Understanding Creativity Backwards: Starting With The Questions

It’s all whizzing up in the food processor. Right now.

It boiled in a pot before that. It lay buried in mud before that. It germinated from seed before that.

I reached a very important milestone this past weekend: I made a meal like I do on every day of the week. The difference:  each ingredient was sourced from my allotment garden. That darn patch of soil that has had me sitting on the edge of a raised bed, sweat beads streaming down my neck, hair all fuzzed up in a messy bun, shaking my head at myself.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into two years ago. I knew it would be hard physical work: I mean it was a literal weed and mud collective prior to the rotavator making a terrible noise across the patch of land that marked out my 80 square metres of soil. But I had no inclination whatsoever as to the exasperation I would feel at times, the disheartening reality when I arrived back after two weeks of not being able to be there and staring at weeds so high, I could cry. No one prepared me for the fact that I would actually resent a plant going into bloom because said plant is a weed and that its pollen is everything I don’t want everywhere. I definitely didn’t think a day would come where I would settle on my haunches in the pouring rain and think that it was all a little overwhelming.

The potatoes, onions, garlic, chives and other herbs sweat in the skillet pan, the pungent earthy smell of steam and butter swelling in the room.

I consider what it means for something to be established. We commonly associate establishment with the produce, the yield, the outcome; generally we regard it as established when fruitful, successful and bearing positive results.

Creativity is a little different, or rather my hunch is that creativity requires a different definition of established.

In creative terms, established cannot only be about the yielding of the fruit:

Is it something we reach for?

It is a by product of  what we strive for?

Is it an accidental occurrence as a result of effort?

It is it a given?

Does it require reaching?

I start with the questions as I turn loamy soil in my hand, planning for the frost which the weatherman predicts for tomorrow.

Post and photo by Claire Burge,  author of Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree.

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Want to take your creativity further? Check out Claire Burge’s new illustrated title,  Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree from T. S. Poetry Press.

And join us for our new book club discussion on Spin, beginning November 6.