Here’s the re-cap for the last five posts that offered several lenses to how creative expression may be headlocked by the idea that some of us have the creative spark and some of us don’t.

I’ve attempted to derail some suggestions that may have steered us to the conclusion that we are spark disabled: We’re not smart enough, special enough, crazy enough, high enough or we lack the creative gene(s).

Perhaps this presupposition (among others) is really about some attachment to our tinkered identities and the borders we knowingly and unknowingly stack to contain those I.D.s. I mean, if we have a deep rooted belief that we were born sparkless or anti-creative and we have decided that’s final so why bother, that’s about as limiting as it gets. It’s tied to that old curse of I’m not good enough. But hey, if you’ve bought into an idea of lack and you’re here and reading this, you must have some doubt and that will give you a bit of space to stretch out. It’s been said that doubt and belief are one in the same–doubt is a form of belief and within all belief there is doubt. I’ve mentioned this before but if we doubt our creative potential and this frees us from concepts around creative expression, we can use this doubt as an ally to play and explore without expectation and judgement. If, however, our doubt solidifies to a hard belief that we are not creative, there’s not really any space for an invitation.

A few months back I caught a news video about an Irish farm cat, called Della, that had adopted some ducklings. She had recently given birth to kittens and brought the ducklings into her

This is Della.

space where she nursed them (!) and raised them to adulthood. In the video everyone is trying super hard to rationalize why a predator would behave so contrary to a predator’s so-called ‘instincts’. But I think this happening offers a beautiful insight into the limitations of our reason and our attachment to fixed identities that keep us from seeing the essence of things. Like I’ve said, it’s most likely that it’s our ideas about ourselves that keep our creativity at arm’s length.

I’ve mentioned the research of Frank Barron several times in this chapter and I wanted to share his list of traits that his research shows is shared by individuals in all creative fields (keep in mind that there is nothing absolute about this list, it’s just one way to consider this):

* an awareness and openness to one’s inner life

*a trust in intuition

*a preference for complexity, ambiguity and asymmetry

*a high tolerance for disorder

*acceptance of contradiction

*the ability to locate and extract order in chaos

*a willingness to take risks

*independence, ability to go against the mainstream

*highly observant

*unconventionality

scary things can be friendly

If you read this and are thinking, well dang it, I don’t have any of those! Hold on. This list is actually pretty friendly. Many of these traits are available possibilities for anyone to choose to develop. I’ll let you decide which ones but you might begin by trying on an openness to your inner life. Many of my adult students (and some youth) insist that they need things to be in a step by step linear order–that it is their nature to be highly organized and they identify as being something like ‘concrete sequential’. This could all be true (and it could be a part of someone’s creative process) but perhaps it is worth asking the question: Is this my nature or is this more about how I’ve been conditioned to experience the world and feel safe? When it comes to creativity we need to become aware of what frees us and what actually keeps us stuck. Della didn’t let the common nature of a cat hold her back.

Unless we find a way to ditch or doubt the belief that we have no spark to coax forth, this isn’t going to be any fun.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

-VOLTAIRE