AND THE ⚫️ Was Gone

Hey there. You’re back here with AND THE SUN, a newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. Thanks for tuning in this spooky season.

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This week’s post is about my Halloween costume, which came together last minute and turned out great thanks to a bunch of serendipitous occurrences. This itself was serendipitous, because I’ve recently been reflecting on the role of serendipity in creativity. Below I’ll show you my costume, tell you how it’s made, and take you through a meditation to help you find more serendipities in your creative projects.

But first, a reminder that I’m hosting another attachment & meditation workshop on Saturday, November 9th. It’s just two hours long but it does pack a meditative punch. Check it out here!

This week’s meditation is a technique for opening a sense of possibility, in order to notice serendipity during a creative process. The rest of the post tees it up!

My Halloween costume this year is “a solar eclipse”, in homage to this April’s eclipse, which I had the good fortune to view from within its path of totality. It was one of the most amazing natural things I’ve ever seen!

The eclipse costume came together at the last minute, and the details of how it turned out and what made it (dare I say) great were clearly the result of various serendipitous moments. I was primed to notice the role of serendipity because lately, in the course of working on a multitude of creative projects, I’ve been noticing the ways in which serendipity is integral to the creative process. 

For anyone who creates regularly, the role of serendipity in creation is probably familiar. Moodboards, for example, are a common place for serendipity to influence a creative project: the right mixture of relevant influences might suddenly spark an idea for the project at hand. Another place where serendipity emerges is through prototyping, where not only do you test what does and doesn’t work, but you often discover things you hadn’t thought of before. 

When we’re in an open, creative flow, it can seem like serendipity occurs even more often. This is interesting, because it suggests that serendipity can be encouraged through a meditation in which we prime ourselves to see, and therefore take better advantage of, the serendipitous moments when they do occur.

Let’s look at this vis-à-vis this year’s Halloween costume! Here’s the story of how the eclipse came to be.

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It was 5:00pm on Saturday, October 26th, and I knew I wanted to make a costume. The nearby art materials store, Blick, closed at 6:00pm, so I was in a crunch for time. 

I asked ChatGPT for some costume ideas, giving it a list of details about my life that might inspire a personally relevant costume. The first serendipitous moment came when I asked ChatGPT, “What about costumes I can do with just copper- and/or silver-colored wire?”, thinking of the wire sculptures I’ve been making recently. One of ChatGPT’s suggested ideas was, “Constellation or Night Sky”. 

Bingo. When I read “Constellation or Night Sky”, April’s eclipse sprang to mind. I had my costume idea.

I Googled “eclipse” for visual inspiration, and the first results were mostly images of the famous ring of light in a dark sky, rather than the twilight of how an eclipse appears from the ground with a naked eye. This both determined my vision for how the costume would look, and gave me an idea for how to make it. The search results were serendipitous moment #2.

To make the costume, I was going to place a small black circle in front of a large black circle, with LEDs hidden in-between, so that light would spill out over the edge of the small circle like the eclipse ring. The whole rig would hang around my neck. Blick sells solid wooden circles, as well as canvas circles, which are made of canvas stretched around a wooden ring. In serendipitous moment #3, I picked the canvas circles because they were lighter. I’ll explain the importance of this below.

I went to a nearby light store to buy lights. After paying for yellow-hued battery-powered string lights, in serendipitous moment #4, I noticed some small puck-shaped LEDs sitting next to the register. I bought three, and they turned out to be way brighter than the string lights, providing the majority of the light for the sun, while the string lights contributed a yellow tone to the sun’s glow. 

Originally, I planned to create the total eclipse, featuring only the ring of light spilling over the edge of the moon. To do this, I was going to place a black vinyl circle over the small canvas and allow the light to bleed around the edge.

Serendipitous moment #5a is that I built the light enclosure before attaching a black vinyl circle to the canvas. Because of this, the lights shone through the inner canvas circle of the canvas. I filmed a process video for a friend (#5b), and had the black vinyl circle nearby (#5c), which I spontaneously decided to move slowly over the light (#5d) because I thought it would look good on camera. I immediately recognized this looked like the moon moving over the sun.

So I decided to change course: instead of just making the total eclipse, I attached a vinyl circle to a pivot that let me dynamically cover and uncover the sun. This looked cooler than just the solar ring, and since the movement of the moon over the sun is universally recognizable, it made the costume easier to understand visually. Mission accomplished.

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I think there are two important lessons here to apply to any creative process where we want to benefit from serendipity.

First, open yourself up to the sense of possibility. When your mind feels constrained, the final product will be too. But when your mind is open, you’ll be surprised by what unfolds. We explore this in a meditation this week, where we’ll do a technique for opening up to the sense of possibility.

Second, try unexpected things and pay attention to the results. You can even use hacky strategies for finding serendipities without sinking the time and effort into full prototypes. For example, if you’re thinking about combining physical elements for a creative project, you can arrange and re-arrange images of these elements on an infinite canvas tool, like Miro. (This is actually how I came up with First Forms 1, the collage piece I included in the first AND THE SUN newsletter.)

Lastly, consider the sheer serendipity of the sun, moon, and earth aligning for a fleeting few moments. The moon, when it broke off from earth eons ago – the happy consequence of a chance planetary collision – had to be just the right size and settle at just the right distance. An alignment that echos the way serendipity finds us, often by chance, always with beauty, and only if we’re open to noticing. Almost inconceivable. When I watched the eclipse in Ohio, I imagined that, like our distant ancestors, I knew nothing about the sky and the universe beyond. How must they have felt, perceiving beyond the realm of knowledge…

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