Creativity

Linda's blog very often has posts that are truly art. In these posts her writing has that quality to it that takes me right into the moment, right into the room (or the jogging path) with her, and I feel the pathos or the life or the grief or the joy. More than that, the beauty of her writing--the structure, the words chosen, and that mysterious 'something more' that true art requires--is so deeply creative that it leads me to the Creator. I remember one post about a woman colleague of hers who was so close to trusting, on the very brink of the kind of vulnerability that transforms, and yet ultimately backed away from it. I was in tears. Oh dear God, please help this woman cross over into LIFE, I thought.

One of Linda's most recent posts is about life--Life all around her, all around us, have we but the eyes to wake up and see. I hope you'll read it. Read it, and give yourself permission to be where she was when her words came forth. I think you'll be inspired. I know I was.

To me, writing like this, which is truly creative, is a manifestation of the Creator within us. Great acting...visual arts...music...all of it can lead us to God because it speaks of what is True. When art helps me recognize the Truth, I often feel gratitude, and joy, and somehow both tiny and expansive at the same time.

A few years ago I began to sense that the meaning of creativity was elusive to me. It was through my lovely friend, Zen Musician Scholar, that I came to a better sense of it. I can't recall anything specific that she said or did, but I began to see that she lived it, she embodied it. Through Zen Musician Scholar, through Linda and so many other friends, through those too-few times in my own life when I am creative, I've come to understand creativity as being an open channel or vessel for God's life to manifest on the earth.