What Are You Here to Create?

We hear a lot about changing the world.

Changing ourselves.

Changing our habits.

Changing our businesses.

Changing the systems that no longer seem to work.

And certainly, there is plenty that needs changing.

But lately I've been wondering whether change is always the most useful place to begin.

Maybe the better question is:

What are we here to create?

Not someday.

Not when we have more time, more confidence, or a clearer plan.

Now.

With the hands, imagination, experiences, and particular way of seeing the world that belong only to us.

Creation Feels Different Than Change

Change often begins by looking at what is wrong.

Creation begins by asking what might be possible.

That difference feels important to me.

When I am trying to fix something, I can feel myself tightening around the problem.

When I am making something, something else happens.

My attention shifts.

Curiosity returns.

I begin asking different questions.

What wants to exist here?

What could be more beautiful?

What might help someone feel more connected?

What can I make with what I already have?

Creation does not deny what is difficult.

It simply refuses to let difficulty have the final word.

We All Have a Particular Way of Making

My mother is a fiber artist.

Growing up, I watched her work with her hands—slowly, patiently, paying attention to material, texture, and color.

She was not trying to change the world while she worked.

She was making something beautiful.

And yet watching her changed me.

My own path eventually led to stones.

Jewelry.

Trails.

Writing.

Sound.

Ceremony.

For years, I might have described these as different interests.

Now I see the thread running through all of them.

I like creating things that help people notice.

A gemstone against the skin.

A stone carried in a pocket.

A guided walk through a landscape.

A few minutes of sound and stillness inside a beautiful place.

A sentence that makes someone pause before moving on to the next thing.

That may be my particular way of contributing.

It doesn't need to be anyone else's.

The World Doesn't Need Copies

I think one of the easiest things to lose as adults is trust in our own way of seeing.

We learn what is marketable.

What is sensible.

What people in our industry are already doing.

What an expert is supposed to sound like.

What success is supposed to resemble.

And slowly, without realizing it, we can begin creating from the outside in.

We look around first.

Then decide what we're allowed to make.

But the work that moves us most rarely comes from imitation.

It usually carries the unmistakable mark of a person.

The restaurant only that chef could have created.

The room only that designer would have imagined.

The painting you recognize before you've read the name beneath it.

The hotel that could exist nowhere else because it actually belongs to its landscape.

The handmade object where you can still feel the presence of the person who made it.

The most interesting work has a fingerprint.

Maybe That's Our Responsibility

I've been thinking about creativity differently lately.

Not simply as self-expression.

As responsibility.

If there is something you see differently because of the life you've lived, perhaps you are meant to do something with that.

If you know how to make people feel welcome, create places where they belong.

If you know how to grow things, grow them.

If you understand beauty, bring more beauty into the world.

If you know how to listen, create spaces where people can speak.

If your hands know how to make, let them make.

If you have a story that might help someone recognize something in herself, tell it.

Our contribution doesn't have to be enormous to matter.

Often it begins very close to home.

Small Acts of Creation Count

A meal made for someone you love is creation.

A garden is creation.

A business can be creation.

So can a friendship.

A beautifully set table.

A handwritten letter.

A piece of jewelry.

A song.

A room.

A solution no one had thought of.

A new way of welcoming a guest.

Creation is not reserved for people who call themselves artists.

It is one of the ways human beings participate in life.

We take what exists...

and add something that wasn't here before.

A Question I've Been Asking Myself

Instead of asking:

What should I be doing?

I've started becoming more interested in:

What wants to be created through me?

It is a very different question.

It takes ambition out of the driver's seat for a moment.

It makes room for curiosity.

Sometimes the answer is big.

Sometimes it is surprisingly small.

Make the necklace.

Write the essay.

Call the person.

Plant the garden.

Build the experience.

Help another artist find a door she hasn't been able to open.

Begin.

One Last Thought

I don't know that any one of us can change the world.

Maybe that has always been too large a burden to carry.

But we can contribute to the kind of world being created.

Every day.

Through what we make.

What we encourage.

What we pay attention to.

What we choose to bring into existence rather than simply criticize from the sidelines.

The world already has plenty of noise.

Plenty of disruption.

Plenty of reasons to feel overwhelmed.

Maybe our work is not always to become agents of more change.

Maybe it is to become devoted creators of what we believe should exist beside it.

More beauty.

More imagination.

More meaning.

More care.

More places where people can remember what matters.

So perhaps the question isn't:

How am I going to change the world?

Perhaps it is much more intimate.

What is mine to create within it?

Warmly,

Kim Blake
Founder, The Art of Ceremony™