Creativity: what’s important to you?

By Jacquie Molloy

All human beings are creative and have a need to create. Although the way we talk about creativity would suggest that only some of us are creative.

But creativity doesn’t have to mean that you are artistically inclined. No, creativity can be expressed in many different ways. Consider this (short) list:

• Enjoying poetry
• Reading
• Listening to, and making, music
• Cooking
• Being curious
• Expressing ourselves through fashion and colour
• Knitting and crafts
• Arranging spaces
• Appreciating beauty
• Repairing furniture
• Tinkering with electronics
• Problem solving.

Practising hospitality might be the way for us to continually strive to be the best versions of ourselves for ourselves, our families, our communities and our world.

Creativity is a core aspect of spirituality and connection to creativity is considered a spiritual domain.

Why?

Creativity of any kind allows us to connect with our unconscious (to ‘lose ourselves’ in an activity). The enjoyment of the activity is as important, sometimes more important, than the outcome.

It is an area of our lives that houses inspiration.  (Remember that inspiration is not just a sudden good idea, it’s also the drawing of air into the lungs.)

If you could draw a line showing how strong your connection is to creativity (however you choose to define that), what would it look like? Big and bold, or dotted or wavy, or no line at all?

What’s important about that for you? What does it mean to you?

Friend of MAA, Geoff Wraight, observed that ‘educating people about spirituality is often achieved by helping them connect with their essential humanity, with the commonality of our basic need to belong and to become aware of the deeper conversation we all need between our hearts and our heads. Poetry used carefully is a powerful way to do this.’

What makes us human is our imagination and our capacity to inspire and be inspired. When I think of the power of language and poetry to do that, one of the poems that comes to mind is Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Do you have a favourite poem, piece of music or work of art that inspires you or comforts you when you need it most? Does tinkering in a shed or sewing room provide you with solace and an opportunity to recharge? There are so many ways to be creative and express creativity.

Perhaps there is something you do or enjoy that is creative but you never thought about it like that before. After all, creativity is all around us. And part of being human.