The Enduring Nature of Creativity

Happy New Year! I've finally touched the ground long enough to begin regular blog entries again. Last year finished with a bang that traveled with lightening speed into 2012, which promises to be full of activity, unexpected events and many opportunities to create the world we want.

A recent exploration of the streets of Harlem, New York, brought to mind the endurance of creative energy. I marveled at the wide boulevards framed with grand brownstones and the towering residences grounded by elegant stoops where neighbors gathered to pontificate on the news and gossip. Even in winter I could imagine the trees that lined the streets creating a canopy of green leaves and blossoms.

As I walked the streets around of Lenox Ave and 125th Street, past little storefronts and vendor stands, I swear I caught a glimpse of the fine high-stepping sisters and brothers in whose footsteps I travel. And was that Zora Neale Hurston's hearty laughter I heard floated above the clamour of current day commerce? The Negro men and women that inspired Langston Hughes' reams and reams of poetic musing still walk and strut the streets of Harlem, their energy far too vital, bold and life-giving to fade with time. They visit the markets, hair salons, five-and-dimes, and cafes. On Sunday mornings, they crowd into churches to hear the Good Word after a Saturday night of getting sassy. They are as spirited, colorful, and stylish as Langston found them to be during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-30s).

The laughter, the good loving and the bad, the tenderness and tears, the outright bodaciousness of the many writers, artists, intellectuals and musicians who filled these streets with word and song still exists in the air, in the sidewalks, in the brick, stone and mortar that erected buildings so reflective of the optimism of the age. It exists in the very notion of creating. Times were no doubt hard but in spite of it all Zora, Langston, Countee, Arna, Agusta, Marcus, W.E.B., Josephine, Count, Duke, Billie, and Bessie and hundreds of others dared to create an epic age. The Harlem Renaissance. And their creative energy and willfulness endures and we are its blessed beneficiaries.

xoxox
Leasa