Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we call our own. The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will take place between them and other seeds in the dark underground of consciousness where we become who we are.
Maria Popova
4 Comments
Faye White
Oh wow, this is both fascinating and overwhelming. The seeds do not just originate from the positive, beautiful, loving but the negative, ugly, hateful as well. I’m flummoxed.
Monte Stevens
My understanding is her point is on the creativity within the arts not on the personality of the individual. So from a creative stance so much depends on the seeds we are given and how we chose to nurture them. I do believe you are right, how we live the reality of life from the seeds we are given can bear beautiful and creative fruit, while some will be noxious and invasive. We all have the capacity to be negative, ugly, and hateful. Here is her full post which may help to understand her point.
geri oster
Isn’t it a bit about being able to see and utilize all of life as an incubator for what we shall be and do and create within and without ourselves for good? The challenge for me seems to be to let go my need to judge good or bad, not only your creations and you, but especially those creations from my own soul and mind. Blessings.
Monte Stevens
I agree, Geri. Our creativity can be good or bad. You bring up the idea of not judging, the dualistic look at life. We can do much better if we live in paradox.