Bird Droppings November 12, 2012

There is something about creativity

 

I got up this morning later than normal being a school holiday. I ran an errand or two first thing and started in on repairing if I can our dishwasher. After reaching a point of needing to ponder I went to my writing table upstairs to clear my head. It has been a few days since I wrote for several reasons the main one being a little red headed munchkin who demands attention. It is hard to resist the tiny voice calling pop pop where are you? So my granddaughter and I colored and read books and played and played for a couple of days. All in all it was still a wonderful thoughtful experience sitting many times watching as learned a new word or color. I am amazed as little ones grow how imagination and creativity begin to show. As I am listening to a small child singing, dancing, and playing with their toes and fingers, all changing almost daily from nonsensical words to words recognizable and rhythms that seem almost inborn.

I was talking to a good friend yesterday about how life as it flows along does change as I look at situations and conditions for me knowing that a few years ago or so my middle son and a few years before that my oldest son would have been the one sitting h Carolina and he and his wife are expecting their first baby. My youngest son and his wife and our first grandbaby will be moving home so her parents can concentrate on their studies, and my oldest working on his Master’s degree and student teaching at a nearby high school. It is sad but I also know their direction and their flow all have new twists and turns new rocks to travel over and around and knowing them, they will manage to transverse the stream. I wish them all the best of all as they go forward.

Yesterday as I pondered a bit while driving back from North Georgia dropping our grandbaby off I thought back to a patch of ground out on our farm called paradise by several small boys and how they would play games with pebbles and toy trucks under a tree along our drive way. Those same boys who now are older and paradise is a memory long gone. Talking with friends several others in reading my various thoughts on imagination recently also had remembrances of days long ago.

 

“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

 

As I read this note this morning I had a response for folks who ask me why I get up and write every day or nearly every day as I have gotten old I take the weekends off many times. It is about seeking answers trying to understand all that is in this realm we call our life. Most recently I had someone complain about my grammar in a short note which I will be the first to say still needs work. How do you improve and that is by writing. A few years back my only punctuation was in dashes. I have thought about the comment now for several days and it is so easy to post a comment on a social media site never meet the person and walk away. Looking at from a psychological point of view someone who gains power belittling another is in effect reflecting on their own insecurities. Either that or perhaps they are a dysfunctional sphincter muscle, borrowing from a lecture I gave on swearing many years ago.

 

“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.” Erich Fromm

 

Many years ago a friend was testing my youngest son for the gifted class which in Georgia you need to for example on three out of four tests be in the gifted range and my son had two out of three going into a test of creativity. Needless to say when the smoke cleared my friend tells me the scale did not go high enough for him. She had fun testing him as his thoughts were unique and for a first grader she couldn’t believe it. His creativity was going out of the box that society maintains for us was a good explanation.

 

“Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible — he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.” Frank Goble

 

Limits become more like water, they become fluid, they are there, but only in the sense you might get wet and yet there is no solidity no containment. A creative person has fluid walls with many doors, windows, and even back doors and is always in movement be it physical or in thought.

 

“People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.” David H. Comins

 

“Man’s fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.” Morris L. Ernst

 

There exists in some people a word, a mood that something that makes the difference. Some would call it passion. If you are passionate about life, and about existence all else around you changes. Around you the colors, smells, attitudes, ideas, thoughts, and perceptions have a different hue a different meaning.

 

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, and more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas… that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.” Michel Foucault

 

It has been quite a few years since I first saw this quote by Foucault a philosopher and very creative man in his own right. Actually he is one many would call weird and abnormal yet he defined normal through defining and establishing the abnormal first. He looked at history and how we change what is perceived as normal and how it changes as people’s perceptions change. Many the times those changes occur due to creative people first seeing something different. I think back to DeVinci and the Renaissance bringing a world out of the darkness.

Many the times I have thrown out a simple Latin phrase used numerous times by a former professor I had in 1969 in St. David’s, PA., at the Eastern Baptist College now Eastern University, Dr. Tony Campolo. He used this phrase as a title for his best-selling book and the many seminars that he would be the featured speaker, “Carpe Diem”. This simple phrase is translated to, seize the day. This is life, passion, existence; we should live it, want it, and exude it with passion, imagination, and creativity. You know my friends what a world we would have and could have if we lived that simple credo. It was not that long ago my youngest son called me up and was telling of this fantastic speaker he had gone to hear from Pennsylvania. He said the name sounded familiar and he thought he had read it in my writings. That speaker was Dr. Tony Campolo and I told my son I had him as a professor in 1969. As a new week starts and as always of late please keep all in harm’s way in your hearts and on your mind and always give thanks namaste.

 

Wa de (Skee)

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