the urge to create

You're a kid. You have crayons and newsprint, a few coloring books, glue and blunt edged scissors, and what comes naturally? To play around with all these things, and make a mess and maybe even a picture that ends up on the refrigerator. This trend now in adult coloring books is pretty awesome - we are finally realizing how whole brained it is to just mess around with color and line.

I, for one, need to create.
I need to cut out images, glue them down, add words, more images, colors.
It really lightens my heaviness to do this, it opens up some sense of wonder and love of beauty.

We all are meant to create beauty in our lives, be it cooking beautiful vegetables and arranging them on a platter, adding some interesting colored pillows to the couch, hanging all our earrings on an earring tree, putting the spices in a pretty row, sitting on the deck and admiring the way the light falls through the winter branches on the wood, pairing yellow socks with red shoes, etc.

For me, the act of art opens up something. Deep meanings and subconscious thoughts? Sometimes it's that, but other times it's just a sense that as a human being, I have the right to create. Birds make beautiful nests, spiders spin amazing webs, their work might not be for the purpose of beauty, but it seems to work better if our efforts end up with something nice to look at.

I don't know if my dog has ever just watched the sunset, I do know he can sit outside for hours and contemplate the smells, maybe creating stories in his head of the squirrels and other dogs the smells evoke. Is he creative?
Perhaps.
I did read somewhere that Octopi like to find little rocks and trinkets to decorate their homesteads.
We should remember this and follow their example.

Don't think.
Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy.
You can't try to do things.
You simply must do things.
--Ray Bradbury