I’m returning to creativity as a way of life, wanting it to be in my muscles and my being and my fibers as a playful act, the beginning, the end and the in between, as my modus operandi and as natural as physical daily movement.
To do that, I need to be detached from the product of it and enamored of the process. Or maybe I don’t have to be; it is, however, something I want to be.
A friend yesterday gave me the perfect summer metaphor of building sandcastles. What is more joyful than the present-state bliss of building in the sand, tactile, earthly and fleeting, knowing that what will come of it, of course, is an erosion, disappearance, and washing away? That to be doing it just to do it, to create and surrender to the elements, to welcome them in and embrace them; to know that whatever it is is what it is right now and then it washes into smoothness, and to create for the sake of play and creation anyway?
It’s taking joy and delight in the unstable, a complete and unending act of doing it to do it, and appreciating both what comes of it then and whatever will after. There is always more sand to be found, willing and waiting to work with your hands, the water, and moment, to become whatever it may for right then, and then, to fall, shift, wash into the next.