Amigos, it can be said that business as usual will not be enough for us to restore our home to its highest productive and creative capacity. That’s why I have asked creativity and innovation thought leaders Larry Robertson and Damian Valles to offer 50 of us a 6 hour workshop tomorrow (Monday) that reminds us that creativity is ALREADY the common language of humankind, and what propels most of us on life’s journey.
Saturday in front of an audience of 150 at the Tucson Book Festival, Larry engaged three former MacArthur Fellows in a discussion of what creativity is and is not. It is NOT a rare genetic condition gifted to just a few by some uncommon mutation. It is also NOT a behavior that simply runs in families, generation to generation, like being a king or a munchkin.
It is a way of looking at the range of possibilities in this world, feeling motivated to take the risk of pursuing one or more of them that others aren’t betting on, and cultivating the luck and patience of seeing it through to fruition.
It IS a shared language across all species of primates in the genus Homo that ultimately makes us polyglots capable of metaphorical thinking and leaping poetry, of shaping beauty out of nothing and brilliance out of darkness. It is within the reach of each of us, but like the contemplative practice of prophets and hermits, it needs to be nurtured on a daily basis, because it will vanish from our lives if we neglect it rather than nurturing it in and around ourselves.
It IS a tool for survival and the only thing that we can participate in daily that might save us from narcissisidom (the KindDumb of Donaldom, boredom, fiefdom and other dumbnesses and numbnesses and mental illnesses).
Take the risk to restore your capacity for creativity to your daily activities… it’s already there within you, waiting to sing harmony with you and others in the Asylum Choir.
-Brother Coyote
