Experience of Creating

“There’s too much goodness in you that still needs to rise, and there’s too much work in the world that still needs to be done.” — Benedictine nun and poet Mary Lou Kownacki

Title: “Children at Play”
Paper Mache Art
Artist Robert Cather
Photographer Carol McKee

Watching Children Experience Creativity
I watch children play in the dirt with sticks and round stones. One boy drags a makeshift sword in the wet red clay making small tunnels and circles. Little holes. Another child watches, sitting on her haunches. Hands clasped loosely like cupping a lit candle. After a while, she picks up a jagged stone places it with care underneath two small pieces of red granite. Then, she skips to a small hill peppered with rocks like the surface of a small Mars. With several pea-sized pebbles in her hand, she tiptoes back cradling the tiny stones like hummingbird eggs and then kneels. One-by-one the pebbles are placed in a half moon circle on the ground, a face smiling at her. She smiles back.

Creativity as Play
I wonder if this how children first experience creativity. They play making something with their hands and the surprise of recognition occurs. The searching, digging, building, moving objects here and there offer a possibility for something known to them. A-ha! A truck, a bear with a missing leg. A bird’s tail. Similar perhaps to when adults are sculpting and see the profile of a face emerge from the rock or a painter who recognizes another oak is needed for the composition. Each adventurous and determined action untwines and brings them closer to an emerging image. Philosopher Kierkegaard said we are most courageous when we walk towards an answer, it is our soul work.

Children, too, budding Einsteins, may realize that their purposeful play gives them a sweet space inside that enlarges. Does it feel good? Yes! It’s visceral, active, the experience of creating is awesome, dynamic, actually alive. It is the experience they are feeling, responding to, moving toward. They may not know it by name, but by a buzzy kind of satisfaction that enters them. It’s a first blush with a creative impulse and even then, authentic and rewarding.

Creativity as Joy
Author Vivian Gornick describes her personal experience of creating during writing a graduate-student paper when she blossomed into an artist. Gornick said, “The sentences began pushing up in me, struggling to get out, each one moving swiftly to add itself to the one that preceded it…In that instant I felt myself open wide…I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal.” Gornick said she was astonished by the depth, the unraveling when one surrenders to the experience of creating.

Creativity as a Meaning of Life
Research has found the meaning in life can be revealed through the pursuit of creativity. Writing a poem about my mother was a way to understand and process my enduring relationship with her, the connections resonating between past and present. More than anything, the words brought me closer to the love I feel.  I am in the room with her/ by the kitchen sink taking her hand/ / I wish it had not begun that way/her eyes now forever cloudy/words hard to come by/… /she looks out the window/mother is no longer in the room now/she’s out in the world floating above in the eternal clouds/Buddha says the sky is always within us/Grateful, mother beats inside me. – Becky Breed

Writing/Creative Exercise:
1) Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What does this mean to you? Consider naming a time that you felt you had to write or create to be fully in the moment. Consider starting with “I remember the day…”
2) Listen to You Raise Me Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUvJO_MgVqsby Josh Groban. When you make or create, do you express yourself because you need to play, find joy or want more meaning in your life? Select an experience that fits your mood or desire and create.
3) An artist friend of mine described how when he opened his heart, his eyes could see more. Is that connection true for you? If so, how would you go about releasing it? What are you seeing? Put it down.