For me, creativity is not simply only writing books of poems, taking photos or painting, singing or sketching. Creativity for me is the holy spark in us, the thing we were given by our many notions of God that separates us from all other living things. Spirituality is not really about religion for me – more people brutalize and murder other people in the name of religion than any other thing in our history. Creativity is about finding ways to live that are nourishing, that bring light and images and colors and emotions to the world.
Creativity is an ideology, a pathway to spirituality, the very definition of spirituality, it requires us to live in a spiritual way. Creativity challenges me to be self-aware, to look inward, to be authentic. It helps me to see the anger and fear that have corroded so much of my life and to begin to learn how to move behind them. It asks me to find other means of communicating that argument and anger, and to shed the endemic culture of struggle stories and lament that is the currency of so many people in our world.
Creativity helped me to see that that if I wanted love in my life, I need to open myself up to it, to think differently about it. And so it came to me.
Creativity helped me to begin taking photographs, which helped me to see the world anew, to begin to bend my knee to color and light, to literally change the way I see the world.
Creativity helped me to respect death as much as life, and to see one as a part of the other. I do not mourn the things I have lost in my life, I celebrate the things I can have. Everyone I love will die, as will I. I celebrate their lives. Every dog I love will die, and how blessed I am to be able to get another, to love one again. I will never make loving a dog a misery, for me, a gift of creativity.
When I hear about the sad and angry news from Washington, I think mostly of how bereft of creativity our political culture has become, how mired on old ways of thinking, how differently I have come to see conflict than the people who embrace it as a way of life. People who love history know better than to think conflict works to solve problems. Creativity is about seeing the world in different ways, about solving problems rather than arguing about them. The creative mind is challenged to think differently, open to new ideas, see the world in different ways.
Creativity requires us to be mindful, to think about lives, our aspirations, to light the creative spark and cherish it more than power or money or position. In our culture, creativity is isolating, it lives on the fringes of our world, it requires patience and strength and discipline, acceptance of the reality that it will most often fail. It is a lonely way of thinking, you will not see creativity people in Washington much or on TV arguing about the world.
Creativity does not make me better than anyone else, or superior to any other way of thinking. It brings me love and peace and beauty, every waking minute of my life.