Life Is the Creative Act

Creativity (Photo credit: Mediocre2010)

“If you’re alive you’re creative. We “reduce and  deflect” our creative selves in many ways. Life is the creative act, not the canvas or the blank  page.”            ~ Patti Digh, “Creative is a Verb”

I like to think of myself as artistic.  There is no real concrete proof of this, yet I keep trying to find my “artistic” self.  She seems to be playing a game of hide and seek with me that I have not yet won. I keep seeking, and while my artistic self is wily and still in hiding, I continue to try to coax her out into the open and tag her.  (Lest you worry – I do understand that tag and hide and seek are two different games). I used to love playing “frozen tag” where you would chase your prey and tag them and they had to stand in the spot where you tagged them frozen into place—that is what I want to do with my creative self: seek her, find her, and freeze her so she cannot get away.

The first step to being an artist is to realize that we are all creative beings. I like to think that my primary way of satisfying my creativity is in writing. But I would like to expand on that creativity to include other forms of inspired, inventive, and innovative methods of expressing myself, other than letting the dust settle on my furniture and doodling in the grime.

I particularly admire artists who can paint and draw or find other mediums to express themselves in a way that lends just that little bit more beauty to the world. Of late, I have been reading the book “Creative is a Verb” by Patti Digh, who believes that if we are alive we are creative. I love this all-inclusive definition of creativity. It gives me hope that someday I will produce something beautiful, but if not, then just the mere act of creativity is enough.

Digh includes a poem by Osho in the introduction to her book which I found inspiring:

When I say to be creative

I don’t mean

you should all go

and become great painters

and great poets.

I simply mean

let your life

be a painting

let your life be a poem.

Osho’s poem is inspiring, but so is Digh’s advice that we should fully own “that we are creative beings, whether we will ever call ourselves writers or artists” or pick up a pen, brush or camera, or show our art, sell it or “create something fantastically unique.” And I love this line: “What if we owned that making dinner was a fully creative act?” (My cooking, if nothing else is creative and sometimes edible.)

Apparently, we should not limit our definition of creativity, but instead—“Open up. See more, Live Deeper.” That is what Digh believes art is, creativity is, and life is.  So, even if I cannot draw something besides a stick figure that is recognizable, I am still creative. So there.