On Creativity, Chaos and Dancing Stars



I broke away from my usual style of painting on large canvases to paint a series of small 6" x 12" landscapes (example above) on gesso board. At first I felt certain I couldn't paint "small" but only "big" because it had been my style for so long.  I proved myself wrong.

I came across a wonderful quote by Gail Sheehy recently, who said, "Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties."  I think its important to do a "certainty" review every so often in order to throw out our mistaken ones - beliefs where little or no truth any longer exist.

 

It seems that a lot of so-called "certainty" is learned, is repeated and then becomes habit. Carolyn Myss, who is widely recognized for her work in energy medicine and personal/spiritual growth, describes habits (of behavior, thought and/or relationships) as our way of attempting to stop change. And isn't creativity all about change?  Lesson learned: creativity and habit don't make good bed-fellows in the human psyche and eventually we will be impelled to reinvent our world through our own choice or someone elses. 
 

Learning how to provide creative solutions to everyday challenges can free us from being "zoned out" to "being in the zone"  and its anyone's guess what kind of ideas or actions we could generate to make the world a better, more peaceful, more loving or more beautiful place.

I am finally learning to trust getting out there, getting my hands dirty,  mixing things up, messing things up, and creating a little chaos "on purpose".  As the famous German philosopher Nietzsche says, "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star".

 

Never Worry If You're Lost

 

I loved this sign in a store window. Who hasn't felt lost at different times in their lives? 
 

I remember someone saying once that if you can't have what you want, then change what you want.  Those words have served me well for many years. Similar wisdom, in this store window in Shrewsbury, England, invited me to stop and look.  Was someone trying to tell me something once again?

I have found that trying to change direction in life is about as easy as trying to flatten a map that has been rolled up and stored in one of those cardboard tubes.  No matter how hard you try to flatten it, it just keeps snapping back until you put something on top of it to weight it down. 

Our own "patterns" are just like that.  We see things in a certain way and do things out of habit and wonder why we just keep traveling in the same direction.  We keep ourselves rolled up, just like the map, at work, in our relationships, our lifestyle choices and perhaps even in our spiritual beliefs.  To change direction may take weeks, months or years of practice and conscious effort depending on how deep the conditioning.  About 6 weeks ago I decided to paint on small gesso boards rather than on my usual large stretched canvases. I'm still uncomfortable.