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On Creativity
by GNEAF Member Shelley Berc
Prologue Magazine
Leonardo da Vinci claimed he saw all his paintings in the humidity stains on his walls before ever lifting his brush. Herman Melville stared at Mount Greylock every day until one day it became that devilish cetacean Moby Dick. Children look up at the clouds and see houses, alligators, and dinosaurs rather than cumulus, nimbus, and cirrus. According to biologists, man can no longer be defined as different from other animals by virtue of speech or tool making. But we are absolutely unique in our dazzling ability to make metaphors. Creativity is the art of living metaphorically.
We are all born creative, curious, and hungry to explore the world around and within us. For a child, creativity is expressed in play and play is the way he learns. Life is just one big erector set that is to be snapped together and pulled apart in a thousand different ways. But this flexibility often fades with the passage of time. We put away our toys and acquire jobs, kids, and mortgages. We become ‘specialists’ and keeping up with our specialty is supposed to take up all our spare time. But our eyes still seek out beauty and our hands itch to make something wonderful out of the wonders we see.
We live in a culture that doesn’t encourage us to be creative unless it looks like we are going to strike it big with a commercial hit. Creativity, like so much else in our world, has been co-opted into consumerism and its worth calculated by how much money it generates. It is only recently that the word ‘amateur’ became a dirty one. Until the 1980’s, just about every educated person no matter what his or her profession played an instrument, or painted, or wrote for pleasure. The aim of these hobbies wasn’t necessarily to become the next Beethoven but to deepen the sensibilities of the individual doing them. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin, when asked why he was teaching factory workers to draw, said “I’m not teaching them to draw, I’m teaching them to see.” I would venture to say that enhanced seeing and feeling are the real reasons to create, whether it is be a garden, a haiku, or a brand new thought.
The word ‘amateur’—from the Latin ‘amator’ or lover—means to create for the sheer love of it. I propose that we bring back amateurism with a vengeance. Weekend painters, closet writers, doctors who are poets, dancers who are CPAs! Some of our greatest scientists, thinkers, and artists have been amateurs. Charles Darwin was an amateur naturalist, Johannes Kepler supported his astronomical investigations by being a court astrologer, Wallace Stevens had a day job in a bank, and the idea of being a professional poet never crossed Emily Dickinson’s mind.
The creative spirit within us is a trickster that adores turning the world upside down. It is a tempest in our comfortable little teapot. It is our personal daemon determined to imprint our unique voice upon the planet, if only we will let it. It trips us and tickles us until we join in its playfulness. If creativity is any one thing—it is play, play, play. If we don’t express our imagination, it festers, it frustrates, it turns us into passive onlookers, when we were meant to be tooting our horn in the universal choir.
Our creativity is a gift. In many indigenous cultures, a gift cannot be kept to one’s self but it must be passed on to others, or it will turn on its owner. My theory is a little less ominous. I think the more creative we are, the more we want to share it. We give this gift by passing on the energy of imagination, play, and never-ending curiosity. Creativity is seriously infectious. Nothing can stop its rampant spread except embarrassment, self doubt, and a premature insistence on perfection. Wanting our inspirations to be fully formed from the start is like expecting a new born baby to get up and walk.
There is a myth about the creative soul that if you don’t feel inspired, you don’t have it. I’ve been a writer for 30 years and if I had to depend on my inspiration every time I stared at a blank piece of paper, that piece of paper would stay forever blank. I’ve experienced every emotion imaginable when I write—from abject terror to feeling absolutely nothing—and through it all like a recalcitrant mule, I have plodded on. Who can know from book to book or play to play if they will be a success? That’s not the point of creation anyways; the point is to take the journey. I trust my hands on the keyboard a certain amount of time per day as more reliable than the breath of the muse, but the funny thing is that the key punching action often leads the muse back to me. We never know what we can do in the realm of the imagination until we try or, in the words of Samuel Beckett: “fail, then fail better.”
Shelley Berc is the co-adaptor of King Stag and a playwright and novelist. She is the Director of the Creativity Workshop.
Give it Up and Let it Go - Creativity As a Practice in Surrender by GNEAF Member Chris Zydel
I was at a woman's writer's workshop in Taos, New Mexico last year, and found myself at dinner sitting across from a riot of a feisty old woman who was talking about these children's books she'd written. Her main character is a rascal and an adventurer, a boy named Weldon. This child came by his name when his father entered the birthing room after the child had been born and boomed to the new, exhausted mother "Well done!" I say to her "Your books sound wonderful". She leans over, looks me in the eye and says " I have nothing to do with it. They just come through me. I open myself to them and there they are. But you know , I don't tell very many people that." I say, "Well, that's probably how it is for most people," and she says "Yes, but at least I admit it ", and really, honestly cackles . I realize that I am in the presence of a true creative witch.
I often say to my intuitive painting students that the painting is none of your business . When you open yourself to your creativity you are learning to trust that the divine source of inspiration knows what it is doing and doesn't need much help from you. It's learning how to step aside so that the muse can have her way with you without too much interference. You don't have a choice about how your creativity manifests , or what your style is or even if your ego is going to like it very much. And when you are really allowing the creative flow to happen, you don't even get to have a say about what shows up. You are merely a vehicle for creative energy to make it's way into the world. In these moments you are offering the goddess of creativity an open invitation to use you and come through you unhampered and unrestrained. You are saying to the holy inspirer, "Yes, I am ready. I am your channel. I am only here to take orders. Do with me what you will."
However, once you declare your intention to surrender to this larger energy it is seen by the personality as a declaration of war. The puny personality does not want to give up it's rather formidable hold on your creative energies and keeps poking it's nose in every step of the way. This part of you is actually quite shameless. I mean, really, here you are inviting the queen of the creative source in all her awesome beauty and limitless power to deign to channel herself through your human form, and the personality has the balls to have an opinion about the queen's directives? The queen says, "Paint some blue over here", and the personality says "Well, I think yellow would actually look much better." I mean, the sheer cheekiness of it is enough to make a person blush!
Later that day at the writer's workshop, gazing out over the red rock beauty of the Taos desert landscape , and asking the muse to bless me with some of her magic, I had a startling experience. As I was sitting there with my laptop, not really thinking, but feeling into myself about what I was going to write , I got in touch with this incredible sense of a glowing, radiant, energy body, something quite vast and rich, deep and old. It didn't feel like my every day sense of myself. More like what I would call the ground of my being. But even those words can't grasp it because it felt so much bigger than me, and in me and not in me at the same time. It was actually a little spooky and I started to wonder if the workshop facilitators had slipped a little chemical enhancement into my sparkling water to give my creativity a bit of a boost. But no, it was just the magic of the land combined with being part of a community of creative women and the willingness to give myself over to the creative force. And I realized in that moment of clarity and insight that pretty much most of it is none of our business.
As I make a continued commitment to an authentic, creative life it feels clearer and clearer to me that my primary function is to be in service to this greater presence. My assignment is to translate for it and to be the conduit, to have as my mantra "thy will not mine be done". We all have this vastness inside of us. We all have a purpose and a job to do. A job that was given to us by God or Great Spirit, or The Divine All or The Universal Source . But we can only know what this purpose is by going inside and really listening. And of course one of the best ways of hearing our sacred directive is by tapping directly into our creativity. And finally, once those instructions start coming through we need to stop wasting our time quibbling and arguing with the queen of the numinous mysteries or we will never get anything done!
