Creativity Is God

I’m very excited to have been invited to blog on “Intent.com”!   As a professional songwriter and recording artist, I have been fascinated by creativity all my life and in the past decade I have been asked increasingly to teach workshops and lecture on the subject.  So I thought my first blog should address my thoughts on the mystery of “creativity”:

 I have to say that in my search for the way to encompass all the traditions and perspectives of the human connection to Spirit, the one word that fully describes “Spirit” that we all seem able to agree upon is  "CREATIVITY".    I feel that creative force, creative spirit, from the flower in the garden or the brush strokes of a painting, to the creative way we all unfold into our individual perspectives; every bit of it is GOD in action.  (GOD being one of many names I could choose depending on the language or culture)

 When talking about creativity in my workshops I often compare the intellect to a laptop computer.  Say we envision ourselves as walking around with a laptop on our shoulders instead of a head.   In each of our “laptops” we have stored all the memories, events and information of our lives.   This amazing “hard drive” has the capacity to handle endless crafted options and ways to arrange and re-arrange and argue different perspectives, etc.  This is a powerful processor and the more knowledge we accumulate on our hard drives, the more options we have for discerning and defining our perspective on life. 

Thought and thinking and “figuring out” stuff is to me, drawn from that accumulated knowledge. 

If that is true, then I believe experiencing “creativity” is like "going online".   It is that which taps into something beyond what we have stored in our “lap tops” and is synonymous with "divine intervention".    I’ve written a few songs from the stuff stored in my "laptop" but the really good inspired stuff always comes through me from something beyond me.  Yes, it comes through the filter of my life, heart and experience, but what makes it a "creation" is that it intersected with the divine somewhere in the process.  It is not so much about what I know, rather, what I’m in the process of discovering.

I tell my students:  "being in a creative moment is like walking out to the edge of what you know and hanging one foot over what you don’t know…."   It is a place of complete “lift off” and spontaneity and trusting the creative spirit to drive and lead.

Like deep meditation, “creativity” is a place that transcends time and space.  

So what about "Knowing God"?   I don’t think we can "Know God" anymore than we can fit everything from cyberspace onto our laptops.  Maybe the root our different traditions is something that makes connecting more manageable. One way to look at the different religious traditions is like “servers”. In keeping with the analogy, some of us are “AOL” and some of us are “GMAIL” and so on.  But we all experience creativity from that fabulous non-local divine endless space of unlimited possibilities!  (Thank you Deepak for inspiring that last description!

I see God as Creativity itself…from the little seeds pushing past rocks and clay toward the light….to the musical and artistic seeds pushing up through the hearts of young children during playtimes(so often squelched by some well meaning teacher or adult).   

And I see Creative Spirit in the sheer power of "thought and intention" which is something I believe requires some amount of faith.  Faith to utter a prayer–that it be heard, faith to push those colors around until a shape starts to form and following that in faith. The power of collective prayer…it goes on and on.   Lift-off.

I’m an old Catholic girl…but my heart resonates, celebrates and deeply respects all of Creativity/(God’s) many–endless–manifestations through the expanse of nature, and the many vast and beautiful aspects of the human family.  In this “church that includes all churches”, I could never imagine Creativity going to war against Creativity.

Beth Nielsen Chapman