I once heard someone say that she doesn’t really write songs. She simply pulls them out of the air. When she is ready and receptive, they come to her.
That seemed strange to me at the time, but I am more aware now that creativity can’t be forced. It simply happens when I am ready and receptive. I have to be relaxed and open to catch a passing image that I apply to my garden or an idea that I put into writing.
I am really not actively working to be creative. These are not images and ideas that I have actively put together. They are nothing I could honestly say that I created. They simply show up out of the clarity of my mind, and I catch them to make them mine.
I don’t know where they come from. I think that my memory has a role to play because it is such a storehouse of raw material. My imagination also has a role because it can conjure a field, a place, a white board where something can come into virtual existence. My discerning mind is also active when it is engaged as an editor.
The creative process for me is not a pursuit, but more like a relaxing and an allowing of the creativity to happen. It is the letting go that brings awareness or mindfulness. Before I can be creative, the memory, mind and imagination have to quiet down somewhat. They have to sit on their hands for a moment, stop waving them in the air.
That is when the space is opened for new images and ideas to appear out of thin air it seems. I sometimes think that the images and ideas are “out there”, some place beyond my senses. When I invite them, they show up, but only if there is room for them to slide into my consciousness.
One of the reasons I think that they have a “place out there” is that I can recognize them when I see them or hear them come from someone else. They appear in things that people make or in things they say. When someone is being creative, I seem to recognize that the creativity is happening. I can see it in other people or in the work they produce. It is like being able to see the beauty in a natural scene if I relax and just allow the beauty penetrate my awareness.
I think that I, like all humans, have a built-in ability to recognize art because I have the ability to become aware of a pattern. It is a pattern that I have come to recognize as beauty. It is a natural, built-in response that is at the core of my being an intelligent being.
The outcome of creativity can be felt, observed and captured only by me when I have relaxed my forms of awareness, my categories, my active imagination. Art and beauty come to me in their fulness when I have entered the shapeless depth of relaxed awareness and mindfulness. That is where I engage in my own creative process or recognize the creativity of others.
My empty mind is a caldron of creativity and recognition. It is where, if I want, I can capture the pattern of beautiful images or ideas.