Creativity Is…
It is July. Summer is the time of growing, evolving, and creating. I love July. If July were human, it would The Feathered Prince with orange daylilies and white peacock feathers spewing from its crown.
Creativity is how I express my being. I garden. I arrange. I write. Writing is the most fearful, debilitating, and exhilarating form of creativity, I believe.
I make gardens, but nobody sees me in that garden. I can share my garden with you, for example, and I am not in danger of being abandoned. There, I will feel more like we are in a space of warmth. We’ll talk about the kinds of hydrangeas and find the birdbath made out of stone, and walk around the old gate. It is they—flower and stone—not me, on display. I’m invisible.
But writing is a struggle against my fear to say, be so, seen, and not be cut off. When someone says, “You are the only one who sees it that way!” there is fear of being isolated, alone, and peculiar, and not in a good way. Paradoxically, that’s the starting point of “growing” the self to make a statement. But it takes assiduous effort.
Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is a mediation on the courage to be “the only one who sees it that way” during the explorations that take him to earth.
When you tell grown-ups, you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, ‘What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? Instead, they demand: How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
The Little Prince who came from Asteroid-B612 wants to create companionship with another and struggles against that which disorients him on earth. He wants to create friendship out of a certain kind of knowledge that is not valued because it cannot be measured. He continues to explore, lose his balance, and become disoriented. That is a metaphor for Saint-Exupéry’s process of creation. The Little Prince and its author develop the courage through the other to tell us that our proof of existence lies not in the asteroids from which we hail but by not forgetting a friend. Otherwise, we become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures.
Creativity is a struggle. I have a friend who says that writing is going to war with the page. The war is with and against his limits.
I do yoga as an “exercise” or as “meditation” on daring to be and for pushing myself with and against my limits. Who will I be after daring to be a pigeon in pigeon pose? Look how vulnerable the dove is while in a sunbathing pose. Science informs us that a bird in sunbathing is typically fluffing out feathers, opening wings, and fanning the tail. The odd posture of a bird (lying on the earth) may be attributed to the bird inclining its body towards the oblique rays of the sun.
Dove sunbathing © Joseph V Higbee
I think there’s more to it. The sunbathing dove is The Feathered Prince who pays us a visit to aid us in the process of our becoming. If you garden, you will one day happen upon a dove sunbathing. The dove will turn its head and eye you and you will see that the proof of anyone’s existence is in having the courage to make, to do, and to be present while vulnerable.
Back in yoga class, that’s me in pigeon pose. It is the flight of address—the peacock piercing through the darkness of fear—on becoming myself.
“Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come...”