We don’t create things out of nothing. We rearrange things that we are aware of. I guess sometimes we’re not aware of them consciously, but they’ve gotten into our mind and then sometimes make a surprise appearance.
There are things we knew about but didn’t appreciate yet.
When we went on summer vacations in the 1960s I was interested in one thing. Playing with my cousins.
Dad pointed out the house where he was born. We’d go to the church where mom and dad got married. I met my grandfather’s sister. We drove down a stretch of road where mom terrified her brothers by driving 35 miles per hour. None of it meant that much to me.
I felt like an outsider with my relatives because I had a different last name and we lived far away.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on my family tree, and I want to find out as much as I can. I want to visit the relatives that are still living in New England, and the graves of those who are deceased.
We get this brief opportunity to be the living ones. My mother wrote an account of her early life that showed me that her generation, and each generation before me, was made of real people with a life full of struggles and dreams.
These are the things floating on the surface of my stream of consciousness now, and are the kind of things that will come out in my creative expression.
Creativity comes naturally to each of us whether we feel we are creative or not. We have to interpret and piece details together in order to know anything at all. Creativity is not reserved for artists, though artists use it to tell their stories. The most whimsical… the most fantastical pictures and stories were stitched together from pieces in the artist’s mental scrapbook.
We develop our craft not only by practicing the creation of art, but by having experiences, observing and reading.
I sometimes feel bad that I didn’t appreciate things earlier, but realization comes in its own time.