Today I’m contemplating creativity. I’ve been looking at the work of Anita Klein, this is her picture (www.anitaklein.com). I love her work, the simple everyday experiences imbued with a sense of wonder, made extraordinary by her looking, her inner way of perceiving. This reminds me of the words of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke…
I feel it now, there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
I notice that there is a common thread here between this post and the last, how everything is already there,as David Whyte says ‘waiting for us’ or as French philosopher Merleau Ponty describes it, we exist within ‘the flesh of the world’, a world which is always already there, imminent, it’s infinite variety and richness dependent on our capacity to look, see, perceive, listen, smell, taste and touch with openness, receptivity and awareness. Think of the raisin!
Mindfulness is such a great support in sharpening the inherent capacity that we all have to apprehend the world fully in all it’s vividness. It allows one to quieten the clamour of self-preoccupation and so be available, receptive to the gift of this world, this life. This is what Anita does so well, she renders the world in vibrant colours, there is a brightness, a love for the world in her work that touches me so. She reminds me to look again, and again at the world around me, the familiar things and to see the wonderousness of it all.
We so often assign the gifts of creativity to artists and yet we are all artists when we live our lives with awareness, making choices about how we think, speak and act, how we ‘engage’ with the world. This is a creative act. Perhaps the most creative thing anyone can do is live life as a craft, an art, to experience, as Anita so evidently does, the wonderousness imminent in the everyday.