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.