So long. . .

This blog will no longer be updated.  Unfortunately, I have learned that a group I used to be associated with monitors my activities on the web and then dissects posts/comments in their own little Real Housewives of the Internet manner.  It’s a shame.  I’ve had zebra named blogs on a few sites for 8 give or take years: long before they came into my world.  Congrats, you won.  I don’t have the energy to fight you anymore.  You took my name, my energy and my medium.  Enjoy your victory.  If I believed in Karma, I’d have some consolation.  Instead, just enjoy.  To those of you I know, if I ever dare do a blog again, you will be sent a link but zebras will never be used again.

The creative spark

There is a rooster that lives down the street from me.  My fur balls seem to think when they hear him, the signal is “Iams cat food” instead of “bird of prey must go forth and hunt.”  As I hear the rooster crowing on this Saturday when the church is draped in silence, I know I’m stretched to the crossroads of my being. 

I’m tired of people.  I’m tired of people who feel their success comes from a driving sense of altruism, when, in reality, that may have been the start but now it is an ego boost.   I finished reading Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin this week.  Although they state it is about the 2008 election season, it does focus more on the Democratic primary: I wish they had gone deeper into that and left the general election out of the text (let’s face it, we all knew the story about Alaska and the backyard before the book).  So much of the log jam is explained: about how autocratic, draconian leadership never works and yet it is replicated over and over again.

I made a mistake of speaking up (shock, I know to those of you who actually KNOW me).  Speaking up is an act of selflessness: you risk the ostracism, the mean girls and the post-modern insult of all “public defriendment” on a popular social networking site.  Really? If a person takes the act of courage to say to the institutionalized hierarchy: “you are wrong” do you actually think defriending is going to upset someone? If anything, it re-affirms the ego strength it takes to push back against the change of fear that is driving the culture we live in: from Wall Street, to Washington, to small businesses to internet sites (Yes, many of us wail when social networking sites change their format – after all, it is important to know if somebody sent you a present for you latest gaming need!).

Did we ever have a sense of conversation in this country?  Are individuals so insecure that having a conversation – a true conversation – risky? The cliché is true: for great rewards, great risks are needed.  Yet, when those in charge of an organization be it a volunteer group to a Fortune 500 company to a branch of government are so insecure that they cannot, will not even listen to an individual who might have an alternative solution or idea we risk losing more than the person: we extinguish the creative spirit which has fueled more than just artists.  In some ways, I find myself wondering, are we a culture where we’d rather set aside the one or two who speak out than risk saying “(S)he might have a point.”  Discourse does not have to be belligerent: often it only becomes so because a person is stretched to a position where (s)he is not heard.  When did we stop respecting differences? When did creativity become a bad thing?

Creativity is not simply painting (although I’m jealous of my friends who can), writing, dancing.  Webster’s defines creativity as “to bring into existence, to invest with a new form, to produce through imaginative skill, to make or bring into existence something new”.  It is the ability to bring something into existence: not just formulate a thought but to bring it forth.  To be creative, to risk the process of bringing forth an idea that is in refinement is one that attracts labels that are often pejorative: “disorganized”, “lazy”, “dictatorial” and on and on.

Creativity prevents stagnation: it is what moves a society forward.  Fear of creativity, fear of change, fear of failure; fear of different voices in conversation cause an idea or a place to become static.  The process, the creative process, often is not one that lends itself to easy conversations or at times words.  For many, it is fragmented, bubbling, back and forth dance of one or maybe two individuals.

We often lose sight of what sparks a change: maybe it is what we once opposed but forced us to draw notice to an issue.  A substantive, substantial change within organizations often occurs after an individual who brings the idea forward is gone but the outline of the creation remains.  What is in is that when pressed cannot share the co-creation if that is the circumstance? Of saying, somebody else showed us the problem and we continued?

The refinement of an idea, of a process cannot happen alone but to shutter the risk of the creative, be it pragmatic, practical, artistic, is to accept what is as perfect and immovable.  The creative process, even in its failure, provides much more than a tangible item.  It is in the process we cradle the possibilities: discover the underlying nexus of many a thought and yield unintentional results.   When we turn our back to those who are unafraid to speak their minds because of our insecurities, we are saying we do not value the risk of creativity because of an insecurity of self.

So I sit wrapped in this vortex.  My creativity is not of the artistic kind (my youngest nieces have offered to teach me how to draw) but of the type that questions, analyzes and wonders why.  I can read a book and dissect the argument for the exercise: not out of malice but to understand the process, to take the process to the next step simply for the pursuit.  Creativity inspires creativity be it in historical research or in opera.  And while I know this: I find myself and others not being appreciated for our abilities.

I wonder, as I often do, what will happen when the collective we looses the group of people who are willing to take the risk of shunning for creativity: for saying, this is how I think it may work, or this is the pattern.  Often, it is the unheard voice or the unpopular, dismissed voice that so often proves to be the one that discovers the solution.  What will happen when enough people see that to speak in dissent is to risk banishment? Or is it too late: have we already lost the inherent value of creativity in our culture?

I know I’m stretched.  My essence, my truth is to speak my mind, my thoughts and take those risks.  And still, the lessons of speaking my mind have been acidic with my ideas adopted weeks or months after the fact without acknowledgement if I’m lucky: or when I’m unlucky, being told they are “coincidence”.  Speaking ones’ mind, holding on to the creative spirit is living in a constant state of risk of self.  And what we will do when it is finally extinguished it terrifying.  Our greatest ideas come from when an individual wonders what would happen when we take a risk to find a new answer to an old question, to put art onto a canvas a new way and others respect the effort.  Until we do this consistently and honestly, we will remain in this stagnant logjam that we have borne witness to since the 2008 election.  Creativity is not to be feared: it is the lack of creativity that needs to be feared.