About Creativity

I'm embarrassed by my own drive to be creative. I feel self-centred even though I can't help it. Be creative, I mean, not self-centred. It's my way of communicating. I can't help waking up at two o'clock in the morning with thoughts and feelings busting to come out. I'm disillusioned with my natural drive to write. Writers are a dime a voo doo doll dozen. And who am I to pierce the heart of my writing's integrity with the pin of someone else's? Even though I know the ghosts of someone else write because they have something to prove. And the ghosts of themselves write because they have to - to relax, for healing, for satisfaction, for communications. Like baby big horn rams, they take the simplest stars and stones that nature feeds them. Just as I indulged in the poverty of milk and sugar on white bread when I was a small child. Now that's a richness of spirit and that's something to write about.

Think of all the grassy slopes of right and wrong that we must stop and rest upon when life is all uphill. The downward slopes bring our spirits up. We pass River Phoenix and Dr. Seuss. We pass that autumn harbour smell when the day was warm but its breath was cool with wind. We pass a Prescott Street spring when the sky was grey and damp upon the cheek. The upward slopes bring our spirits down. We pass the drunk-driving ex boyfriend with the pot problem who was ashamed to be seen with you in public. It impaired his chances of sleeping with other girls and he doesn't want her or her or her to see you with him. We pass the sister dying for a puff when she was 17. We trekked downtown to scan the streets for butts. She took them home and rolled them into the cigarettes that her job at Mary Browns wouldn't afford her to buy. We pass all the kids who wouldn't play with us in grade two.

The sad slopes that take our spirits up are always the hardest to pass. But they're also the most fulfilling to overcome and so easy to find in life. Pain can be so much easier to find than joy. But joy is so much easier to live than pain. Full happiness is not easy but just think: you've overcome sadness when it happens. The sad slopes that take our spirits up are laced with bittersweet memories. My mother who walked me across town in my socks so I could get some shoes at the Goodwill - the little red ones that I wore beneath the big tree at Bannerman Park, my soft yellow hair making the sun jealous. The two bright orange lamps from the seventies mom sold for bread. Poor ol' Mr. Hickey giving my sister and me all of his wife's beads and Noxema after she died. Your aggressive, unbalanced father picking you up a Twix bar after all the screaming and fighting and how much that meant to you. When the world is against you, the happy slopes that take our spirits up are filled with miserable things that we take too seriously such as money and power and morbid self-satisfaction. The happy slopes that take our spirits up are filled with beautiful things that we take for granted like children drinking from fountains of milk and old men fishing in honey streams. When life gets easy you don't stop to take in the rebirth of an autumn morning, the rebirth of a harbour stink, and the redemption of a Twix bar. You don't truly consider the beauty of being alive, of being a part of nature, of this world. When life is all uphill we walk uphill watchfully, we stop and rest occasionally and look around partaking of the world like wild mountain goats, the buffalo and its calf and the big horn ram.

And some say they write but never do. Some "do" for the glory. Some don't but for the same reason. Some do because they want to make a name for themselves. Some do because it helps them. Having said that though there's little wrong with people making a name for themselves if it helps them. Carpenters can do the house thing. Mechanics can do the car thing. Musicians can do the guitar/drums/bass thing. And all of these things are important. But the most meaningful purpose behind what they do can only be found deep inside. I do the writing because it's deep inside me. Writing is a voice. This voice can actually talk the way we talk: everyday words once spoken as sounds, now written as words. Or this voice can talk the way the soul talks: everyday thoughts and feelings thought and felt as far more than everyday thoughts and feelings, and written as more than just words. Consider prickly white poppies mirroring the white sun; wild watercress feeding upon the air of water and the water of air, nourished by the cool springs; or frosty cottonwood trees that canopy abandoned shacks. They gleam fuzzy white against the rotted black walls and collapsed roof boards.

I don't like being competitive. I fear that any kind of involvement in any creative medium automatically makes me competitive. Even if I do it just because my soul is on fire. The critics have extinguished my ego long before it had a chance to breathe a spark. One fire is for the essence of being - a warm rain so powerful that it curls my big horns. The other fire is for the glory - a frozen sun I know will never shine on me, I'll never want on me. With the torch of burning glory comes the fire of hellish infamy: crushing popularity. Everybody hates you when everybody loves you. The competitive nature of art explains why I try to work in mediums and write in styles that few others work and write in. So I don't have to compete with anyone. Competitive binges also compete with soulful expression and interfere with truth. I'm not in art to prove that I am something; I'm in it to prove that I am nothing. I'm in it to prove that I have nothing to prove. I am a pink shadow in the darkness of being alive. Art is the only face I own and writing is the only voice I want.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have any creative drive at all. Then I could feel free and I wouldn't have anything to prove. I could come and go through life without the drive to think and feel everything. But I would not be free. And I've never had anything to prove. That’s why I don't want to have anything to prove. And my soul will not be free. It will be confined. I would never express how I think and feel. It's so subjective especially when it's competitive. One university classmate once said to me, "You don't seem like the type to do poorly." Tell my instructor that. Then I feel bad for doing poorly because someone felt this was wrong of me. I feel awkward for failing to achieve another's ideal. I suck at conformity; I always fail to live up to others' expectations. And I often failed at school because I failed to live up to others' expectations. Perhaps then I can find peace with my failure. It's not so bad to look stupid because at least I look like me. But yes, failure does make me feel inadequate, but I often thrive at independence. When I do things for me I merely do what I can, and that's not much of an expectation to live up to. Sure, sometimes a troubled self-esteem can set her expectations of herself pretty high because others don't believe in her and she has to live her dreams though she and everyone around her believes that she can't. She has to fight those feelings. And sure, sometimes a troubled self-esteem can set her expectations of herself pretty low because she doesn't believe in herself and she doesn't believe she can achieve very much. She doesn't believe she can do anything. She believes dreams are a waste of time though that's the most frequent use of her time. Dreaming she could be a more sensible person. Dreaming she could do things and go places and believe. Dreaming she could believe in dreams. Dreaming she could have something to dream about. Dreaming she could dream.