The Creative Path

 

Carrying What is Hidden 

as a Gift to Others

If a fool would persist in his folly, 

he would become wise.

— William Blake

The difficult secret about creativity is that it is an invitation to travel the path of longing—longing for real meaning, real connection, and continual nourishing surprise that can enliven and even transform the lives of others.

We associate creativity with discipline and long hours but long hours make sense only if we are following a meaningful central trajectory—one that in the creative act itself seems to issue from our bodies like a comet’s tail out into the world.

Creativity is an invitation to transgress—once we take the step toward creating, we always betray our known self and the inherited stories we hold close, the scaffolding of our entire identity, and the structures and systems that held us in place. This is why it feels so difficult. This is why we feel as if we are ‘blocked’, we really, actually feel as if we are losing our sense of self. This is why the creative path can feel so distant and elusive: to create is to betray your home and set off into a distant unknown place.

Creativity demands choosing longing over belonging: that choice asks us to risk losing grip with what makes sense—to drop into a state where the familiar self cannot follow a known path. So many things can be created easily and unconsciously—chaos, resentment, envy—even destruction—can be created on a daily basis without effort or intention. Meaningful creativity is something else entirely—it puts us in cultivated, intimate companionship with the world and with the struggles of other human beings—fellow creatures trying to get things right and failing awkwardly most of the time.

To follow the path of creativity is to stay in the unknown long enough for it to become aliveness—and to shape that aliveness into forms of beauty and life-changing insight—the gift of being given new eyes or ears for this world or even a new mind for an imagined future. 

These dreams beneath the surface made real through our creative gifts, are the fruits of a long and conscious path—a harvest that asks us to keep listening to the inner urgencies of our life—and the way those urgencies arrive in all the hours of our everyday lives.

Bringing our inner and outer worlds together. 

Following a creative path that always asks us to shape a way of being equal to every mode of doing.

David Whyte