“Only the unexpected is real.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later, maybe in a slightly different form? For me, over the last while, it’s been about creativity, spontaneity, the flow of life which is unstructured and unrehearsed.
We had a great discussion about it one evening in my ‘Alchemy of Writing’ group. I’ve been offering to my students a vision of creativity as something that is innate and universal, because it is our true nature. It’s not something that belongs to anyone, and especially not to a privileged or special group of people. Creativity is how the whole universe emerges into form- over and over it demonstrates this spontaneous power of expression at the very heart of life.
When I really allow my heart to open to the sense of this vast field of creative energy, I realize that each one of us was born to discover ourselves through this process of free expression- to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is always new and dynamic.
As we explored this way of looking at things in my class, we realized that a lot of confusion happens when we equate creativity with skill. They are not the same. Skill is a learned thing, something acquired through practice and intention. We can practice creativity too, but only in the sense of learning how to open, to surrender to something that we can never control. Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”
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