Creativity by Darylynn Starr Rank

The cream-coloured daffodils in my garden are still blooming, while the velvet-yellow tulips are in full spring splendour. You know how it goes. The earth is creating itself anew.  The birds building nests. The squirrels rushing around getting prepared for their newborn. My own personal favourite moment of the rebirth is the Great Blue Herons who have started flying past my bedroom window again. They're on their way to their hatchery high up in the trees of the primeval part of the forest they use for nesting.

Spring always makes me want to write. I think it makes me want to share in the moment of creation.  Bring something new into the world. Something that has never been said or done in quite this particular way ever before. Because it's new. It's mine. It's my own personal creative act. So it has to be unique. By definition.

I stopped writing for seventeen years. Couldn't write a word that had anything to do with 'art' for all that time. When I found my way back to it (through an extraordinary journey of exploration), the second page I wrote described the lavender/blue hyacinths blossoming in my garden. So I really do know that my own particular reclaiming of creativity did, indeed, happen in the spring.

So many of us experience winters of gray, cold silence in which nothing creative emerges.  The emptiest ones are metaphorical, those in our minds. Every branch, every twig, bare of anything green or growing. And, sometimes, it doesn't ever seem to end.  A lot of the time we're not even aware of having lost something. So many of us are absolutely sure we never were creative. Ever.

But you know, I've never met a single person, when push comes to shove, when confronted with the reality of their 'early' years, when they're truly ready to look, who didn't have something artistic they loved to do as a child. Whether it was writing poems, or singing songs, or banging on any object that would make the sound of drums. Drawing pictures in the sand or the snow or in mud puddles. Much less finger-painting with actual paints. Whether it was making worlds out of Play Dough, Leggos, Tinker Toys or Mechano (remember that?)  Or making stories and plays about elegant adult tea parties or frontier, cattle-rustling, bronco-busting cowboys. Even dancing around the living room. 

You see, it comes with the territory of being alive, I think. This urge to be creative.  Just look out your window. Step out your front door.

But winters can be very difficult sometimes, especially those metaphorical, internal ones.  Painful even. The ground is hard. Sky, gray. A monochromatic emptiness. And we forget.

We forget the saturated green of new grass. The vivid red of that special rhododendrum. The strong sweet scent of the yellow bruim, the magnolias, the viburnam that fills the warming air of spring. We forget what it was like to simply burst forth with the joy and excitement and sheer, glorious fun of our creativity. Forget what it is like to be yelling (even if only in our minds) at the top of our lungs with new ideas, new stories, new pictures, new weavings, new songs. We really do forget.

For me, spring always comes as a bit of a surprise.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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