How Do You Create?

©2012, Danise Codekas

The incomplete life is a good life, if you are still breathing. So many serendipitous moments and experiences occurred in the last few months, I am still aligning the events with my brain and emotive body. Without a doubt writing has encompassed and recorded some of these events.

On this pilgrimage into to the southwest, I keep bumping into others’ ideas about creativity, including writers', yet, no writers’ experiences are ever the same, are they? The one thing, dominant in their writings about creativity and the inspiration, is the overwhelming passion they feel about writing. Some, a day cannot go by, without writing their words down.

The flow is unlike that which I feel, when I am sitting on a mountainside, camera in hand, watching a bear and her cubs walking together. There is a different rush and alertness than when I am shooting video, or clicking away at a pack of watchful coyotes, than when I sit with my favorite French pen, in hand with white legal pad, and stroke words between lines.

Both ignore time, yet one demands my full attention, remaining quiet or hidden so as not to frighten away the animals. The other, demands pauses, staring off into the distance, and what really surprises me, if I have pair of headphones on someone can be sitting in the same room, watching TV, and with my music and headphones, the words still flow.

It doesn’t matter whether I am alone, in my kitchen, or office, or enjoying flying between Madras and Singapore. I can write anywhere.

Sometimes, I seek out noisy coffee houses and restaurants for the sheer pleasure of the warmth of humanity that emanates, in a place where bohemian glasnost and hazelnut latte smells, swirl around the tables and talk, vilifying the cruelties of the world, and exalting the impeccability of joy, within the human spirit.

What really grabs my attention is when a cashier, or a barista, is an exceptionally joyful being. Making people relaxed, getting them to laugh, for no reason, other than it is more desired to uplift, than not.

Those humans are worth of my notice. When they remember me, flick my attention from my morning concerns to focus on who is standing before me, in a lackadaisical, kind kidding, sort of way, then they have my respect.

How to get to this point in a dialogue without saying anything of merit, for you, is the mark of a great writer. Some of them, boring treatises, white papers, dissertations, or scientific discoveries are those which do not tie the topic to the heart, or draw parallels, and enhancements, for any human invited to read the author’s document.

Sometimes, we just have to type along until ideas make sense. In my case, I write along, until what I understand, morphs into understandable dialogue. I reach a momentum, during writing, which excludes anything else in my orbit, sensually. Time and space disappear when I am writing.

All that is being transmitted across my fingers comes during the act of writing. I imagine, like a musician, humming along until the notes grab that part of the brain than says, and go write these bars down now. I can feel the words build in me for days, at times.

Some idea, like the one that pops into awareness, when you are half asleep, on a plane and it follows you along, for a few hours. If you don’t write it down, sometimes it is gone forever. Don’t know about you but I always figure it wasn’t meant to come into written form, then. Maybe in a few years or decades until that understanding is totally understood by a soul, yours or mine.

Comedians must be very good writers, I sense. To take serious subjects and draw parallels so that they can be delivered in a few minutes to a couple hundred people, and everyone laughs, or boos, however a universal paradigm is presented, analyzed and shown to be part of the human tragic-comedy, in a way, that connects everyone in the room.

They must write down some of their ideas, along the way, and need to present those ideas in 20 minutes. Very good editors, they must be. To collapse hour and a half speech to 20 minutes segments, we all understand.

How many ideas could we read and understand, if that were the norm? Those long, political speeches would become concise, understandable, and entertaining. If only a comedian could have a last edit with them.

I am going to sleep outside in my car tonight. There is something about being outside the house that has been feeding my curiosity, recently. When I visited the archeological site at Aztec, Colorado something clicked inside me when I walked into the great round kiva. It was built before horses arrived in the Southwest, before the Spaniards brought the horses to the new world.

Every time I sit in a square room now, no matter how large, I am suppressed. Not only do we change emotionally and psychologically, we also change spatially, internally. You could compare it to tasting vanilla for the first time or crème brulee. Some switch, dormant, clicks on, and there we are not content with just chocolate, any longer.

I am not content with just squares, any longer. I want a round house, still. Always a geodesic dome has been at the heart of my house building gene. Stepping into the kivas of Mesa Verde and Aztec reminds me that round is part of our DNA building material.

Discontentedness is easily mistaken as being uncomfortable. They are two different things. You can be uncomfortable, in your favorite chair, because the cushion is wearing out. Being discontented with a chair, has to do with the fact that there is another chair you have sat in or seen that you know will satisfy you more.

Where does this leave us for most of our lives? Leaving behind the desire for a new chair, fixing the old one, one may be able to find contentment. Once the mind is brushed by a new song, tastes a new flavor, or smells the scent of an ocean after years living on a mountain, there is no forgetting. It is physics at the most basic instinct level. Watching affects the observed and the observer.

So, too, the taster, the reader, or the traveler, sitting in a six thousand year old kiva are affected forever. True, every nuance may not be remembered at the mind’s forefront, however, the cells never forget.

The nerve endings that responded in the inner ear, at the back of the tongue, the optic nerve endings, the olfactory nerves remember forever and so we, you and I, are changed forever by the experiences we are led to by our souls.