Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.
Brené Brown, Rising Strong
I must stop eating cheese and crackers before bed. Awake again last night, gifted with a measure of unplanned reading time, but causing me to wake late this morning.
A note from a special friend is waiting when I wake. My heart aches for her, even as it celebrates with her for making a difficult choice prompted by the power of the written word.
I ponder her words and go to other words. I consider how creative pursuits have served as healing and teaching tools in the lives of people I know and love—this dear one included. We return to them in times of change and growth and they help us move forward. How precious it is that the Creator implants this desire to create within us, knowing it will move us closer to where we need to be.
A sentence, a photograph, a painted picture, a fabric bag: the crafting of all of these things take us to a different place—the place where we can hear the truth and find peace for those things that trouble us.
We return to the necessary work of making things and we become gentler, kinder, and wiser in the process. We create, and the cacophony of the world falls away as we work in solitary wonder, and something new springs forth.
We find healing.
We are changed.
We put something out into the world that changes another.
And we move forward.
Oh, Linda, you’ve expressed this so beautifully. You’ve put into words why I write, why I like to make things in the kitchen and with crafts. It all brings such grace to my life, and I don’t know where I would be without it.
Thank you, Karen. Aren’t we blessed by this gift of creativity–both in the making and in the partaking?