“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”
— Gloria Steinem
After my last piece on caregiving, a comment arrived that’s been rolling around in my thoughts. It was from Madeleine Shaw, a Vancouver slow fashion designer and educator, writer and co-founder of Lunapads (one of the first reusable menstrual product companies). She was referencing her practice as a textile artist who upcycles discarded clothing and linens into one-of-a-kind garments and accessories. In recent years, her caregiving load has also been steadily increasing. Her father recently died. Her mother is in her nineties.
She wrote:
“I don’t think I would be able to have the immense caregiving capacity that I do without the blessing of a strong, accessible creative practice.”
I've felt this myself. In the hardest stretches — my mother's long journey with Alzheimer's, and my uncle's sudden descent into dementia and grief after losing his wife, both of whom I was sole caregiver for. Over the years, when others’ needs were urgent, writing was what kept me alive in my own world. It wasn’t so much an escape as it was a return. A way of tuning in and turning back to myself when everything else was pointing outward.
Madeleine named it more plainly than I had: creativity isn’t the reward you get once the hard part is over. It’s what makes the hard part more liveable.
Most longevity frameworks don’t include this. You won’t find creative vitality on a standard longevity checklist or in the Blue Zones’ famous practices. The conversations tend to centre on muscle mass, sleep architecture, blood markers— most of them metrics built around men and or/ the optimizing mindset.
What gets left out of recommended “habit stacks” is something I kept noticing across every community I studied where women genuinely thrive in midlife and beyond: making something — a painting, a garment, a garden, a sentence, a gathering — isn’t a side note. It’s load-bearing.
This is why I named Creative Vitality a Pink Zones pillar — and why it’s the one I’ve been most eager to write about.
Each pillar in the Pink Zones is anchored in something from the natural world. Cultural self-worth is the seed. Systemic support, the soil. The nervous system, climate. Rooted nourishment, nutrients. Community, the mycelial network. Ritual and meaning, the roots.
Creative Vitality is the bloom. The culmination. Everything else makes the bloom possible — but without it, what was all of it for?
A few weeks ago I was lucky to spend an afternoon in the studio of Lori-Ann Latremouille, an incredible Vancouver artist and friend. Something I’d been seeing, feeling and trying to articulate for a long time finally clicked.
Lori-ann described how she uses her creative process to regulate herself — deliberately, the way a musician tunes an instrument.
“I’ve always found that when I did pieces that were all black and white, it was very calming — I was just focused on the texture. And then when I’d add one colour, it would be like a note, one note singing out. And the more colours I use, the more exciting something would become. So if I wanted to calm down, black and white was really good. If I wanted to pick up my energy, adding colour seemed to be the way.”
“I think there’s actually something in creativity that adjusts your physiology and can help balance your mood. It’s like a form of meditation — because you’re out of your mind and in your body. You’re not thinking, you’re making. So your mind can relax.”
The research is starting to catch up to what she already knows. A large longitudinal study of more than 16,000 adults found that for women in their fifties, creative engagement improved mental health whether pursued alone or with others.
Neuroscientists studying flow — the deep absorption that making often produces — have found that it activates the parasympathetic nervous system: rest, repair, restore. The self-critical voice (linked to the prefrontal cortex — particularly the parts involved in self-monitoring, error detecting, and judging) quiets. You stop scanning for what needs fixing when you start making.
I’m also very excited to share that I’m actually living this pillar in real time!
I just received production funding to make a documentary (my first!) about a local Pink Zones Icon and pioneering endocrinologist, Dr. Jerilynn Prior. I’ve written about her here. Holy creative learning curve ahead! My own creative muse is saying: “Heidi, You talk it, you walk it”!
(Here’s a clip from me walking the forest trails at UBC (Pacific Spirit Park, outside my door!)
Here’s what has delighted me most: as I’ve been sharing this project, friends and acquaintances with skills in this realm keep coming forward. The mycelial network, doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Our next Bonfire gathering — my monthly in-person circle for women in Vancouver (inspired by Shannon Watts and her Bonfire group )— will be hosted by Madeleine Shaw herself, around the theme of clothing, identity, and transformation. I didn’t intentionally design this Bonfire as a space for creative collaboration, but it turns out that when you gather women together for real conversation, you discover just how many of them are are creating...
More on that soon.
I’ll leave you with Lori- Ann’s own words because she is, to me, a living Pink Zones woman in full bloom:
“My artwork is not easily categorized. One can see in it both our ancient ancestors and the multiracial villagers of our future. The work tries to display our inseparable bond with nature and all universal forms… humankind cannot truly break this link. With or without intention, we will always return to earth. I hope my artwork in some way, can serve to remind people, even just for an instant, of this vital connection.”
“Within these forms, new shapes emerge and metamorphose. The image literally blooms on the paper.”
— Lori-Ann Latremouille
She blooms.
Sources
Tomioka, F., Noguchi, H., Takahashi, T., & Mori, T. (2015). How possibly do leisure and social activities impact mental health of middle-aged adults in Japan? PLOS ONE, 10(10). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0139777
Knierim, M.T., Rissler, R., Dorner, V., Maedche, A., & Weinhardt, C. (2018). The psychophysiology of flow: A systematic review of peripheral nervous system features. In Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation (Vol. 25, pp. 109–120). Springer.
If this article resonates, this is the kind of conversation that lives beyond the page inside The Pink Zones Podcast Club. ….like a book club- only podcasts!
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Heidi, caregiving can organize enormous portions of a life around response: another person’s needs, appointments, crises, decisions, and changing capacity. Creative practice restores the experience of initiating something, of choosing what begins and giving shape to something that did not exist before you made it. That makes “load-bearing” especially apt; making can preserve a place where the caregiver remains an author of her own life while so much of her attention is necessarily directed elsewhere. I’m grateful you gave that part of caregiving a language spacious enough to include Madeleine’s textiles, Lori-Ann’s colors, your writing, and the documentary you are now learning to make.
Heidi, I really related to this because I came to realize last Summer that a big part of me was missing by not expressing myself through creativity. For me that's through writing as well.
That study about the connection between "making" and longevity was fascinating.
I've been recognizing this as "doing what makes you happy" in whatever form that is as an important aspect of mental health and longevity. Now I have the science to back up the intuition.
Thanks for this and best of luck with your documentary!