Creativity is a shape shifter. It is something that is not defined with pattern. It carries with it, its own mentality. One moment it takes upon itself this form, the next that. Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to see things in a completely different way. It is this bedazzling spirit that appears to all of us, yet is hard to identify its existence because there is not one of us that can agree upon what we read or saw as far as ourselves or our eyes are concerned.
Are the wielding of colors upon canvas, just as similar as paint chips and wallpaper? Is this evident of its creative existence? What about a pen versus paper, a rosebush bordered along a garden path? Yes and yes. What about the cooking up of love’s revolution? Why the hell not? Is it touching with delicate love the petals of a rose, or pulling off the Big Sweat of the swelling summer, or tying upon your line a pale morning dun because the trout see them better in the morning sun? Yes, yes, and yes. What about finding ones voice, or rearing a child towards adulthood, or better yet helping raise a nation from its prayerful knees? Hell yes.
Creativity is the tending to love like the orchard it is, finding the words that see fit. And when the cosmic thread finds its fabric, you sew the creative life that has been so graciously given to you. All of the above belong to the creative river of life. Creativity is the celestial river beneath the churning river of life, which flows from in and out of our souls.
Some say the creative life is in the living of ideas, some say it’s by doing, I believe it rests in the simplicity of being you. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether it be a band, a collection of words, an image, an idea, let alone be it humanity, that touches us in a way nothing else can. All that can be done to satisfy this craving is to create. It is not a matter of wanting or needing to, it is not a singular act of will; one solely must.
The creative force flows over the spiritual terrain of our soul looking for the natural hollows, the channels that exist within us. We become basins of belief, tributaries of truth; we are the shallow pools, the serene ponds, and most important the sanctuaries of sanity. The wild creative force flows into whatever garden bed we build for it, those we are born gifted with and those we have to dig with our own bare hands. We don’t always have to fill them, but first we must build them.
In lore, there is an idea that if one prepares a special spiritual place, then the creative force, or source of the soul, will hear it, sense its way to it, and call it home. Whether this force is summoned by the prayer of biblical proportions, “go forward and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the movie Field Of Dreams in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball stadium in the middle of midwestern nowhere USA. “If you build it they will come,” is a way of saying to prepare a place for the longevity of the creative force. It induces the soul to take the imagination to places that life could only dream of.
Once the inner river finds the estuaries and branches in our soul, our creative life fills and empties, rises and falls just like the seasons of a wilderness river. These cycles or patterns are responsible for the different climates of spiritual survival. Certain patterns of paths are the ones we must walk to get through the arid desert of the mind. Things are created; thoughts are fed, then fall back and die away, all in their own right time, over and over again. Creating one thing at any certain point in the river feeds those who come to the river, feeds those far downstream, yet even others in the deepest pools of imagination.
Creating is not a solitary moment. This is the clarity of creativity. This is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, whomever tasted its ingredients with the perfect balance, they sense it, they see it, and they are fed by it. This is why beholding someone else’s creative words, imageS, or ideas fills us up, and inspires us to do our own creative work. A single creative deed has the budding potential to feed this starving world. One single creative act can cause a river’s torrent to carve through miles of stubborn stone.
I have always thought of the following song’s inspiration as being that of creativity, more so necessarily than that of female persuasion. See you all soon. Thanks for stopping by.
—BeLove
