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

Alice Walker's Writing Wisdom

I confess - I have been a reluctant writer. When words and ideas are flowing, it's extraordinary but it does not necessarily come easy. I am not one of those people that has to write every day or die, one who lives to write. And I loath re-writes! In other words, I can find many other things to do rather than sit at my little humble table and set fingers to keys. Writing is, for me, a labor of...I wouldn't say "love"...but rather "the love of word magic," how they fall out of the air into my mind and on to the paper.

Alice Walker expresses perfectly what I have grown to understand about the act of writing. One must have faith in one's gifts. If you show up, get the work done and you will have won. I claim this as my meditation. It relieves the pressure to create and writers actually have a lot of help. I recall attending a panel discussion in which Walker described living in New York as she was just starting The Color Purple. One day she was standing in a forest of Manhattan skyscrapers looking up at a small slice a available sky and heard a voice in her head say, "What is this shit?!" It was one of her characters speaking in no uncertain terms on her feelings about life in the big city and she was not impressed. I like to think it was Celie. New York City was cramping her style, her story bouncing off all that stone and concrete. Walker said at that moment she knew that to write The Color Purple she had to move to the country, be among trees, flowers, grasses, nature's beauty. Soon thereafter she relocated to Northern California where she now lives and works.

I always loved that story, the magic of it, the spiritual help that was so strongly present in Walker's telling of the story. Since then I have heard many writers describe the phenomenon of their characters speaking to them and often correcting them. That is the gift that all writers and Creatives have available to them; a transcendental energy that speaks, directs and guides our hearts and hands. It tells us what happened next...and then...and then. All we have to do is show up. I am meant to write and I commit to showing up. Dragging my reluctant self to my writing table, sit on my slightly uncomfortable chair and getting the work done. The stories that we each collect in a lifetime is our own unique truth to express and share. We are obliged to do so.

xoxox
Leasa