CREATIVE MERCY
What's just around the creative corner
Merciful you are Creativity, for you ask nothing more than that which we can presently feel.
Yet poised to startle us with something new… when even a drop of humility is beaded from our brow.
Never too small, never too big.
How perfect are your revelations, already webbed between our five fingered tools.
Awaiting for plans to go astray, and for the courageous wisdom to value this more than our expected result.
Our materials are the sense of self and our tools a silent messenger for all that we have not considered.
The form is the unspoken sensitivity between the seen and the unseen, the built and the unbuilt, the start and the finish.
Just like what we experience as a fellow’s voice—a combination of the curvature of their teeth, a symphony of relaxation in their diaphragm, a diaspora of nerve impulses on their reverent way back home—so to can we experience creations from the human hand.
Whomever bravely stays at this level of creative sensitivity is knighted with the honor to express the inexpressible.
We don’t get better at creativity, we get better at listening.
Listening to what materials can do, listening to what truly excites us, listening to what people feel when they sense our creations, listening to the limits of tools and where new inventions may be beckoning new life through perceived struggle.
I have never experienced a creative outlet that does not surrender to a fond listener. How quickly the vacuum fills with the next step when we surrender what should be done, what could be done, or what will be done.
There is a silent mercy in this, that is it’s own art form. What we consider great creativity is simply the compounding capacity to leave what we know in pilgrimage for that which we do not know and the belief that it will be worth it. Discomfort may arise from this which is confirmation that something newly great is on its way.
This may feel like humming restlessness, aimless wandering, or lame minds skimming over what you know is great. Many turn back, but the wise persevere because these are prerequisites for greatness. Nothing new was ever found in places presently known. All great stories or jokes are so because they escape what we think we know will happen. So too does the creative advice follow: You will be blessed with new insight, skills and wisdom by becoming humbly sensitive to what’s just around the creative corner. You’ll also have more fun in this pursuit too, which is the most enduring of all creative qualities.