Creativity is at the root of everything we do.
Our Western culture tends to compartmentalize art and creativity and, in doing so, minimizes their value. But life itself is created and nurtured through childhood. Creativity and art, imagination and exploration, are encouraged during these years.
But then we’re taught that we must get serious, be serious about life. And most of us leave our art and creativity behind. As Wordsworth writes, the “Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy” and we follow what our culture tells us is right, what we must do, how we must “grow up.”
Writing, painting, photography, sculpting, weaving, and all of the many other forms of artistic expression are ways we learn who we are, are ways we process these lives we lead. They are expressions of our essence, our very souls. Joan Dideon said “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Art is about expressing the inexpressible. Art is about metaphor through which we sense and feel that which we cannot express with words. Art is beyond language, beyond borders, genders, religions, beyond anything that separates us. Art is that which resonates so deeply we begin to understand that on that level, we are all truly one.
And so we find ways we can come together with others of like mind, to get away in an idyllic setting, away from the routine, the requirements, the numbing repetition of existence, to find and reclaim our art and, therefore, ultimately our lives. And once reclaimed, we can return home, knowing that the magic was never in that location but rather, is within each of us. It is us and is wherever we are, whatever we do, and is part of that essence that this world has never seen before and will never see again. And ultimately we realize that by retreating we are never “getting away from” but rather, if we are lucky, we live a life in which we are always following our own sacred path toward who we are meant to be.
