Keeping Our Lights On
A five-month program for nourishing your creative life force
in challenging times
How great would it feel to have a steady pulse of creative self-care built into every week?
Your creativity is your life force, and that source of aliveness needs nourishment, connection, and encouragement.
Keeping Our Lights On is a five-month program that offers the supportive community and weekly sustenance you need to keep your creative spirit alive and thriving in these difficult times.
Each month, we take up a different core practice of creating - practices like savoring pleasure, venturing out with fresh eyes, and transmuting challenge into joyful possibility.
Held in a beautiful structure that facilitates learning, sharing, and creating together, you will tend your creative spirit, honor your creative energies, and discover what it means to approach living itself as a creative act, especially in dark times.
About the Keeping Our Lights On Program
Keeping Our Lights On weaves together:
juicy monthly themes
optional creative projects that guide inquiry into each theme
weekly online meet-ups and open studio time
practices for approaching all of life with a creator’s mindset
rich opportunities for reflection, conversation, and connection
Keeping Our Lights On is for you if you:
Enjoy all kinds of creative play
Feel inspired to make 2025 a time of not holding back
Crave dedicated time and space to nurture your commitment to play, beauty, and joy
Are ready to harness the power of an encouraging community to help you remain connected to your inner light
Keeping Our Lights On is for anyone determined to walk through 2025 grounded in the hopeful magic of creative practice in art and life.
The way we live through the time of overwhelm is to learn rituals that center us and ground us, that connect us more directly and more strongly to the deep sense of self.
– Michael Meade
Our 2025 Themes
Each month of Keeping Our Lights On is built around a different theme.
February
CONNECTING
Reclaiming the unbroken thread that connects you to your life force,
and creating a relational foundation for our work together
March
SAVORING
Slowing down and tuning into the sensory pleasures that fuel creative living.
April
TRANSMUTING
Engaging creativity as an alchemical force
for turning pain into meaning and challenge into joy
May
MATTERING
Choosing to act as if we matter, as if what is meaningful to us matters,
as if what we devote ourselves to is essential to the well-being of ourselves and the world.
June
VENTURING
Stepping out of the comfortable known and
engaging risk as a creative practice
Creativity is a magic wand that works two ways. When you set it in action and seek to create something, it does not just bring into existence that object or work, it also raises in your heart a dream, a hope, and a will to achieve that creation. And when all else seems lost and steeped in hopelessness, the magic of creativity can still keep you going. For when all else seems dark, an urge to create something would still give you an aim to look forward to. And if you just take hold of this urge, it will take hold of you and see you through even the darkest times.
- Jyoti Arora, author in Ghaziabad, India
How the Program Flows
Weekly meet-ups happen via Zoom on Fridays from 12 - 1:30 pm Pacific Time.
FIRST FRIDAY WORKSHOPS
In first Friday workshops, we introduce and unpack the theme of the month and share prompts for the month’s (optional) creative project.
SECOND and THIRD FRIDAYS
On the second and third Fridays of the month, we check in first, then move into open studio time to work on our projects in the company of each other.
FOURTH FRIDAYS
The last Friday of the month is a time for sharing of creative projects and closing reflections on the monthly theme.
NOTES:
February is an abbreviated month with just two Friday meet-ups.
The first meet-up of the program is February 21st.
The month of May has five Fridays.
We’ll take a break during the “extra” week.
“I am thankful for the gift of Sara’s work. It offers of a movement forward for those of us willing to listen to our creatively purposeful yearnings for integration.”
Angelah L.
About Your Facilitator
Sara Saltee brings a gracious spirit and a curious mind to her work as an artist, writer, creativity coach and teacher. After 20+ years of keeping her passion for creativity “on the side” of her work in higher education and organizational consulting, Sara founded the Saltee Academy for Complex Creators in 2020 to create a welcoming community for wholly original women with multiple creative passions and a desire to approach all of life in a spirit of openness and inquiry. Combining her original tools and frameworks with deeply compassionate facilitation, Sara creates programs and workshops that help people connect to their own authentic creative impulses and express the fullness of their creative power.
I can’t get enough of Sara’s unique perspective and delivery when it comes to creativity and incorporating the whole person. I’ve found her classes to be so nurturing and enlightening, and I want to take in more!
- Lauri M.
Early Bird Discounts
Available until Feb 9th
Full fees for the Keeping Our Lights On six-month program are $150 per month.
You can pay in full or opt for a monthly payment plan.
The reduced prices below reflect the following early bird discounts:
save 20% ($30 per month) when you sign up for monthly payments
save 25% ($187.50) when you pay in full
Sara’s courses have been hugely important to my transformation. Her work has really expanded my awareness of how I am creatively showing up in the world (and not just through artistic expression).
- Elizabeth C.
Program FAQ
Q: What if I can’t make all the meet-ups?
A: Don’t worry about it! While our community will be most vibrant with active participation by as many of us as possible, we’ve designed the program with a full understanding that our lives will inevitably fluctuate over the six months of our time together.
The First Friday workshops will always be recorded so you can get the new theme and new prompts via replay if you need to miss one.
The Second and Third Friday gatherings are divided into two segments, and you are free to come for one or both.
Q: What kinds of creative projects will we be doing?
A: The optional creative projects we suggest are designed to be open to wide interpretation and flexible to any medium. You’ll have all the room you want to take each project in a direction that you’ll find engaging, or to ignore it and work on a project of your own. For example, a prompt like “Turn something into something else” might become an opportunity to turn a childhood memory into a poem, or a set of teacups into a fountain, or a ruined painting into a collage. Or, a prompt like “Create something risky” might spur you to use an “ugly” color in a project, or write something about a vulnerable experience, or take a crack at using the oil pastels you’ve been scared to try.
Q: What if I would rather just keep going on my own creative projects?
Go for it! On any given month, you should feel free to continue with projects you’ve already got underway instead of taking up the creative prompt we offer. You’ll still gain a lot from the community support and your reflections on the themes will undoubtedly bring fresh energy to your creative works-in-progress.
Q: Will everyone there be a great artist? Will I feel ashamed if I’m not?
Keeping Our Lights On is not at all concerned with making great art, or even making art at all if that’s not your jam. Instead, we are focused on understanding how we can engage our own creativity in whatever direction it moves us. We do creative projects because we want to practice activating our imaginations and experiencing play, not because we want to be great. We look to artists and writers (some of them great) to provide wisdom about what it means to be a creator, how we can live in ways that are aligned with our inner needs to create, and how we can bring a creative approach to all of life - including our work, our projects, our art, and our relationships. Whether you identify as an artist or a writer or neither, you will be at home here as long as you are intrigued by activating your creative spirit.
Q: Tell me more about how we’ll share our work - is this a critique group?
This is NOT a critique group, and you will not be asked to evaluate or assess each other’s creative products. Our emphasis will be on asking good questions that give us space to speak about our process and our relationship to our creating. Sara and Melissa will provide tools at the beginning of the program to help you ask for the kind of feedback you actually want as a creator and we’ll all work to ensure that we are offering only comments that are welcome and helpful.
Got Other Questions? Contact Sara
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
- Mary Oliver