Several new emails in the past 24 hours have touted creativity programs and ideas.
One of this morning’s emails feels like a goad. It was about setting up the day to be about one’s own creativity, versus checking the incoming mail and web feeds to see what others are doing. Fashionability (attention to what others are doing), can create mirage-like expectations, supposedly a whole universe “out there” of people just creating their brains out, while the poor reader struggles to dream of producing anything that anybody would want. That’s at the most superficial level.
At the deepest level, the fact that all creation is re-created in every instant – our minds, hearts and bodies being part of it – can be a showstopper in figuring out how to participate deliberately: one “creates” in every breath, willy nilly, waking sleeping or dreaming.
Other showstoppers might be the memes that have saturated the web culture: you supposedly have a very specific purpose, which you Must discover. You (the cognitive “you”) are responsible for having created every life experience, for everyone everywhere especially you, and you Must develop a concrete vision for a better world/you so that you can be aligned with and driven by it, ideally “passionate” about it (passion literally from a root meaning suffering, or wounded). Your only reason for being is to serve the needs of others. Egad.
In some of the subtler higher dimensions – in terms of physics, spiritual strata, etc. – some of those memes can have a helpful resonance, some genuine wisdom and insight. In the mundane, they can paralyze, annihilate, misdirect, entrap.
The Key du Jour, for me, some days, is allowing meditative awareness to float me into remembrance and realization. To feel the creative fire of my own cells, enlivened in each breath. To contemplate every fiber, ink, artist, machine, seller, and carrier of an item I look at, expanding into its relationships with every item in its current and former surroundings, its vibration in my memory and current aesthetic, its functionality, until its essence as a persistent re-creation (recreational play of consciousness) begins to hum. To listen to the movement of my hands. To feel the burbling warmth of my heart.
In such a meditation, the unconscious ease of creation flowers into the waking mind. In that state, remembering which moments gush the richest streams of creativity is almost automatic. “Creativity,” then, is a sweet greeting, a welcoming. It is self-expanding, self-recycling. If purpose, passion, and/or service fountain up from That space, they may well be trustworthy interpretations of realness in all dimensions, conscious and otherwise.