Be, Awake, Create by Rebekah Younger

Author:Rebekah Younger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2019-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Contemplation Your Creative Process

Consider how the last paragraph relates to your own creating. Write about the process of one of your creations. How did it create an outcome inspired by an experience? It could be an artwork, event, or accomplishment in your life, large or small.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the various components of any creative act and how being awake in this dynamic process leads to fresh and vital expressions.

Joining Now and Here

So the bandstand…is really a sacred space…you have no opportunity to think about the future, or the past. You really are alive right here in this moment.… Everyone’s listening. We’re responding. You have no time for projected ideas. —Stefon Harris, jazz vibraphonist

Meditation and the awareness exercises help us be present in now and aware of here. When we join them together in the creative process, being here now, a fresh and genuine creation is born. You communicate your experience by making choices and taking action, a natural consequence of the energy generated by joining now and here.

Now is pregnant potentiality, an ever-fluid space where inspiration arises. There is room for something to happen. The possibilities are endless. Only in the present can we act. You can’t create in the past, though memories may inspire your creations. You can make plans for the future, yet in the present, they are but a dream. These are thoughts that may lead to creating. Yet the actual act of creating happens in real time—now.

Here is very specific sensory input from the environment—your direct experience. This is current reality, what you create with, including materials, tools, and resources. Through sensory awareness, you perceive what you have. Then, you choose what to do with it. Clarity of perception leads to clarity of expression. Now is grounded in the reality of here. This is where creating takes place.

Your conscious awareness is the energy that brings these two together. It was my awareness of the Point Reyes afterglow that inspired a creative response. Someone else could have expressed that experience as a painting, poem, wash of colored lights on a gallery wall, or not at all. Throughout the process, the creation might have shifted to something else or been abandoned altogether. Yet, I wanted it to be a knit garment and used the materials and resources available to make that happen. Each experiment gave me new information and a new now and here. I cared enough not to abandon my vision or deny the reality of my materials. This provided a dynamic energy to fuel my creative process. With each step closer to the vision, the energy became stronger and each setback was an opportunity to commit to what mattered most about the vision. These three principles are at the core of every creative process.

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