For millions of American women this is not a foreign concept. They gather. They gab. They eat, shop, drink, watch chick flicks, and then they start all over again. We don't really belong to that august sorority known as the American woman. Ours is a weird little group, with weird little ways of whiling away a beautiful autumn weekend.
We got together to Create. On any normal day we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about creating--unfortunately, perhaps, more time talking about than actually doing. So this weekend the proof was going to be in the pudding.
There were rules:
1. No filing.
2. No sorting.
3. No cleaning.
That last item ain't so hard. The first two, not so easy. Some of us yearned to fill the yawning storage compartments in our vehicles with legions of plastic tubs and cardboard boxes, seeing endless hours of gleeful girl talk as the perfect antidote to the mind-numbingly depressing task of sorting. But some of us are hardened taskmasters and would not allow such pursuits.
Eureka! It worked. We hunkered down and we got stuff done. Fascinating, interesting, unusual stuff we wouldn't have done if we had stayed at home. Stuff like the little gal above, cut from a 19th century magazine, sweeping her way along a pathway of technology created from a now obsolete computer card.
And we talked, a lot, about creativity itself--the elusive muse we try to "catch by the tail" and wrestle to our own ends. In a fit of desperate avoidance behavior I hit Facebook (that old cheater of creativity) and found a fellow writer fighting the same battles had on this very day posted the following lecture about nurturing creativity--a talk given by writer Elizabeth Gilbert. We listened while we worked, the result being more conversation, more thoughtful inquiry, and, eventually, more work:
It all boils down to this crusty remainder: behind every creative impulse is the fear of failure and the fear of so much more. We are the descendents of a long, lusty artistic culture based on "the notion that creativity and suffering are linked." And, as Gilbert so pointedly asks, why have we accepted that? Why have we let that ridiculously childish notion inform our view of the arts, to the point that if a loved one is considering following their passion into a world of art, we question their wisdom, their foresight, even, perhaps, their sanity?
Because it's just plain hard, there's no road map for living it, no prescriptive plan for results. There's simply the giant question mark that all creative impulse must answer--that little bit of the divine placed deep in every human heart that yearns for an earthly voice.
And bottom line: it's work. Like anything else, it requires discipline, focus, repeated practice, and yes, even failure. But...
