Photo credit: Lisa Blair
Dear Artist, dear Lover of the Creative Life,
Remember that the Creative Spirit is always present offering you clues to follow, like breadcrumbs in the forest leading you on a trail to a pot of gold. A pot of gold designed especially for you. A trail that speaks the language of your soul, beckoning you to move this way and then that. A trail, that when followed in each moment, leads you step by step down your own unique creative path.
But you must pay attention. You must listen, look, and feel for it. You must give yourself ample spaciousness so that you are open enough to hear it, to feel it, to see it, to move it.
Although the Creative Spirit is always there, always standing by to guide you, if you merely go about your daily life in earnest, if you dedicate your attention only to being responsible to work, to others, to the chores, to the correspondence, to the duties and tasks, then you may not know it is there. You may become utterly convinced it has left you—alone.
But if you listen, look, and feel, you may find it is there in the rays of sunshine through your dirty window pane, or in the chirping of the red and gray house finch who pecks at the seed you left out for it the day before, or in the sway of the hips of the trees as the wind passes through, or in your dream of the placid lake at dawn, or in the tears you shed over a longtime pain in your heart.
And then the real magic begins. Then the excitement happens. Then, you may find the Creative Spirit in the first bud of an idea for a song, poem, brushstroke, movement, phrase, or image.
Snatch these up as if they are hundred dollar bills flying through the air! Make notes about these. Don't wait too long to do so. Let these ideas know you know they visited you. Take them seriously.
Begin now.