The Creative

When I am completely myself, entirely alone...photo credit: World of Dance

"When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.”  

--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

From different snippets of a news program, a magazine article and notes from a music program, the energy from what I call "the creative" has been infiltrating into my now. When synchronicity arrives, one does not turn away, but sits up, begins to open to, examine and follow.

As a culture, creativity defensively hides in a small box and is not well respected (if you can't make a lot of money by doing it, as a rule).  Somehow, it's all well and good for small children to explore art materials, but a few years down the pike, these explorations or most other "impractical" inquiries are subtly discouraged. Imagining, thinking outside the educational box, unrecognizable (by the majority) delving into unvalued areas are not seen as useful in a standard education. (Thank God for Montessori and Steiner.)

Like owning our physicality, the creative is our birthright.  All people are of spirit, all people are creative.  It is a general misconception that a creative idea has to be "artistic" oriented or even original.  Some say there is nothing original, that accessing the creative is borrowing and renewing (for self) of the old.  As a nurse, the creative is a resource I depend upon, especially when in relationship with patients or other staff.  I have seen when I am reactive, judgmental ("spirit sick") my choices are limited, and I am unavailable to the creative.  Relaxing into the moment, identifying the interesting aspect of the irritating-other (a separation of sorts) produces the possibility of relationship.  

A difficult, hostile dynamic between a married couple in a small hospital room where no one is listening, all my various (and thin) cajoling attempts are rebuffed and what is imminently required is locked out by what feels like an endless habitual polarization. I go back to the nurse station sense my agitation and take a few moments to breathe.  How can I approach them rightly, what do they need?  The creative arrives. A novel thought comes to me.  I am a bit unnerved by this notion, it counters my usual modus operandi. It feels edgy, but somehow right.  I breathe a few more times, feeling my feet under me.  I go back to the room to the deadlocked couple and begin to order them around with definitive assertion; I do a lot of arm flailing, throw my head every which way, appear fed up.  This they understand.  This they respond to.  Their previous sarcastic contempt of me is now replaced with respect and they begin to listen and do what is necessary.  Go figure. 

A terrified chiropractor is admitted for unexpected surgery. He is resistant to all care, all procedures, he refuses to cooperate with anyone on anything.  When I greet him at his bed, he is hunkered down, arms crossed, his face a wall of tension. Somehow, I recognize this state he is in and it actually inspires me to let go of my own tensions. I ask him about himself, his practice, what he needs now.  He asks me to do a right brain-left brain exercise with my arms and hands (validating his own knowledge and understanding of the relationship of the brain to the body).  We do it together and it is very cool, I can feel my brain connections switching sides.  Afterwards, he's good to go with all the tests he has refused thus far.  Getting met.


These stories could easily be paralleled by a bus driver dealing with unruly kids, Greenpeace canvassers on hostile territory, air traffic controllers on a holiday weekend.  We all have access to the creative and we are creatively relating a lot of the time.  It's a question on how to recognize it when it arrives (or is quietly dwelling). Is it the spontaneous wry comment defusing a room of tension?  A moment of "intuition" that deflects an accident? The organism is very pliant and the creative is ever ready.  

A relaxed state has a lot of faces:  Post a glass of wine, the time before sleep, the ill state (ego out of commission), the state of vacation, the chaotic state (so much static, creativity can sneak by), the purposeless ("lazy") state. I heard a radio interview wherein the musician/lyricist being interviewed was watching her girlfriend dye her hair.  What must have been a relaxing, pleasurable time, she wrote in her mind while watching her, the song which would be her next hit (nothing to do with dye-ing hair).  Or the guy snacking on a bag of chips on a subway car who witnesses a slap fest between a male and female rider, stands up (still snacking) and walks to the exit door of the subway car, stopping to stand between them, without saying a word, somehow diffusing their hostility. 

These are all examples of fertile ground for the creative to reveal itself.  Allowing something to rest long enough to receive something else.