What’s creativity got to do with it?
by Ruby Seastone
I’m forever fascinated and startled by how we, as cultures, create versions of “reality” then insist on cementing them into entrenched dogmas. We wouldn’t know who we are, in any of the ways we’ve long been used to figuring that out, if we embraced more fluid, open-ended ways of recognizing the world and each other.
I teach art making to adults of all ages and walks of life, as play, as therapeutic healing, to explore innate artistry, as human expression – because all open up our aliveness to less fixated and more expansive perceptions. Teaching people with everywhere from considerable to zero belief in themselves as art-makers, many have discovered something beyond resigned life-as-is, as a “created,” to becoming a creator – of art, of more innovative knowing and relating to ourselves, of our very lives.
We’re living in times of fertile chaos producing rapid and often unregulated change, for better or for – hopefully – eventually better.
What creativity – from the entire range of art-making through living life itself in more inventive versatility – has to do with this is that it supports practicing new ways of being who we are and can be. It’s a stepping stone, forms a new template from which to fly freer. Such practice erodes the concrete of the tried and tired old ways, drop by drop by drop.
It allows us to discover more about being fully human, because practicing creativeness leads us beyond the mundane, beyond languishing in boredom and obligation. Every single one of us who practices creativity in one form or another contributes to birthing a world built on potential instead of on merely repeating the past. This is what creativity has to do with substantive personal, cultural and even spiritual renewal.
Ruby Seastone PhD is a lifelong multimedia artist, long time creativity teacher, and holistic psychotherapist. You can find out more about her work at www.artlifecreation.com.
Aware that we’re enduring such initiations as the Drumpf Phenomenon as part of the dissolution of old paradigms, she chooses instead to invest her curiosity on the broader evolutionary potentials of, say, the next fifty years.