Slow Chew: Born Creative

My dear friend Gail is highly creative and imminently talented. She can turn a barren half acre of land into a landscape to rival the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. She breaks up old Italian ceramic plates and cups and creates one-of-a-kind mosaic tables. She takes clam shells and some paint and produces works of art in miniature. Everything Gail touches blooms. Gail is an artist, but not to hear her tell it. In fact, the last time I called her one, she practically shouted me down. You see, Gail did not go to art school. Although she has sold some of her work, she does not make her living as an artist, and so she does not think she is one. But she is wrong. If you are someone who disqualifies your gifts because you don’t have a degree in that field, you have merely fallen prey to mass consciousness. The prevalent thought in our world is that degrees confer wisdom and expertise. Not so. In the words (though not exactly the context) of Malcolm X, you've been had, you've been took, bamboozled, led astray. To create is to make something, give rise to something, produce inventions or art, perform a role for the first time. Creativity is born in us, it is who we are. Here’s how I see it. If we view existence from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from the universal to the particular, we see that we are part of a cosmos that is ever creative. Everything around us is born of what was here before, just atoms re-arranged. I’m thinking of that 60′s rock hit, Woodstock, “…we are stardust, we are golden, we are ten billion year old carbon, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Our physical bodies are inherently creative. Cells reproduce themselves over and over. We create other human beings in the laboratory of our wombs. Our senses interpret vibrations, the waves of electro-magnetic energy around us into sights, sounds, tastes and sensations, with no direct effort on our part. Actually, it is factory installed. Our ever-creative lungs take in air, process needed elements like oxygen, and exhale those compounds un-needed by our bodies like carbon dioxide, which, in the enchanting dance of nature, is used by our fellow planetary inhabitants, the plants and trees. Our digestive organs do something similar with food. How creative is that! In Chinese culture, Yin and Yang represent the two opposite principles of nature, in constant union and motion of ebb and crest. Yin characterizes the feminine , magnetic or negative nature of things. Yang stands for the masculine, electric or positive side. They are not static points at either end of a pole. They are constantly spiraling, interchanging and alternating, like night and day, cold and hot, light and dark. We swim in this sea of creativity like fish in the ocean, and just like the fish, we are mostly oblivious to the water around us. But creativity is present with every breath, in every minute, everywhere we are. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” How we combine all of these elements, how we stir our thoughts into things, how we out-picture our imaginings into objects, and ideas, and laws, and relationships, and professions, and governments, and technology, and symphonies, and businesses, and fine cuisine, and works of beauty are examples of how we use our intrinsic creativity in the world. So that the very act of living is am authentically unique – and valid – work of art.