Welcome back, you trash-talking creatives! Last week, we lifted the lid on the trashcan and considered what our waste reveals about us. Did you compose a trashcan percussion score, recognize an award-worthy recyclable or interview an object refusing to become anything other than refuse? Whether you produced less waste or merely paid more attention to it, I just hope nothing followed you home.
This week, we are reaching into the pantry for a creative staple: the bean.
I’m picturing the prototypical bean—kidney, pinto or black—but “bean” covers an enormous family of edible seeds and bean-adjacent legumes. We also use the shape to describe swimming pools, bags, or a slang term for someone’s head. Change the spelling and it becomes a word containing everything that has already happened.
Beans also occupy a durable place in storytelling. In fairytales, beans are counted, planted, spilled, and transformative. They can represent abundance or scarcity, depending on whether you have a pantry full of them or a handful of them after selling your cow.
As a kid, my best friends Robert and Erick lived in a house where a cast-iron skillet of fresh refried beans seemed permanently available in the kitchen. Sadly, I was a picky eater and maintained a diet with all the adventurous range of a fast food menu. I didn’t appreciate those beans until adulthood.
These days, one domestic source of my happiness is a pantry stacked with canned goods. Beans helped nourish civilizations long before anyone drew a bean-shaped swimming pool. Can beans (no pun) also nourish our creative spirits?
Play, after all, is one of the ways humans and many other animals explore, learn and practice being alive. Let’s spill a few beans and see what grows from some time spent with one or more of these creative exercises:
- Cool Beans: Invent a no-cook recipe for a hot summer day. Begin with a drained can of beans and add whatever seems refreshing: tomatoes, corn, herbs, cheese, avocado, peppers or those tasty yet meager leftovers. Give your creation an impressive restaurant name like “Sunset Cannellini Mosaic.”
- Beanologist: Pour a handful of dried beans onto a table. Sort them using a classification system of your own invention: trustworthiness, leadership potential, or a predisposition for criminal behavior. All beans are equal, but some beans are more equal than others.
- Human Bean: Curl your body into the most bean-like shape you can manage safely. Slowly uncurl as though you are sprouting. Pay attention to balance, tension and the space your body occupies. Turn the movement into a ten-second dance, or the jumping off point for your new series of exercise videos, “Bean Body Blow Out!” Create a suitable list of celebrity spokespersons.
- Been Counter: Make a list beginning with “I have been…” Include places, emotional states, occupations, mistakes, and identities you once tried on. Choose one item and rewrite it as “I am becoming…” Let the sound shared by bean, been and being carry you into a short poem, monologue or wildly biased autobiography.
A single bean contains stored energy and the possibility of becoming something much larger. Creativity often begins the same way: one small idea waiting for attention, nourishment and a little time to grow. This week, plant one if you like, eat several if you can and give at least one ridiculous idea the chance to sprout.
This column was written with help from ChatGPT, which has never tasted a bean but spills plenty of them.
