Creativity and Self-Expression: What’s Love Got to Do with It?

In short: everything!

In order to be a better creator, and in order to be fully Self-expressed, you must be a better lover.

This sort of love has nothing to do with like, or romance, or heart-shaped chocolates (although they, too, are products of love). This love has everything to do with framing all of your experiences, joyful experiences, difficult experiences, rage, jealousy, and sadness, quite simply everything within an all encompassing outlook of utter miraculousness.  In other words, for us to have any experience at all is based upon an infinite number of causes and conditions extending back billions of years and oodles of light years in all directions.

In the words of Longchempa:

“Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter”

This is the space of love. Not like, not tolerance. But ardent, uncompromising love of a universe and all things in it that have been here to love you, to support you, to challenge you, and to allow you to grow and create.

We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong.  – Brené Brown

Here’s how I put it in my book The Shoreline of Wonder: On Being Creative:

In the tension between the individual and the collective, we cultivate our ability to love. Love, as defined by author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck is “the will to extend one’s self for the purposes of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” According to Huston [Smith, author of The World’s Religions], the historic Jesus, for example, chose love, which brought people together, over holiness, the need to designate what is pure and what is not or to divide people into “the chosen” or “the damned.”

When we commit to leading a creative life, our love and appreciation for others grows. We begin to resonate with the way the insights of all the individuals throughout time have contributed to the world we see today. The language we use, the clothing we wear, the houses in which we live, even the ideas we find important, all originated from someone else’s mind, all originated from their willingness to bring their own insights to fruition. Furthermore, when we recognize this, when we recognize and acknowledge the contributions of others, abundance and generosity come naturally. When we “give” in the spirit of love, we aren’t left with a sense of giving something up, but with something far more basic: Every creative act re-affirms our deeply intimate, interdependent relationship with the world in which we live. As expressed by Isaac Newton, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

On this Valentine’s day, I offer you a poem I wrote on a magical night in San Francisco 2005, where I felt thin veneer of romantic love give way to a love that was far deeper and enduring, the same love that I associate with the heart of creativity and Self-expression.

Valentine’s Day Poem

February’s promise,

and the fog of romance,

rolled over the city.

Valentines mushroomed in storefronts.

Mannequins swaddled in desire’s latest offering

Posed without blinking in red frozen rapture.

As the city teetered with possibility,

that this time around feelings might just be captured,

I fell in love,

with falling

in love.

Downward ever downward

Breaking

surface after surface

until hallways of marble

washed through me like liquid.

Falling

until the fatigue of desire

gave way to contentment’s infinity.

Falling

until the most subtle of life lines

even a gypsy maintains

for a moment

was gone.

I fell

Into urchins bumming change

And hustlers selling watches

I fell

Into the swagger of a princess

And the scars of a victim

I fell

Into dealers pushing exits

And children quickly growing

I fell

Without fear of sudden impact

Without hope of ever landing

Friday’s drunkards howled they’d won their five day battle

An old woman gave God’s blessing for a quarter

taxis came and went.

The thick moist air filled my nostrils

And the buoyant ads of romance continued spinning their fairytales (?).

And I fell, and fell, and fell some more.

A patch of open sky appeared,

a sudden wind gathered might

and beaconed the daily news

and a cadre of debris

To dance outside a window box.

As a connoisseur of suchness,

a witness to the longing,

alone,

I fell in love

and held but just this wish:

That others, too,

Might fall,

and fall,

and fall,

and never

ever

hope

To

land.

February 2005

San Francisco