Beg Steal or Borrow

I grew up in a small town. It was a good place for kids and families to live.  We could go out for the day and leave the house unlocked. My dad would park the car in the yard and leave the key in the ignition where he knew he could find it. Nobody robbed our house or stole our car. Families knew each other and there was a sense of community.

If you did something bad as a kid, it had a way of getting back to your parents as fast as a packet of information can move down a fibre optic line in today’s digital world.  Maybe the eyes of a community had a way of keeping things in check. Maybe it was limiting to stay.

When I was 17 years old, I left home for university and never lived in my small town again.  I didn’t miss it. I felt grown up in the big world. In the years that followed, the city became my home. I loved what the city had to offer - anonymity, diversity, energy and opportunity. I still love it for all the same reasons.

In the past decade, I have been drawn back to rural life where everything is slower, simpler and unadorned.  It’s as if I can’t wait to return to that which I couldn’t wait to be free of when I was just starting out in the world.  

My life is the circle game, as Joni Mitchell so insightfully captured in her song of the same name.  I think all of us look back and remember the days when we were young, when we had big dreams and couldn’t wait to get started on the world.

This song is an acoustic cover of a beautiful and haunting song by Ray Lamontagne and the Pariah Dogs.  Beg Steal or Borrow isn’t about ripping anyone off to get ahead. It is a metaphor for doing what is necessary to get where your dreams want to take you.

A Mythical Tale

Hummingbird and Dragonfly were resting in the branches of a purple-flowered shrub. “Timethief is hoping to choose a Favicon and she has narrowed her choice to the two of us, “said Hummingbird.

“Yes,” said Dragonfly. “Who do you think is the best choice for her?”

Hummingbird darted to a more comfortable branch, pausing in mid-flight to consider the question. “I believe you are, dear Dragonfly, for you have so many dimensions. You transform yourself in keeping with the illusion of life. You are worldy and unwavering as you travel the canvas of life. That is Timethief.”

“You are very kind, my lovely feathered friend,” replied Dragonfly. Of course I would be honored to represent her. But I believe you are the best choice. You are a messenger, rising from the western meadows with precision and grace. You are a diviner of time and space, and that is also Timethief.”

And so the conversation went on throughout a pleasant afternoon, each graciously offering reasons why the other should be chosen. As the sun began to drip from a late afternoon sky, Eagle overheard the conversation and dropped down onto a broken limb of an Arbutus tree.

“You are both worthy, my friends,” said Eagle. “But only Timethief can choose. For no matter what any of us may think of her or see in her, what she is, is what she believes herself to be. Only she can know.”

“That is so like you, Eagle, to see the bigger picture,” said Dragonfly. And realizing that no answer could be found, she immediately departed for a bug ice cream stand on a cool lily pad in a nearby pond.

“Indeed,” added Hummingbird, whose ankles were growing very tired from perching so long on a wobbly branch. “Your intuition is very sharp and you also see the inner picture.” And with that, she was gone in the twitch of a wing and the blink of an eye, seeking the abundance that comes with sweet moments.

Eagle looked out over the western meadow, her solo dreams in crescendo with a chorus of chirping crickets rising up from the simmering summer grass. Field Mouse looked up and saw Eagle gazing at the distant horizon. A grace note, in harmony with the music of the land, she scurried unnoticed into a tiny burrow within a greater chord.

Timethief will choose when she is ready, thought Eagle. At that moment, a breeze came in from the water, ruffling her crown feathers, stirring ancient wisdoms and yearnings. Inspired, she spread her majestic wings and lifted up into the eternal lightness of being and the peace that comes from knowing one can never make a wrong choice.

Creativity and Aging

All of us are born with a natural inquisitiveness. When we are children, we are all creative. We experiment with everything around us in order to learn. But early in our lives, not coincidentally around the time we head to school, we figure out that it is faster, easier and often safer to duplicate what someone else is doing rather than to make up things ourselves. Creativity can be hard and dangerous. There are no rules and no guidelines. It makes children nervous in an uncertain world.

Childhood and education conspire to kill our creativity. Now all you educators out there are going to want to challenge me on that, but let me say up front that I am not blaming you for any of this. Where I live, schools are consumed with curricular outcomes and data collection. Arts programs are withering on the vine with funding cutbacks and from the pursuit of higher academic ratings. Schools also have to compete with a relentless and pervasive pop culture. Educators, it is not your fault that lunch-time karaoke and lip-synching contests are more popular than the jazz band concert or the student art show.

It is part of human survival to learn to fit in. Additionally, we learn to be successful by mimicking the norm. But we risk ceasing to be authentically creative when we simply reproduce that which is just handed to us by mass culture . Even now, someone out there may be thinking about lifting words off this blog post. I should be flattered, but I just find it sad that someone would think my writing is better than what they could express on their own.

Everyone knows the purpose of a coloring book is to color inside the lines. Did you ever draw a picture in grade school and put a band of blue on the top of a white page for sky and a band of green on the bottom for grass? How about stick figures? Children don’t see the world that way, but those were the drawings that hung all over my Grade 1 class. In absence of knowing what to do, children (and grown-ups) look around and follow others. Why would anyone knowingly give a child a coloring book and take from them the freedom to draw something of their own? Answer: It is simply fun to color and it’s great for developing fine motor skills. But somewhere along the line, this activity has been terribly confused with art and the act of being creative.

I flunked out of Grade 3 Conservatory piano lessons when I was young. One day, my music teacher, bemoaning a horribly inaccurate rendition of “Fur Eloise”, asked me how my rather interpretive version could possibly be what Beethoven had intended. I knew what I played was awful. I just wanted to play what I heard and at the time, that was Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys.  But music rules were to be followed. My friend Sheila played the notes as written like a robot. She excelled. To this day, she can’t pick a tune out on the piano in the absence of sheet music.

Nonetheless, acquiring the fundamental skills can spare you pain down the road. Unless you become somewhat competent, you can be clobbered by the Simon Cowells of the world. All the talent in the world won’t save you from ridicule if you put yourself out there and can’t deliver on the basics. I am not advocating abandoning practise or suggesting there is no value in mastery of the arts. But I see many people who have creative ability simply give up their interest over a perceived  lack of ability to measure up.

As we age, we recover the creative freedom we were born with. We start to see through the rules and we emerge with clear eyes and fresh ears for the world. Some of the greatest writing, art, science discoveries and music have been produced by people between the ages of 70-90. This does not surprise me. When we reach a place in our life where we are able to let go of what we think we should be doing, we return to our original, natural, childlike inquisitiveness. We start to color outside the lines. We take up the piano again and play the notes we want. We even have the audacity to write and publish our creative words in a blog. Creativity lost in childhood returns as we age. Here lies a path to eternal youth.

(Original drawings done by Erika, Age 8, El Salvador)