The Creative Life

I joined an online creative writing class a couple of months ago. When I’m in the class, I feel a childlike delight stretching across my smiling face, and I see it shining back at me on my zoom screen. I don’t see it on everyone else’s face. They look like normal adults. And mostly I don’t care. I only feel a minuscule smidgen of embarrassment, because I know we are all happy to be there. Because we are there for the same reason.

Our internal creative life has a place to land and play with others, who hold the same invitation.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells us in her book, “Big Magic,” all humans hold the invitation to live a creative life, but few of us take it. We allow the invitation to be buried under beliefs that we aren’t good enough or too fill-in-the-blank enough to be fully alive in our creative space. Because let’s face it, it doesn’t have any monetary value for most of us. It is subject to criticism. And IT IS purely selfish because it most likely doesn’t include anybody else. And we are told from a young age, being selfish is not nice. Doesn’t get the chores done and doesn’t work in a group setting. Gilbert notes, if the act of our creativity is not purely for our own delight, it shows up in our writing, and the reader doesn’t like it. She says to the writer who wants to write a self-help book to help others, “Please don’t.” To the one who wants his first screenplay to pay for all the debt he’s in now in order to write full-time, she says something like, “I beg of you, please don’t. Write for you and for god sake do not put any pressure on your creative life to support you financially. Let your creative life delight you. And if it delights or helps or teaches someone else, so be it. That’s great. If it doesn’t, too bad.”

We can all tell when someone is doing anything for our approval. It’s a little uncomfortable for us. But if you perform from your heart, now you’re talking! Now it’s more interesting to us. Now we get to sit back and take it in, requiring nothing else of us. We don’t even have to pay attention if we don’t want to. The creative thing, whatever it is, a dance, a song, a loaf of bread, a drawing, a sport, your business, being a parent, we know it is your thing. We don’t have to like it. But you can bet your bottom dollar another creative-lifer or wannabe, will give your creative expression a nod. It may not be the way he or she chooses to express their creative world, but they see yours. They see your glitter.

Something else I’ve learned. Inspiration is ideas in the air like particles ready and waiting to be inhaled by anyone. They can also be exhaled and up for grabs again. This phenomenon has happened to me several times so much so that I have second-guessed myself if my phone is being tapped. A word I’ve never heard before and have fallen in love with, I then hear or read multiple times in different places. “How do they know this word? Has it been here all this time or is it a new, catchy word the cool people are saying?” Or a subject I’m writing about and I see someone else has written about the same subject through his own experience. It’s freaky how real this idea hopping is.

Freaky and also really amazing to experience!

I have re-opened myself up to my creative world. It is a world my mother looked down on while I sat at my desk in my room, quoting something to her from a Leo Buscaglia book. “Philosophy is fine Katherine, but it’s not practical to spend too much of your time in it. There are more important things in life for you to learn in order to be a self-sufficient adult.” Okay, she didn’t say those exact words, but that is the scene in my head that changed the course of my creative world. I was sitting at my desk and she was standing, looking down at me, and said something. What I understood from that frozen memory is, it’s not a valuable world. And she was right. In a large family, it has little use. It keeps you separated. It’s selfish time away from how you might be more helpful to the whole. My mother was a reader. But she only allowed herself to read non-fiction. I would bet money there was something or someone that told her fiction was a ridiculous way for a good mind to focus its attention on. She was only teaching me what she knew. I get it now. So much so that I don’t even need to forgive her for the many years I stayed quiet. For believing her, that my creative life had no value.

To my adult children, I want to say, I’ve cracked the code to life, finally!

All that you do, do it to support your creative life. And in my experience, creative is synonymous with The Divine, God, our muses, connection to our deceased loved ones, our lineage past, present, future, and the juice of life.

You do not need a permission slip or an invitation to live a creative life. It is already inside you. And you live it for no one but yourself.

This is the tingling, smiling on my face, alive on my tongue, dancing in my body. And anybody who is dancing in their creative life, I am winking at you. I see you. You delight me. You always have.