Last night I finished reading the book 'Big Magic' by Elizabeth Gilbert. I really enjoyed reading it. It was an inspiring and thought provoking read all the while being easy to read, broken into nice short chunks.
I found it interesting to discover that the working theory that I have developed for myself in the past year is very similar to what Elizabeth Gilbert describes and encourages. It is one of appraoching your creative work playfully and intentionally. One of exploring, trying things, even if they're not guaranteed to work out, simply to make something, anything! Creativity is a process, you need to keep busy for inspiration to find you. Who hasn't experienced a situatiom where we are in the middle of a project and we get a thousand ideas for more projects flooding through our brain, then when we are finished and are sitting still, we can't find all those ideas and no more seem to come?
Creativity is a part of me. I don't really care if nobody sees my art or buys it, I need to create no matter what. I dicovered just how much a part of me it was the year I went to Bible College. At that stage of my life I thought that making my art and serving God were separate, divided into secular and holy spaces. I discovered that I was wrong, creativity was not something I could pack up and leave behind, it is an alive essential part of me. As I have journeyed further in life I have come to the conclusion that art and God do not need to be separate either. Elizabeth Gilbert completes her book with a section titled 'Accidental Grace' where she shares an illustration of how the secular became holy and 'the lines had blurred between high and low,. . . between God and earth'.
That's the space I want to live in now, embracing both, creating, always creating.