying deeper and deeper attention within their particular field of play.

Here, for example, is the playwright August Wilson on how all of his work explores a single story:

“I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say.
I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.”
- August Wilson

And here’s the fabulous Roseanne Cash, who, at the time of writing this in 2008, was reflecting back on 25 years of songwriting:

…as I get older I have found the quality of my attention to be more important, and more rewarding, than the initial inspiration. I’ve found that the melody is already inherent in the language, and if I pay close enough attention to the roundness of the vowels and the cadence of the words, I can tease the melody out of the words it is already woven into. I have found that continual referral back to the original feeling tone of the inspiration, the constant re-touching of that hum and cry, more important than the fireworks of its origin. I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.
This maturation in songwriting has proven surprisingly satisfying. Twenty-five years ago, I would have said that the bursts of inspiration, and the transcendent quality that came with them, were an emotionally superior experience, preferable to the watchmaker concentration required for the detail work of refining, editing and polishing. But the reverse is proving to be true. Like everything else, given enough time and the long perspective, the opposite of those things that we think define us slowly becomes equally valid, and sometimes more potent.
— Roseanne Cash, in the New York Times, 2008

Perhaps we should pay attention to what these mature creators are saying?

In addition to swooning at the poetry of Cash’s language, (“the constant re-touching of that hum and cry” - wow!) I am taken by her analysis of the difference in approach between a younger and older creator. Early on, we tend to be in love with the hot newness of each inspiration, but with age and experience, it is the steady devotion to a deep, nuanced, attentive listening that carries us on.

Taken all together, this covenant theme suggests to me that it is more than okay to resist whatever pressure we may feel to continually be reaching for something new to say or do. I am delighted by this permission to uncouple the idea of being creative from the idea of seeking novelty or even inspiration.

Of course, there is real pleasure in trying new things - new mediums, new ideas, new directions. But over the long haul, I love the notion that by forging a covenant with our creativity, we are agreeing to continually refine the quality of our attention to the themes and questions that recur in our work. Choosing to go more deeply into what we love and what attracts us, we can find fresh directions not by asking “what else is out there?” but by asking “what more is there to notice in the field where I live?”

An invitation

Your invitation this week is to try on this idea of making a covenant with your creativity and see how it fits.

Do you already have a sense of a sacred agreement with your creativity? What are the terms of that agreement?
If you don’t yet have a covenant with your creativity, does the idea feel compelling to you? What would you want that covenant to look like or feel like?
What is the ground that your creativity compels you to explore again and again? If you look back on your creative life, are there a set of questions or themes that recur in your work?
Are you in a phase of seeking new inspirations and new thoughts or a phase of deepening the quality of your attention within your existing field of creative play?

I’d love to know how this covenant idea resonates with you!

One more thing…Testing a Possibility

I’m at one of those moments in a creative life when one realizes that one is never ever ever going to complete some very meaningful projects unless one picks up the pace. Sound familiar?

More specifically, I have some ambitious goals for the next three months that relate to leveling up my coaching and art business with a new website and a number of new products, and to get all of this done, I need to be adding an early-bird, high-focus shift to my workday.

I’m wondering if you might like to join me?

I am considering hosting a Zoom co-working studio called Mornings Alive where we would gather Monday, Tues, and Wednesday mornings from 7-9 am Pacific Time to work on whatever high-focus project we’ve got in front of us - you know, the kind that are most susceptible to being put off or getting lost in the shuffle. We’ll bookend each studio with brief check-ins and use the juicy middle for a solid stretch of creative activity - could be writing, or course-making, or making of any kind…

I’m excited for the feeling of accomplishment that allows you to say to the rest of the day - “screw you, at least I already did what matters most!”

Let me know if Mornings Alive is something you might show up for in June - August, at least some of the time?