The Sylvr Pen

creativity 1 : the quality of being creative 2 : the ability to create

creative 1 : marked by the ability to create : given to creating 2 : having the quality of something created rather than imitated : IMAGINATIVE

create 1 : to bring into existence <God created the heaven and the earth -Genesis 1:1 (AV)> … 4 a : to produce through imaginative skill b : DESIGN

creator : one that creates, usu by bringing something new or original into being: esp, cap : GOD*

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be created in the image of God, and I think a great deal of it has to do with creativity.

On my mind also is a question about it from the past that keeps coming back to me, repeating. So I repeat it to you, asking…

“What is the most creative thing you’ve ever done?”

I heard it many years ago from several women enthusiastically about to embark on a small group study of Genesis. It was the warm-up question for them to consider before their study began. I was unable to attend the study (though I must say my interest, like theirs, was definitely sparked by that question). So I never found out what their individual answers were, because they were supposed to keep them hush-hush until the first day’s discussion. But a definite reflexive answer popped up in my mind immediately.

Since most of you, my readers, are women, I wonder if the same answer pops up for any of you. (I would love to find out in the comments.)

So I think I’ll leave the rest this post unfinished for a day or two to give you a chance to think about your own answer, and I’ll pick up with my answer and a few of my thoughts about it.

Until then… Happy creative thinking!

—–

*Merriam Webster’s  Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

A To-Do List for the Autumn/Winter “Creativity Room” (see last post for the reason for this):

1. Make a mini indoor “herb plot”:

• Dig up a pot of chives from outside
• Ditto one of parsley
• Ditto a tiny lavender shrub
• Start a new pot of thyme
• Ready the container-grown rosemary plants to be moved in, come cold weather
• Paint the bottom shelf in the crafts room, under the “grow lights” (fluorescent—which you can replace with true grow lights later)
• Find or buy something to serve as nice (white?) planters, to contain all the above
• Arrange above plants on shelf under light.

2. Add some color and flowers:

• Trim down the impatiens to make them less leggy
• Use these cuttings for floral arrangements now
• Pot up some of the impatiens plants later, and take inside
• Place these in center of plant shelf, amid indoor mini “herb garden”
• Repeat these steps with colorful coleus plants.
• Pot up the pinky “Polka Dot Plants” (really house plants sunk this year into the garden) and move them inside for winter

3. Incorporate some vines:

• take cuttings from ivy and vinca
• hold in water temporarily
• plant in pots or hangers, twisting and fastening atop the ground for fuller plantings

4.  Throw in a bit of outer-space-like whimsy:

• simply bring in the planting of succulents
• find a special container in which to place their pot, more fitting in whatever room they’ll “board in”

5. Enjoy these each day

• Take time to smell the fragrant, feast your eyes on the beautiful, look closely at the details, and giggle over the quirky
• Especially important: consider their Designer and His amazing  creativity, wisdom, and even whimsical humor!

What a celebration of His amazing creation!

*****

“I come to the…” crafts room… “alone…”

(“Creativity room,” I call it for motivational effect.)

… I wend my way past the ancient squeaky card table set up as station for sewing bits of fabric into patterns of light and shadow, and make my way to the little maple rocker by the window.

Here’s where I’ll sit with morning coffee, I think. Here’s where I’ll allow the day to wind up in me and start my mental wheels turning, just as it did on so many summer mornings in the garden.

There I sat on bench shielded by privacy screen and began with stillness. Needing to plan new plantings when I learned that mowing of that one large grassy space wasn’t going to happen, I “sat with it” as an artist “sits with” a canvas till images and patterns form in the imagination. That blank space became my canvas, and greenery and flowers, planters and edgers, bark mulch and gravel, stones and bricks became my art materials, their varied colors my “palette.”

I won’t be sitting on a metal bench outside in blizzard, ice storm, or sub-zero weather. I won’t be feasting on the wonder of growing things out there once they’ve come to look more dead than alive. I won’t be sinking seed into frozen soil.

Instead I’ll sit here surrounded by actual art materials and tools, shelves of them: paints and inks and chalks and markers, threads and yarns and fabrics and stamps, brushes and pencils and needles and scissors… actual canvases and blank papers waiting to receive the expressions of my imagination.

There’s plenty I can do here, and the room is light and welcoming. But somehow the possibilities lack the vitality I enjoyed “out there.” God seemed nearer there, and more a part of all the processes. Why? What was difference?

I pull aside a curtain to see the bird feeder, because that promises pleasant winter watching. This is the best spot for it, up above the birds, who don’t seem to notice what’s so far above them…

Beyond feeder and lawn lies the garden itself. My eyes are drawn toward it. In winter this window will give the best view of that, too. Pushing aside the second curtain, I also see, up the hill, the corn standing magnificent in Husband’s serious garden—and beyond that the trees, hills, and skies, the place of sunsets and sunrise reflections.

But these thoughts don’t help me consider the art room, do they? So I draw the curtains closed.

I have my little Psalm book with me. I open it to the twenties, today’s planned reading, and land on Psalm 24. I know it by heart, partly from childhood, partly from pray-reading it often more recently. So I pray it now, from memory. And when I come to open gates and His entrance through them, I push open the cloth “gate” to my view out the window again. I see fog forming there, thickening before my eyes, and beginning a slow undulating dance across the lawn and upwards.

Mere damp air. Vapor. Yet it seems so alive…

Then the epiphany happens. I see the difference between designing a garden while sitting out in it, and “creating” with the materials in here, see why there’s more God-connection outside: What’s in here is one step further from the Creator. Though paper comes from the pulp of trees God made, man made the paper—and so with all the other materials.

Suddenly a strategy emerges for imbuing my indoor creative space with more of a sense of the Creator. This forms a happy To-Do list for “To-Do’s-Day” tomorrow.

Through most of my life, September, more than any other month, has announced to me, “Fresh start,” “New year’s beginning”—even more than January.

September’s approach typically conjured visions of new school clothes, unbroken crayons, erasers sans graphite smears, pristine tablets and notebooks waiting to be filled with new ideas and words and learnings and imaginings.

To all this I looked forward breathlessly. Even fall’s dying leaves seemed more alive in their vivid colors, swirling from branches and flying free on autumn winds, than their former chlorophyll-shrouded, static summer selves. A sense of adventure filled the air, filling me also with the desire to fly free and discover my own deeply hidden true colors.

But the past two or three years have spelled… not new words on carte blanche pages, but trouble getting September off the ground!

One big reason: the exuberance recent summers have given me. Happy, whole-hearted exertions have produced (by the sweet grace of God) satisfying accomplishments. I’ve spent more time outside, again growing tan, as my former, childhood, self had done by running pell-mell laughing in summer sunlight on hot lakeside sand and plunging into shimmering mountain waters.

You see, once again this summer, as in the previous two or three, I was pursuing a passion (you might even say obsession): the expansion of a garden, green and growing in more ways than one, developing more and more into the Eden I’d vaguely dreamed all my adult life of having. “The Garden” gradually took on a beautiful personality of its own, and sometimes seemed to embody God’s presence palpably.

Closing the door on that wrenches my heart!

But close it I must. The air will grow too chill for my asthma-vulnerable lungs to breathe rightly, the ground too hard to accept a spade, let alone eager fingers. The annual plants will melt into wet, withered corpses, and the perennials will go into hibernation like children curled into themselves to keep a warmer dormancy.

And the time to close that door is now. About mid-August air-born allergens start driving me inside—increasing the push as pollen count rises. More importantly, if I let extended garden projectts block hopeful planning of autumn/winter pursuits, I’ll end up, as last year, like a newbie sailor cast upon the open sea without map or compass.

I’ve made forays into possible cold-time pursuits, experimented with art journaling methods and jostled fabrics into patchwork patterns.

But these forays, though pleasant, felt somehow vapid, and failed utterly to conjure the gusto of “the garden.” At least so far.

Only here and now, in my writing of this post, is the root reason coming to light.

The clue word above is “vapid.”

Compared with the garden building and growing experiences palpable with the Presence of God, these more recent indoor endeavors seem lifeless… because they are!

It’s the God factor. It’s “the living God” my heart and soul long for, my heart and even my body thirst for (Ps 84:2; Ps 143:6;  Ps 63:1). He was in “the garden,” no doubt about it, but He doesn’t seem to be in the “creativity room,” in the quilt-making or even the art journaling.

This need not remain so. God’s presence fills every micro-inch  of His Creation, surrounds paint brush and sewing needle as much as garden trowel. My soul thirsts not for the outward occupation of busy work, but the inward occupation of Himself, filling my space, my soul, my all.

The collage at top contains a phrase from an old September Victoria magazine: “Finding the quiet center of our lives.” I know full well what my quiet center is: Himself. And as Augustine said, no matter what I do or don’t do, my heart will remain restless till it finds its rest in Him. He’s the fount from which flows the richest vitality in any endeavor.

He has been the real life of “The Garden,” the ultimate reason I haven’t wanted to close the door on it. He, the Creator, will be the real life of whatever proceeds from the Creativity Room as well, if I allow it.

How to do that I need to write in a separate post.

Wordsday.

That’s what I’ve long considered calling this fourth day of the week here on the blog, along with purposing to explore a fresh, new, meaningful word each week. But, well, I never got started, did I?

And all this summer, where have I been? Not here on any post, not since May! I have good reasons excuses, but the real underlying problem is best expressed in the word I now present as my first weekly Wordsday Word:

INERTIA

in-er-tia   1 : a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force … 2 : indisposition to motion, exertion, or change : INERTNESS

-Merriam Webster’s  Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

Saturday the doorbell rang, just as I was about to grab a quick shower, then scoot out to pick up one of those nice barbequed chickens for dinner, along with a couple of refreshing salads and a carton of ice cream. That weekend dinner menu had been residing in my mind all day, because cooking’s less fun when the kitchen’s overheated and so am I. But instead of scooting to either the shower or away in the car, I scooted to the back door to see… a knock-me-over surprise! A good friend I haven’t seen in far too many months. We’d both been bogged down in our own to-do mires, and neither of us had gotten around even to calling or emailing. Until now. Until some external force acted upon her inertia. Never mind that the same thing hadn’t happened to mine, even though I’d thought of her repeatedly…

We hugged big, then talked long and well, moving from one strata of conversation to another, deeper and deeper, from the superficial, to the accounts of what was going on in our respective lives, to the deeper honest talk about how these happenings had affected our hearts and souls, and how and where God had “appeared” in the difficulties and wowed us by His obvious involvement.

There was no way I was going to shoo her out the door… I recalled that I had some emergency chicken pies in the freezer…

A couple hours later as we walked toward her car, Husband, who had shown up by now, asked her when she planned on retiring. A few years, she said.

“Just don’t retire from something,” I advised. “Retire to something.”

Husband mentioned the importance of keeping active always.

She heartily agreed. With a grin she shared a maxim she’d just heard to that effect:

“A body set in motion remains in motion. A body at rest… rests in peace.”

As I think back on all that, I see the inertia principle in action—or inaction—all through that afternoon—and through the months leading up to it. And I certainly see it in the dearth of words on this blog all summer.

There are all kinds of inertia: physical, mental, emotional, psychological, even spiritual.

But sometimes an external force acts upon that body, or mind, or heart, or soul, and gets it going again.

I knew I was in need of just such an external force, as August waned and September approached. If I didn’t get this blog started now, it would most likely just… rest in peace!

So I took it to God. I didn’t ask for Him specifically for the drive to get it going, but more for guidance as to whether I should bother. And God does provide.

In this case? Through examples. New posts suddenly appearing on other long-silent blogs refreshed my mind and stirred up my heart, and gave me a sense of connection. Realizing their great value for me gave me the hope that my own might do the same, if for only one person. And this post at soulPantry especially gave me a wonderful, friendly shove— “coincidentally” called “Prompt: To Move to Action.” Thanks, Kel!

***

Has inertia stalled your momentum in any area of your life lately? Has any external force given you a friendly push and gotten you going in a right direction again? What or who was it? If not, what eternal force do you think could nudge you?

*****