Creativity and the Spiritual Heart
The ultimate repository of creative inspiration
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. ‒ Oscar Wilde.
By the time I departed the school gates for the last time at age sixteen, I had a rebel streak running right through me. I also had two abiding convictions. First, I’d do whatever it took not to be poor, and second, I would be a servant to no man. These hard held convictions turned out to be absolute stumbling blocks to my innate creativity.
For the next two decades, I spared nothing in the quest for power, prestige, and money. But I ended up smashed to smithereens, done and dusted, camped on the dark side of the moon for longer than anyone should.
Not everyone needs to be broken entirely, reduced to a state of powerlessness and despair, to begin the re-creation journey, but I did!
Amid my dark nights of the soul, there was one tiny flicker of light. Almost invisible, yet somewhere deep within the hole in my soul was the calling to change, a gentle urge toward re-creation.
One of the most enduring, cross-cultural, and ancient images of the living-Spirit is as a Creator. Obviously, this has meant different strokes for different folks across the ages. But the notion that the Creator never tires of creating and re-creating has similarly been with us forever. The grand design is a work in progress. It’s happening all around us, ever developing with no end date in sight. And just as much as the redesign relates to the universe or multi-universes and all they contain, so too does it apply to our life internally.
One of my sons recently gifted me a book: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Among the many useful and encouraging insights in this book, for us creatives, is the idea that we are at our best creatively when we attempt to connect to the Source of creativity in the universe.
This is a quintessential truth known to creative folks throughout the ages. The creative journey goes best with an ever-deepening connection with the cradle of creativity and re-creation.
Few things bring more joy to the heart and soul than a creative project of whatever kind. Rubin reminds us that everything we do can be a creative act in lockstep with the creative Source.
Of course, we must also contend with the fact the self-centered ego is also ever at play. There is both dark and creative light within all of us.
In my case, the ego-self played out, in running as hard as I could from the dread of poverty and powerlessness. But in the end, it dropped me headlong into both. Strangely, it was only after a prolonged and bitter encounter with this unwelcome place that I was ready to change, to be re-created, to rediscover my creativity that had got lost along the way.
These days my creative shtick is to write and speak about the spiritual heart. I believe that a changed heart is really the name of the game, the central aim of the spiritual life. It is also the ultimate repository of creative inspiration. For when the heart gets changed, we become remade people.
When that occurs, we perceive the world with brand spanking new childlike creative eyes, and our cherished creativity gets similarly completely transformed. We become creatives, fully in the intuitive creative and recreating flow with the Source.
May our hearts go comrades, with the inspired, and recreative flow, and may our unique but innately connected journeys of creativity grow and grow…
— Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
