Tag: creativity

Boxes & Bowls

Everything I write lately would put cornflakes to sleep. I try not to force it; I know it never works. I just need to show up and maybe something will magically rise, like tiny rainbow Trix bobbing to the surface.

These empty vessels where spoons hold air and stomachs growl concern me. I hate it when things get silent, and I don’t know where my next artistic bite will come from. I’m old enough to know it’s not permanent but still all that blank milky space is taunting me. The cupboards seem bare.

Which is strange, because a bazillion boxes are filling my head. I have boxes crammed with experience, (raisin bran), boxes full of fields (shredded wheat), boxes full of wishes, (lucky charms). I have boxes stacked with laughter (cheerios), and old memories (quisp), and crazy ass neurosis (clearly cuckoo for coco puffs). Don’t even ask how many boxes I have of half empty commitment (hey kashi, why don’t YOU go lean?!).

You’d think with all those boxes something might just pour out. But I’ve not an alpha-bit of confidence in my ability to write these days. And just for kix I’d love it if, just once, I could skip over this part; the one where I’m staring at an empty bowl in a morning fog without any idea where the day will take me.

Maybe I need to break a few eggs, travel the world and eat some Weetabix, leggo of my ego. Not sure. But if you care at all, send me a little snap, crackle and pop, would you? I’m feeling entirely stale.

Creation

I woke with a gentle but urgent thought – I woke with something I needed to do, some kindness that needed offering, or some idea I needed to explore. I woke with a loose and blousy image; some new creation was tugging at a thread. Something I needed to know was trying to be known.

And then, while the gauze was still across my brain and my gaze was still soft, I sat down at my desk and checked the news.

Apparently, my airbag is a serial killer, salmon have been taking Lipitor, and a woman accidentally mailed her cat. Closer to home, my daughter was diagnosed with an anxious vagina and the peanut butter was gone from the mousetrap, (which, after day 4, should really be called a feeding station).

All of this astonishment before I even get to the real stuff, of Pakistan and poverty and cancer and cures and beheadings and bombs. The attention and gasp is all worn out by the time you even check your first email. That fleeting thought you had this morning is crowded out. Before you know the words you long to speak, or the dream you need wake from – you are swarmed by the news of dying bees.

And it’s essential, of course; those dying bees. But so is something else.
What’s close up, what’s within us, is so frequently swept away in a torrent of information and data from the outside world, that the universe that is you is drowned. Drowned in headlines and crushed by all the little bits from across the globe. The weight of it all, the power of the moving tide of media and markets takes us along, and soon we are so far away from that single thought – the one deep inside of us that needed to be known – that we know nothing, and nothing new is created.

Maybe that’s why we are all so weary. Even with headlines that make our hearts stop, we are weary because our own place in creation isn’t reflected in that raging world. Somehow, all the words we’ve heard before. Maybe when we long for original thought, it is our own that we are missing.

We are the creation that will and can change the world. But we must find time for the silence, and space for the tender truth of us to emerge.