Day: January 4, 2014

Someone told me this morning that I was the first person they had ever met in their lives who believed creativity was important, that it was not something to be squeezed in behind everything else, to be abandoned when we are busy, to be trivialized as a hobby or cute interest. I was surprised to hear it, but I have come to understand the importance of creativity, not just in my life, but in the lives of so many people I know and have encountered.

In our world, creativity, like spirituality and compassion, is trivialized, pushed to the side. Important things are discussed on TV and in the news – politics, finance, the minute-by-minute activity of the stock market, shown us in ticker tape streamers all day. Nobody is on television arguing about creativity, unless some dodo actor or politician has said something dumb about something he knows nothing about.

People tell me all the time they are too busy to be creative, they are working too hard, they don’t have time, their wives or husbands laugh at them. In my courses on creativity and blogs, the first thing I say is that creativity isn’t an interruption from the work, it is, for many of us, the work itself. I believe the creative spark is a gift from God, it is unique among all the species and animals in the world, in the Kabbalah God warns the only thing human beings have to fear from him is wasting the creative spark, failing to use it in pursuit of power or money.

We spent more time worrying about money in our world than almost anything, yet I have come to believe creativity is our soul, our identity, our struggle to make sense of our world and to find and shape the beauty and light all around us, this is our news, our politics, our passion.

Creativity is transformative, it frees our inner spirits, defines our souls, gives us purpose, lifts our hearts, is our language to the other struggling and yearning spirits of our world. Creativity is the purest form of passion, it deserves our attention and respect, it ought not to be pushed to the edge of life, out of sight, beyond reach, until it fades out of sight like a sailboat drifting on the horizon.

Creativity is important. It is the greatest antidote to fear and despair, it kisses our hearts and infuses us with life. In my teaching, I see fear all the time, choking off creativity, sending out little voices that say, “you can’t do this,” it is no good,” “people will laugh at you.” Creativity chokes off those voices, chases them away, it is much more powerful than fear. Creativity is self, it is who we are. Who we are not.

My wish for you: light your candle, raise your voice, sing your song. Creativity is important.

When I first moved to upstate New York and wrote about the impressive winters here, it seemed exotic, it was new to me and people around the country were surprised by the very low temperatures and the howling blizzards that came roaring down from Canada, I got to dramatize the experience in several books – “Dogs Of Bedlam Farm,” and “Dog Days.” People in California and Florida and Texas could hardly imagine such weather and found it quite exotic, my border collie Rose became famous for her heroic efforts during lambing and some awful storms, I wrote about that in “Rose In A Storm,” a novel about a border collie left alone on a farm.

I remember my first encounter with -30 temperatures, how matter changed, I got frostbite, I had to wrap rubber hoses around my neck and crawl across sheets of ice on my hands and knees to get to the water tanks by the barn. I learned a lot about handling extreme weather, it is different now.

But so is the weather experience of almost everyone around me. I see that our experience of weather has changed in those relatively short years, everyone everywhere has experienced extreme and challenging weather, quite often much more intense than mine. Maria and I often joke that our region is now considered moderate, the hurricanes and big storms and tornadoes and heavy snowfalls go elsewhere, most often South of us to Boston or Philadelphia or New York City. Realtors here say people along the East coast have begun looking for homes here, there has been no serious damage from storms.

People in Minnesota and Iowa saw wind chills of  – 50 and – 60 last night, worse to come in the next few days. I get messages every day from people who have experienced tornadoes, drought, devastating rains and floods, and of course, the new superstorms, no longer a rarity but a common experience. More than 70 million Americans are experiencing the cold and snow from the storm the Weather Channel has named “Hercules,” and it is hardly the biggest storm of recent months.

Our new shared experience has become surreal. Many of the people who are running much of the country deny climate change, refuse to fund research and warning projects about storms, believe all-weather events are simply the work of God and that claims of environmental catastrophe would hurt profit margins and job growth. They might be right about one thing, in the Kabbalah God warns his people to take care of Mother Earth or he will send awful storms and floods and storms to punish them.

Rose’s exploits seemed heroic to me at the time, but not so unusual now – border collies in South Dakota risked their lives to try to save millions of cattle who perished in the awful superstorms of October, far worse than anything Rose and  I ever saw at Bedlam Farm.

The new story for me is the shared and sometimes beautiful but disturbing experience of invasive and increasingly powerful weather. We are all learning to pay attention to the weather, and even in our narcissistic culture, we are seeing that our individual experience is a shared experience, perhaps that is a silver lining amidst all of the suffering and dislocation of our weather. I asked people on my Facebook page this morning to list the temperatures in their communities last night, my -18 degrees was not impressive.

Some people shrug at this weather, no big deal, they are either comfortable in denial or happy to avoid the growing hysteria and alarm about weather. I am allergic to drama these days, but I am not ho-hum about the weather. Our shared experience is a powerful one – my animals are suffering in this kind of cold, and so are we – and I am going to write more about the weather. I am also listening to God, too, along with the Washington politicians who believe science is just a hoax. God isn’t tell me that there is no such thing as climate change, he is telling me and my cold and aching fingers that his Mother Earth is weeping and crying out to us, and Hercules is another angel come to speak to me, and all of us, and  that is a message I am hearing.

 

 

It was nearly 30 below in some areas of my town last night, worse in the Midwest and Central states, at the town dump (The Washington County Recycling Station) Mike, the station manager stayed warm by taking his Ipad into the office and taking money through the window. Not the best day to have his job.

This window is the first thing I see in the morning, I call it my window on life, it alerts me to the outside world, it is a psychic window sometimes, the mirror of a mystic, it suggests the coming day. This morning, the temperature was – 15 degrees, and when I looked up at the window through my groggy consciousness, I sensed the sun rising, it was lighting up the stones and bottles Maria put there, I could see from all the frost how cold it was, I saw the blue sky emerging over the barn.

Life itself, I thought, color and dark, sun and cold, creativity and promise. Life itself.