Why do we create? Why do we aspire to become more creative?
How we approach these questions will determine the success of our creative endeavor. By reflecting upon these questions, we will be more certain that our project has value. It doesn’t matter whether you want to reach an audience of thousands or are pursuing this project for your own personal pleasure. All too often, we fall into a critical space where we search to satisfy our own inner critic – that voice running around in our heads. It is all too happy to point out a few of our shortcomings. This inner critic is lashed to our ego, and we must avoid the pitfall of identifying too closely with it.
These are important questions to ask ourselves at this juncture. We have spent the past few weeks assembling a structure around which the creative project can grow. But we haven’t quite got to the point where we are ready to dive into the project headlong. This is the season of gathering materials that inspire us.
Think about this structure as a frame in the garden that is now barren, during these winter months, but which will soon be laden with shoots of runner beans come spring and summer. We have been carefully putting this artistic frame together so that our projects are well-supported. We have been engaging in the rational side of the creative process.
We need this structure to entertain these more fundamental questions.
At its most effective, the creation of art is meant to uncover our own highest purpose. This perspective moves us beyond the question of satisfying our egos. The ego is a small and temporary presence. It will assert itself from time to time, and then wane at moments of deep creative concentration. And it will cease to have any influence upon the art that we have created once we are no longer here, in our transient bodies.
The creation of art puts us in touch with our true self, where an ever-present and abiding source of inspiration can always be found. It lies just underneath our consciousness at every moment. This is the path through which we connect to the very stream of life. Your creation echoes – in a smaller format – the wide expanse of creation all around us, in the natural world. It is a kaleidoscope, capturing a specific pattern of light, at this moment.
This perspective matters. We need to cultivate and maintain this connection. If you make the artistic process all about the ego, then you will end up just burning yourself out. You will up with writer’s block if you are hammering out a novel this year or blowing out your larynx if you are tackling an opera’s libretto over the next twelve months.
As a sensitive person you have already spent plenty of time pondering the soul’s purpose, or even the concept of the soul itself. Now is a good to time to reflect upon how the true self relates to the creative process. You don’t have to get religious either. Just be a witness to life unfolding continuously, at each moment, all around you, in the everyday world. Your act of creation connects you to those countless little moments of birth, transformation and retreat that occur on the biological stage.
Over the past few weeks, we have begun to pull together a foundation for our artistic pursuit – a rational structure around which all those creative impulses will flow and unfurl themselves. But now it is time to ponder the whole project – we are in a secure enough place to do just that. Just why do you create?
Asking that question even before you start would have been overwhelming. Now it is a bit easier.
