This post was written by Cherice Montgomery, a Humanities Center faculty fellow.
Seasons of Creativity
My research focuses on the nature and design of compelling learning experiences. I am especially interested in creating immersive learning environments that put language learners into flow, or a state of such deep attention and personal enjoyment that both self-consciousness and time slip away (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
Making things better requires doing things differently than before, and that entails learning how to be more creative. When we internalize what we are learning, it changes the very core of who we are (see Alma 5:14; 1 John 3:2).
Creativity is a mental skill that can be developed with patience and practice. However, I have also come to believe that creativity is seasonal and that those who wish to discover its secrets must be willing to spend time wandering through many different disciplinary landscapes, wondering about their branching connections, weathering professional uncertainty, and wintering periodic lapses in personal productivity. In the remainder of this post, I explore the seasonal nature of creativity and its relation to my own recent attempts to cultivate a more balanced, fulfilling life.
Wandering
She pulled into the trailhead parking lot and wearily stepped from the car. “I’m too tired to be here,” she thought, sighing deeply. She scanned the small groups of people wandering around the canyon, mildly jealous of their carefree laughter and creative exuberance as they snapped photos of one another against breathtaking backdrops of changing leaves. Her soul longed to wander too—to leisurely sip the magnificent colors and savor the last whispers of warm autumn sunshine. Yet typically by the time mid-October had arrived, so had crunch time, and this fall was no exception.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. Her mind moved to the same rhythm as her feet on the gray gravel beneath her. Visions of unanswered emails, ungraded assignments, and unfinished articles gusted through her mind like the leaves that swirled around her. “I have so much to do! I don’t have time to be here!” she thought. She resented the pressing sense of urgency that made her feel she had to rush through even the most pleasurable parts of life just so she could get everything done.
Her attention shifted to the thick, rich light dripping down the mountains. “There really is ‘a certain slant of light, [autumn] afternoons’” (Dickinson, 1898/1960, p. 118), she mused. The thought sent her mind wandering back to a question that had been posed at the creativity symposium: “Is Dickinson ever useful?” The question troubled her, both because of its implications and because she didn’t have a ready answer. Then again, perhaps it was the wrong question. Did everything have to be useful to be loved?
Emily hadn’t seemed to think so. She had wandered leisurely through the woods near her home, taking time to collect the things she noticed and playfully preserve them in her poems before gifting the items to her friends:
“I robbed the Woods—
The trusting Woods.
The unsuspecting Trees
Brought out their Burs and mosses
My fantasy to please.
I scanned their trinkets curious—I grasped—I bore away—
What will the solemn Hemlock—
What will the Oak tree say?”
(Dickinson, 1898/1960, p. 24)
It seemed that Nature reserved her most interesting secrets for those who regularly spent time there. Thoreau also had a preference for wandering in the woods, unconcerned with “getting somewhere.” Twenty-first century life felt so frantic by contrast. Yet wandering, both physically and mentally, seemed to be a prerequisite to creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Ray Bradbury explained it as an issue of nourishing the soul: “If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.” Learning science scholars take a more theoretical view, explaining that new insights and intuitions present themselves each time one wanders across a “conceptual landscape” in a new direction or “along multiple dimensions” (Spiro, et al., 1987, p. 1; Giordani, 2013). The destination isn’t as important as the cognitive flexibility that ensues–a distinguishing characteristic of highly creative people.
She stepped out of the theories and back into her body. Her eyes wandered over the trees, their leaves flickering toward the sky until the wind caught them and blew them away. Like the autumn leaves, she typically held on for as long as she could until the forceful winds of responsibility blew so hard that sheer exhaustion forced her to let go. And that made her angry. “I rage red,” she thought, as her eyes scanned the carpet of dying leaves. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas, 1937/1971) her mind echoed. “Burn bright, and then burn out. Is my light dying? Am I dying, disintegrating under the exigencies of my life like autumn leaves?” she wondered.
Wondering
A bird glided past her and tenuously perched on a nearby fence railing. Creativity often felt like that–an unexpected, but rather uncomfortable visitor who was never entirely certain it was welcome, or that it was safe to stay. As she observed the bird, wishing she were closer so that she could identify it, she was reminded of a story frequently told by theoretical quantum physicist Richard Feynman (1988):
On weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods and he’d tell me about interesting things that were going on in the woods. ….we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”
I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.”
He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!”
But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. Well, he says, “So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing-that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.) (pp. 12-13).
“Look at the bird and see what it’s doing.” When birding, she had learned to pay attention to a bird’s observable features, the sounds it makes, its behaviors, and its interactions with its habitat. How could she see what Creativity was doing if she never took time to look deeply? How could she interpret its behaviors if she didn’t practice observing them regularly?
She decided that she could go Creativity-watching for just a few minutes. Instead of checking off a list of the birds she had seen, she would curate a collection of some of her favorite species of creativity.
She crested a ridge and suddenly spotted a rare specimen. His long legs were visible as he stood in what appeared to be a ghostly pool of water, watching intently for threats. He was as large as a goose, but shaped like a Don Quijote. Dark eye rings offered a striking contrast to his pale, buffy face from which a sharp omnivorous beak protruded. His most distinguishing feature was a tuft of feathers that stuck out of his crested head like a wild windmill. He was, in her opinion, the epitome of synthesis and a monument to the integration of literary and visual creativity.
She was distracted by the call of another species. At first, she had a difficult time identifying it. She had to listen carefully, capturing and replaying his call several times before she could finally classify it. The call began as chirps of alarm, then morphed into a tenuous warble as though the bird were trying to find his voice. She tried to remain very still as she listened. Sensing no threat, he began to sing–tentatively at first, and then with more confidence. She realized it was an Ira-Glass bird. His gentle, but powerful song resonated deeply with her own experience and reminded her of the importance of authenticity in creative pursuits.
Just as the Ira-Glass bird flew away, her ear caught wind of what sounded like a Batiste-Beethoven bird. The melodious notes sounded familiar at first, but then the rhythm changed and she started to doubt that she had identified it correctly. She consulted her Chris Wallace field guide and discovered she was looking at the rare classical-blues-gospel morph.
She decided to try her luck in a new habitat, and wandered toward STEM Forest. She could usually find intriguing species there. She was not disappointed. She chased a juvenile bird through numerous disciplines. The chase was worth it, though, because she got to see the aurora borealis, met a knight, wandered through some French literature, and stumbled across a multilingual snake in the process. The unique little bird delighted her!
She also stumbled across a male version of the same species! This one was also preoccupied with strings, but his song was much more musical than the female’s.
“Stop dawdling! I told you, you don’t have time for that!” Her anxiety ripped her out of the memory, filling her up with oceans of doubt.
“But I have no idea what to put in that blog post!” she whined. “Manage your energy, not your time,” her inner voice suggested. She agreed with the concept in theory, but in practice? Well, that was an entirely different matter. She had to be creative in a crunch. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The leaves shattered beneath her feet. Her thoughts came in snippets—a word here, an image there. Maybe she just had to trust the process, believing that something would take shape as her mind continued to wander–traversing multiple texts, multiple literacies, and multiple modalities? She had heard that feelings were just another source of information, so she decided to listen to what they had to say about creativity.
Weathering
The wind blew colder, pulling her mind back to the trees and the weather that was almost upon them. She wondered if they felt as cold and lonely as they looked? She supposed the answer was immaterial. What mattered was that the trees were teaching her about the nebulous space between what could be and what is. They were showing her how to be still, flexibly bending as they weathered the uncertainty of creativity. They were inviting her to balance, breathe, and absorb her surroundings. They modeled how to reach toward what little light they could find, welcoming it into their souls, taking energy from it through photo/synthesis, and returning it to the environment filled with the pure oxygen of love and truth. Watching the trees shed their leaves was teaching her to shed her fears and preoccupations. Their strong trunks and naked branches showed her that it is possible to be vulnerable AND strong. Their patient waiting and weathering reminded her that creativity takes time and that “…after much atribulation come the bblessings. Wherefore the day cometh that ye shall be ccrowned with much dglory; the hour is not yet, but is nigh at hand” (Doctrine & Covenants 58:4).
Wintering
As she delighted in the vistas spread before her, she wondered why it seemed so much harder to exercise faith when things were cold and dark? “I know a young man who was once like a trembling leaf of autumn staring into a wintry abyss…A man whose fear led him to play very fast in order to avoid considering what he might become. But this young man was blessed with a teacher who could see into his soul, who taught him how to breathe the incomprehensible air of distant places, who gave him permission to search the world in order to find and make who he was, and to love what he made. A teacher who taught him about the patience needed in the seeking and the creating. Now this young man wants to be the same kind of teacher, one who teaches just by being who he is. And that is precisely what he has become. In fact, just knowing him could change your life” (Barone, 2001, pp. 70-71).
She supposed God was rather like that too: “…and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the bearth, and call things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its dmotion, yea, and also all the eplanets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.” (Alma 30:44).
She imagined the birds, the trees, the rocks, and the leaves speaking the words: “And now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, this is the atestimony, last of all, which we give of him: That he lives!” (Doctrine & Covenants 76:22).
She wondered as she wandered (Niles, 1934) why it had taken her so long to realize that Jesus Christ was creativity personified: “And the Word was made aflesh, and bdwelt among us, (and we cbeheld his dglory, the glory as of the eonly fbegotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14). Even Jesus had created things in seasons–one day at a time.
Spending time among the trees today had reminded her that creativity had its seasons too; seasons of wandering through uncertainty and wondering if she were good enough to do the work she felt called to do. Seasons of opposition where weathering discouragement seemed difficult, and seasons of wintering where everything seemed cold, dark, and frozen. Although she had been longing for perpetual spring or fall, she now understood that what she really needed to do was to embrace creativity’s winter. The wintering provided the rest, resources, and renewal so essential to ensure that the fountains of creative productivity could flow again in the spring and offer cool refreshment in the summer.
Although the blog post felt both dead and alive right now (like Schrödinger’s cat), she could see that it was full of potential–a superposition of possibilities, “a compound in one” (2 Nephi 2:11). Perhaps, it wasn’t the product that mattered, but rather, what producing it was helping her to become. She had learned a lot–about writing, about herself, about her values, and about how to craft a more meaningful life. That seemed like more than enough.
But then her brain cried, “It’s horrible! The writing is preachy and self-indulgent, the transitions are clunky, and many of the allusions don’t make sense.” And with that judgmental measurement, all of the possibilities suddenly collapsed into a decaying pile of leaves. Creativity was fragile like that.
“It’s still not finished!” her soul cried. And then as her frustration ebbed, she finally understood that it didn’t have to be. There would be other walks, other trails to explore, and other treasures to find.
Although she still had miles to go before she slept, “Away from [her] workplaces [she] had learned to explore at leisure the textures and patterns in various landscapes….[and she had learned] that meaning can never be rushed…nothing beautiful ever hurries” (Barone, 2001, p. 69). In the meantime, as she had criss-crossed the conceptual landscape of creativity, she had discovered plenty of life and learning in the layers.
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