Creativity Is Letting Go

I’ve been watching bits and pieces of the Lord of the Rings movies lately.  Those movies and  books are some of the finest examples of a creative person letting go that I have ever seen.  The characters Mr. Tolkien creates, the animals he imagines, are beyond belief, yet his books and the movie makers make them come to life.  They let their creativity get loose.  And we are the better for it.

I’m also reading The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and the same can be said of these stories and characters.  Who ever heard of a talking horse, or a wardrobe that magically leads to the land of promise and a lion named Aslan?

The closest I’ve possibly come to letting myself go was after reading the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.  She encourages her readers to sit in front of a mirror and then draw their face as they see it reflected in the mirror.  As surely as I sit and type I drew an exact replication of my own face.  I could not believe that, for I am a self-confessed non-art-drawing person.  My art lies in music and writing and such. 

As I reflect back on that experience, I

remember talking to myself and my sub-conscious self all during that exercise.  “Let go.  Draw what you see.  Note the shades, the light and the dark, note the texture of your hair”, etc.

I was letting myself go. 

I’ve done that a few times in my writing, and then there are times when I have been afraid of certain posts, certain subjects.  I feared what my siblings may say, or my close friends, even how Carolyn might interpret an idea.

Perhaps this begs the question – do we sometimes fear creativity?  Creativity, by its very nature spins off a nice list of some incredible words:

  Imagination

    Inspiration

      Ingenuity

        Inventiveness

          Resourcefulness

            Creativeness

              Vision

                Innovation

I’ve been resourceful before.  To me that means taking something that exists already and putting it to other uses.  I do that with words all the time.  I’ll give an idea three or four different treatments for the different blogs sites I have.  And it is creativity.

I’ve come to this conclusion as I write this piece.  Letting go is hard.  Letting go sometimes means losing control for a moment or two. 

It’s hard to let go.  Perhaps we sometimes fear it will become epidemic and that the rest of our lives will spiral sideways and fall off the proverbial cliff.

I know when I started my blog A Time for Rhyme, I feared that some would not get it.  I started out attempting to write like Shel Silverstein.  I adore his brand of creativity, and I wrote some pretty crazy stuff in the beginning. 

And then, magically perhaps, I evolved into a poem/prose style of short phrased poems that do not rhyme.  I feared ridicule from the Poem Cops, which thankfully never came.  I finally reached a comfortable spot with that and decided I liked what I was producing, and I was comfortable in my own skin.  Good enough.  Perhaps that was a form of letting go. 

I don’t know if any of this is helping you or not, but I sometimes think about this stuff, for I consider myself a creative type and I seek to explore the new, the different way of saying the tried and true.  I seek new insights, new avenues of expression. 

I hope you find some measure of creativity and letting go in your own life.  I hope you find the guts to launch whatever it is you need to launch – a new business, write and sing your own songs, write your own essays … and at the end of the day, I really hope your press “PUBLISH”.

That is where our creativity needs to go.  It needs to breathe the free air of expression.  We want to see your juicy moments of creativity.

This is my morning reflection.

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