![Picture](/uploads/4/3/5/0/43506379/1475543.jpg?297)
Travertine. It is everywhere. There is a large expanse of ecru beauty, an alien landscape.
Travertine under your feet and across the distance for miles, in a sea of such delicate grout lines, that the massive 5’x5’ blocks of stone read more like a homogeneous flood than an orderly crossword puzzle of individual pieces. In the middle of the field of stone, 33 yards ahead of you, is a large monolith of the same material. It is somewhat ova-shaped, just the slightest nuance of a curvature reminiscent of a billowing canvas sail on an open ocean voyage. You know that perfect arc. Because you handpicked that perfect arc.
Within the center of this flawless monolith, a brook emanates clear, blue waters. And there you are within this massive scene of perfect neutral nothingness of color, with this perfect something-full of a spectacle at its center: a religious experience of a fountain with shimmering, Mediterranean azure-colored waters flowing onto a perfect, pristine world of travertine. And it takes all of your strength and power not to break down, in a full and urgent kneel to Life, at this beautiful sight.
It took me years. Years to realize.
Tell me how you are “not creative.” Some days, I think of the old cliché: “If I had a dollar for every time….” I jokingly muse: if I had a dollar for every time my daughter needed me and called for me when she was little: “mami” – “ma” – “mom” – “mamá.” Just a dollar for any version of the word ‘Mother’ uttered with an immediate yearning, or a sudden rousing from a nightmare in the late night, I would be very rich. So how about, a dollar for every time you have heard someone say about themselves, “I am not very creative.”? We would all be millionaires.
We, as cogs in our proper places of this proper societal machinery, have been conditioned to display humility beyond true honesty. If you feel you fully rock in your ability to cook a mean and wonderful Ravioli al Pesto or fix the unfixable laser printer, it seems you are supposed to take any compliments about it with a shruggy-shouldered, timid mumble of a response. And so, self-confidence has been mucked-down to false modesty in its struggle to avoid perceived conceit. This is where humble imploded all over itself and left us with doubt and reluctance. After years of deflecting the compliments, you may succeed in not believing you are anything anymore.
You are walking up a staircase that is only about two feet wide. The loud crunchy protests of the wooden risers under your feet tell you the age of this old home. The handrail shows the careful painting and color selection of another era – deep cabernets and ceruleans, with fine, golden accents on the delicate rosettes that are spaced evenly through its path – layers of color now perishing to fade and puckering through years of disuse and neglect. Finally reaching the second floor, there are a number of hallways to choose from, all of an uncomfortable, way-not-up-to-code tightness and equal proportion of creepiness. It is like a Winchester Mystery House of diminishing widths, each complicated space narrower and more claustrophobic than the last. You select a direction, but to navigate to the next room ahead you have to move sideways in the suffocating sandwiching of walls. You never reach the room. You wake up bewildered, in the sticky preamble of a full sweat.
And it took me years. Years to realize…that we are each creators and creative.
The travertine sea has never existed. The creepy, creaky Victorian has never had a physical form in this world. These are the landscapes that I allowed into being, to serve as appropriate backdrops to my dreams. Each custom-made and conjuring up a specific feeling: anxiety…or elation.
I cling to the memory of that hauntingly ethereal off-white expanse. It makes me happy, and it holds me in awe to realize that our minds have the power to author a place so compelling. Think about it the next time you get ready for bed. It is a miracle to think that you can create a place that never existed. Sure, some nights you might be back at your childhood home or neighborhood sandbox, walking around in a perfect replica, but what about the other nights? The nights where you are crossing the Madagasi mountain ranges, among dense, specific flora that you have never seen in a documentary or in person? Or where you are perched on the rooftop of a primary-colored, Mondrian-like, Rubik’s-Cube of an apartment building in Budapest? Where did those spaces come from? It sort of makes a person look forward to going to sleep. It is like going to a movie theater where the film will be fully a surprise, and in the projection room there is an eccentric guy with a wheel of fortune in front of him, ready to wildly pick at chance the genre, the setting, the era of the feature he is going to show you. We are all our own directors, set designers, and authors.
So tell me about how you are not so creative. We all got so busy typecasting ourselves into our Life roles. The artist is not allowed to think he is good at physics, while the engineer sighs in front of a blank canvas thinking she holds no ideas worth painting – and each suffers in the longing of the supposed greener grass that the other one masters.
It is a grand moment when the societal pressure to be so demure and be so humble subsides, and a true respect for your potential is set free.
Creativity is imagination that is granted permission.
Close your eyes, and see.
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - by The Beatles
www.dailymotion.com/video/x1kcsgz_lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds-official-video-hd_music
Travertine under your feet and across the distance for miles, in a sea of such delicate grout lines, that the massive 5’x5’ blocks of stone read more like a homogeneous flood than an orderly crossword puzzle of individual pieces. In the middle of the field of stone, 33 yards ahead of you, is a large monolith of the same material. It is somewhat ova-shaped, just the slightest nuance of a curvature reminiscent of a billowing canvas sail on an open ocean voyage. You know that perfect arc. Because you handpicked that perfect arc.
Within the center of this flawless monolith, a brook emanates clear, blue waters. And there you are within this massive scene of perfect neutral nothingness of color, with this perfect something-full of a spectacle at its center: a religious experience of a fountain with shimmering, Mediterranean azure-colored waters flowing onto a perfect, pristine world of travertine. And it takes all of your strength and power not to break down, in a full and urgent kneel to Life, at this beautiful sight.
It took me years. Years to realize.
Tell me how you are “not creative.” Some days, I think of the old cliché: “If I had a dollar for every time….” I jokingly muse: if I had a dollar for every time my daughter needed me and called for me when she was little: “mami” – “ma” – “mom” – “mamá.” Just a dollar for any version of the word ‘Mother’ uttered with an immediate yearning, or a sudden rousing from a nightmare in the late night, I would be very rich. So how about, a dollar for every time you have heard someone say about themselves, “I am not very creative.”? We would all be millionaires.
We, as cogs in our proper places of this proper societal machinery, have been conditioned to display humility beyond true honesty. If you feel you fully rock in your ability to cook a mean and wonderful Ravioli al Pesto or fix the unfixable laser printer, it seems you are supposed to take any compliments about it with a shruggy-shouldered, timid mumble of a response. And so, self-confidence has been mucked-down to false modesty in its struggle to avoid perceived conceit. This is where humble imploded all over itself and left us with doubt and reluctance. After years of deflecting the compliments, you may succeed in not believing you are anything anymore.
You are walking up a staircase that is only about two feet wide. The loud crunchy protests of the wooden risers under your feet tell you the age of this old home. The handrail shows the careful painting and color selection of another era – deep cabernets and ceruleans, with fine, golden accents on the delicate rosettes that are spaced evenly through its path – layers of color now perishing to fade and puckering through years of disuse and neglect. Finally reaching the second floor, there are a number of hallways to choose from, all of an uncomfortable, way-not-up-to-code tightness and equal proportion of creepiness. It is like a Winchester Mystery House of diminishing widths, each complicated space narrower and more claustrophobic than the last. You select a direction, but to navigate to the next room ahead you have to move sideways in the suffocating sandwiching of walls. You never reach the room. You wake up bewildered, in the sticky preamble of a full sweat.
And it took me years. Years to realize…that we are each creators and creative.
The travertine sea has never existed. The creepy, creaky Victorian has never had a physical form in this world. These are the landscapes that I allowed into being, to serve as appropriate backdrops to my dreams. Each custom-made and conjuring up a specific feeling: anxiety…or elation.
I cling to the memory of that hauntingly ethereal off-white expanse. It makes me happy, and it holds me in awe to realize that our minds have the power to author a place so compelling. Think about it the next time you get ready for bed. It is a miracle to think that you can create a place that never existed. Sure, some nights you might be back at your childhood home or neighborhood sandbox, walking around in a perfect replica, but what about the other nights? The nights where you are crossing the Madagasi mountain ranges, among dense, specific flora that you have never seen in a documentary or in person? Or where you are perched on the rooftop of a primary-colored, Mondrian-like, Rubik’s-Cube of an apartment building in Budapest? Where did those spaces come from? It sort of makes a person look forward to going to sleep. It is like going to a movie theater where the film will be fully a surprise, and in the projection room there is an eccentric guy with a wheel of fortune in front of him, ready to wildly pick at chance the genre, the setting, the era of the feature he is going to show you. We are all our own directors, set designers, and authors.
So tell me about how you are not so creative. We all got so busy typecasting ourselves into our Life roles. The artist is not allowed to think he is good at physics, while the engineer sighs in front of a blank canvas thinking she holds no ideas worth painting – and each suffers in the longing of the supposed greener grass that the other one masters.
It is a grand moment when the societal pressure to be so demure and be so humble subsides, and a true respect for your potential is set free.
Creativity is imagination that is granted permission.
Close your eyes, and see.
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - by The Beatles
www.dailymotion.com/video/x1kcsgz_lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds-official-video-hd_music