make like a human

an interview with maria bowler on creativity as a political and spiritual issue

What a treat I have for you today, my wild ones.

Maria Bowler

is a creativity coach who supports imaginative souls in their acts of meaning-making — and one of my personal favorite Instagram follows. Her new book is called Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity (do we love that or what?), and my Southern rooted soul is TICKLED PINK to serve y’all her wisdom on a silver platter today. Enjoy! Then go create!

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

Your work insists that human creativity is a political issue. You also believe it is a spiritual issue. I find your emphatic certainty about this really grounding for me personally. Often we need someone else to give language to what we intuit but maybe struggle to articulate. Can you explain the political and spiritual implications of a healthy creative life?

A creative life is political because it confronts the core lie of productivity land: that we are what we do, and therefore doing upon the world is the solution to every problem. (When I’m talking about “productivity land,” I mean the world shaped by capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist, ableist, and racist alienation.”) Our current politics is based on identifying us as producers: people whose value, connection, and belonging needs to be performed. Being consumers is an offshoot of that productivity framework.

When we see that we’re not actually producers, we are makers — people who naturally create in partnership with the world — we stop being so easy to manage. And suddenly, entire systems that rely on our obedience to scarcity, speed, and control lose their grip.

It’s spiritual because creativity connects us to everything that’s beyond us. We act from connection and curiosity rather than control. We aren’t forcing life into submission; we collaborate with seen and unseen realities! That includes the stuff we like and the stuff we don’t like. Creative living also insists that being is where all the juice is, and that wholeness isn’t a reward we earn after we’ve done enough, or done it “right.”

One of the cornerstones of your work is the differentiation between producing and making. How do you explain the distinction, and why does it matter which we choose?

Producing is what happens when we forget who we are. It’s when we look at our time, our relationships, our work as a bunch of objects to manage. It's the compulsion to prove our existence by rearranging the furniture of life. We move faster, optimize smarter, check the box so we can finally rest. (Except we never actually rest.) We think there’s a magical destination —after the performance — where we finally get to be.

We know we’re producing when no matter how much we get done, it feels bad. It can’t actually ever satisfy us because as soon as we check a box, there’s a new box to check and that becomes a new emergency.

Making, by contrast, is what we do when we’re in relationship with reality. We are active participants in a process that never ends. It’s not about the final thing. It’s about being in conversation with life. A maker says, “What’s here, really?” And then: “What wants to come alive from this?” It’s a radically different posture. One creates deliverables (or avoidance); the other creates meaning.

"A creative life thrives and withers in direct correlation with the truth... the truth of what is alive in you and what is not." This really sums up my quest to decide on a topic for my next book! Over and over, I'd choose a topic only to realize, once I'd dig in, that it wasn't alive in me. Every no led to a yes, eventually. How do we sort through what is and is not alive in us?

That’s so real! I feel like it’s an ongoing process where we unpeel layers like: “This is what I should do. This makes sense. This is what I think will keep me safe.”

I don’t know about you, but often I get what seems like a good idea — and it is a totally fine idea — but I’m approaching it all wrong. I’m doing it because it seems strategic, safe, smart. It makes too much sense! The idea might actually be something that feels “true” on the surface, but if I’m doing it under the condition that I get praise or safety from someone else and I wouldn’t do it otherwise, it’s not going to feel alive. It will feel vaguely like a trap. Because on some level we know that creative presence isn’t conditional.

It’s like if you were to say to a friend you’re building a relationship with, “I will show up for you if you keep making me feel good about my life!” Gross.

Compare that to saying to someone, “I am curious about you. I want to know you. I want to be shaped by your presence and contribute to your life.”

That’s how you know what’s alive and what isn’t — because it invites you into relationship. Would you want to hang out with this thing regardless of the outcome? That feels reciprocal, electric, sometimes inconvenient, but never hollow.

Please preach to us for a minute about the difference between being disciplined and being a disciple.

This is a big one. Our default version of discipline is basically a worship of control. It’s like a sexy form of self-denial. It says: “Fighting off chaos/the other makes you good.” It has no purpose other than to maintain itself. Does that sound familiar? You know… stuff that exists for no other reason than to cling to power? That’s a recipe for hollow, decaying institutions that need to be maintained with more and more authoritarianism. So I’m suspicious of discipline that is just about…discipline itself. “I am disciplined so I can be a disciplined person.” Why? What for?

But the root of the word “discipline” has to do with studying. So connecting to that aspect, rather than punishment, is what a) creates more fulfillment and b) is actually more sustainable in the long term.

Being a disciple means devoting yourself to being an ongoing student of what you love, not what you fear. It means surrendering to a process larger than your five-year plan. Discipline just wants to get your butt in the chair. But discipleship keeps you there when things get weird and holy and confusing. It says, “Stay curious about this. It matters.”

You wrote that when we berate ourselves for procrastinating, we aren't simply resisting an action - we're resisting our own resistance to action, which is exhausting! But you don't advise us on how to overcome this urge; you take it from a different angle. Can you explain?

Most productivity advice treats resistance as an obstacle to “overcome.” I treat it as a part of you that’s trying to speak, and often has really important insight.

When we resist, there’s often something sacred happening: fear of losing ourselves, boredom with the status quo, grief we haven’t felt, intuition we’re overriding. So I want to befriend resistance.

If you’re procrastinating, ask: What’s the wisdom here? What part of me doesn’t feel safe to act? What’s the secret instruction inside this delay? We need to be listened to like living beings.

Here’s a funny thing: Procrastinating on purpose isn’t procrastination anymore. When you are procrastination without resisting the fact that you’re procrastinating, you’re just…doing something else. The experience of it is totally different. I love asking my clients to procrastinate on purpose sometimes; something cool always happens.

Your work and mine both place a lot of emphasis on the importance of inner knowing, and of learning to discern and trust that inner knowing. For me, this wasn't a topic I set out to write about, but a natural outworking of a pretty radical shift in my own spiritual life. Has trusting yourself been a major life change for you, or did it always come naturally?

Shannon, I have knocked on the door of multiple institutions to validate me so many times it’s hilarious. The church! The academy! Another school! Another school! The publishing industry! I gained so much from engaging deeply with each of these places, but ultimately I hit a brick wall when I tried to trade a set of rules and roles for my life.

My husband reflected to me recently that I do tend to listen to myself, and it’s true, but often not right away. I told him, “If I could have simply followed someone else’s rules to great success, I would have!! At certain moments, if it actually worked, I absolutely would have traded my integrity for some imaginary golden ticket.”

I was raised to be a “good citizen,” good church girl, an honor roll student, and very polite. Inner knowing is rarely any of those things.

Thankfully my inner knowing refuses to be ignored forever. It throws fits until I listen. For example, I knew I had to leave my MFA shortly before graduating. I had done most of the hard work by that point. Which was so inconvenient of my inner knowing to say! But I’ve forced myself to do things my inner knowing is against enough times to know that it’s a struggle for everyone involved — not worth it.

I’ve seen people, myself included, build stuff on a foundation their inner knowing knows is wobbly, and it’s very painful to maintain.

On a very practical level, how can artists/makers resist an economy of productivity while being realistic about the need to produce work that sells, and on something of a regular basis?

This is the question. And like all good questions, it has an annoying answer: you can’t solve it, but you can live with it.

While the rules of our economy are utterly made up, they nonetheless have very real consequences. Rent is not imaginary. Neither is childcare. We have to navigate problems like this all the time. But because we’re in productivity land, when it comes to our work, it feels existential. “When I’m not producing, promoting, monetizing well, am I still an artist? When the market responds badly, am I still real?”

That’s precisely why we need to untangle our identity from what we produce and how it is received, because we are not what we do. You are not the algorithm’s favorite today. You are a living, breathing, meaning-making being. So now what?

Yes, your work may need to sell. But also, you can be okay both practically and as a soul if it doesn’t. That’s where we treat the capitalist pressure and the creative identity stuff separately. We have to get both very realistic and very introspective.

Start with the survival stuff: Will I be practically okay if this doesn’t sell? Let’s say it all goes sideways and your lifestyle has to drastically change. Will I pick up another gig, take on client work, teach a workshop, wait tables, apply for a grant, borrow from a friend, barter, downsize, pause? Humans have been surviving creative droughts and reconfiguring income for millennia. You can live a full, rich, holy life without ever going viral or hitting your revenue goals. You can still feel deeply sufficient.

But even more important is this question: Will my self-concept survive if this doesn’t sell?

Will I still believe I’m a real artist, a worthy human, a vital part of the world’s fabric? Resist the lie that market success is the same thing as meaning. Ironically, sometimes, the more rooted you are in that truth, the more resonant your work often becomes. And whether wild success arrives or not, the process is a whole lot lighter.

Practice reminding yourself that you are okay, even when things are not okay. Build the part of yourself that knows how to begin again. Your Maker self can’t ever be taken away; it’s a given.