Creativity

 Since discovering BBC Sounds, I find I like listening to something at night. I suppose that in the quiet my tinnitus is that much worse without the day’s distracting noise. For a while I listened to Emili Sande’s ‘Composed’, a wonderful mixture of old and modern classical music with a sone or two thrown into the mix. I moved on to listening to ‘The Sleeping Forecast’. Whoever thought to mix the shipping forecast with classical piano music? In my sailing days I paid attention to the shipping forecast. That makes it sound very exotic, doesn’t it? My sailing days can be counted on the fingers of one, possibly two hands, happening during May Day bank holidays, crewing for a boss that hired a sailing boat for a weekend and headed for the Crinan Canal.

Now I am listening to ‘What Makes Us Human?’. I admit it was the RE teacher in me listening to see if it was worth playing bits of to a third year RE class. When I left teaching, I was working on a unit of studying what makes us human, looking at it from different perspectives, some religious and some not. Yes, I know I retired four years ago and there is no unit being produced. I fall into teacher-mode holes occasionally.

The guest speaker was Pam Ayres. She is a remarkable poet. She was a favourite poet at our Saturday Sunset Café poetry nights.

The podcast begins with reading a personal essay on the topic of being human. This is followed by a conversation with the presenter. Jeremy Vine usually does it, but he must have been on holiday.

Pam’s answer to what makes us human is the ability to create. All of us, she insisted, are creators in some way or another. We make things. At this point my mind flits to bower birds –‘As bird behavior goes, the displays of bowerbirds are among the weirdest. Male bowerbirds have taken up architecture to impress females, building large hutlike structures of twigs, decorated with shiny beetles, shells, and other colorful touches.’ (American spellings on the web page) Nature is brimming with creativity is seems, but do they choose to do it or is it built in DNA that compels them?

As regards poetry in particular, or writing, she was asked whether it was something everyone could do? Were we all born with the ability to write a poem or a short story? Do we really have that novel within? No we don’t. Some people are born with that creativity to see something and translate it into words and evoke a response from a reader. Even the natural writers and poets work at their craft. Poetry doesn’t fall into anyone’s lap. It is a gift, but one that comes with graft attached. Did she say that writing can be a learned thing for those no gifted? I might have fallen asleep at that point. It must be, I think. If we only did the things we were gifted to do I think we would miss out on a lot of experiences. Sometimes it is in doing the unfamiliar that we discover that there is a gift there after all.

I have been writing for decades. I was a late developer. There was nothing in school that even hinted at an ability to write. I thought I fell into it, stumbling into an evening creative writing class when I should have signed up to do counselling. I didn’t fall into it at all. God knew the gift was there and that I needed to be in the right place and the right time to find it.

A friend last week was speaking words of encouragement over our small praise and prayer group. She said that in me she saw a river, swift moving, full of life, bubbling over. Not a river of water but of words that swirled, words I was catching and using to write poems and stories. In everything I wrote the love of God was on display. In me there was an unquestioning acceptance of what she said. I have stopped thinking that my poems are not good enough. Too often I stand back and wonder where the words came from. God. I am most ‘me’ when I am writing, even in the struggle to string the words together.

We are made in the image of God and He is the Creator. Why should we not show His image so clearly when it comes to creativity? We are, perhaps, most like God when we are making something.