Awakening the Light

Too often we exist as hollowed soul-shells, content with a shadow of existence, insisting that this is good enough. Racing through our days as if this counts as living. Or in the words of Neil Postman, “amusing ourselves to death” and calling it life. In my journey of living intentionally, I’ve realized how important creativity is as a consistent and regular practice.

We’ve done ourselves a disservice by devising such a restrictive definition of being creative. It is only for the painters and poets, the tortured souls crafting paeans to pain. Yet we’re all creators in more ways than we realize. Every time a problem is solved, you’ve created a solution. Every time you changed or improved something, you’ve created a new reality. In fact, you can look at it even more broadly, as we are creating our own experience of life

Whether we do this consciously or unconsciously, by the mere fact of being alive, we are active participants in the ongoing act of creation.

(Rick Rubin, The Creative Act)

But so often we just drift along, choosing not to craft our experience but simply let it all happen as a product of our unconscious inner world.

Not only do we limit creativity by definition, we also hurt ourselves when we relegate creative practices to a place of luxury and leisure. As if being creative is something we can only indulge when all other responsibilities and obligations have been completed. As if it is enough to exist on the surface, without truly living this “one wild and precious life" (Mary Oliver). In fact, in the greatest trials and in the deepest despair, creativity is often the lifeline to a better future.

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.

(Bertolt Brecht, The Svenborg Poems)

Creativity is not a luxury, it is a necessity for navigating a life full of suffering and sorrow without losing our souls. It can’t be pushed to the end of the list—we must carve out time for this act of survival no matter the distractions.

Yet creativity is a strange and fickle thing. It isn’t a tame lion. Once you start wrangling with this wild beast, you realize it is not a “create on demand” situation. There is a sense of surrendering to a force greater than yourself. To give yourself as a vessel for the source of creativity to run through you.

“The wild creative force flows into whatever beds we have for it, those we are born with as well as those we dig with our own hands. We don’t have to fill them, we only have to build them.”

(Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With Wolves)

Creativity is a practice of patience and tenacity, to take ourselves into the wild space of potential and wait for what may come. It is a paradox of being and doing. Of being still enough to hear “the roar on the other side" (George Eliot). Of holding vigil through the discouragement, the dry spells, the seeming abandonment, of wrestling with the divine, like Jacob proclaiming to the angel, “I won’t let you go until you bless me" (Genesis 32:26). There is a sense of determination and grit, of proving that we are willing to do the hard work, that we are not simply a fair weather friend. And when we’ve been tested and tried, when we’re found to be a sufficient vessel, then what a deluge, an overflowing of inspiration, is waiting.

Creativity can be a path to meaning, to make our time on this careening planet count for something. To bring something forth from the realm of ideas into this reality—what a wondrous thing. For me, one of the most tragic things is when someone discounts their own ability, or potential, for creativity. Someone who listens to the voice that says “you’re not good enough” or “who do you think you are?” This troubled and broken world needs every act of creativity we can invoke, every scrap of light and hope that we can cobble together, offered from a humble heart of love.