This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to bring some of your hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are.*
(John O’Donohue)

Creation is life, life is creation.

If we could not create it’s likely we’d implode.

Some do.

We cannot go back and we cannot remain still.

Tied to the universe, we can only continue our journey.

John O’Donohue writes about a concept from the classical period referred to as pleroma or “the urgent fullness of God”:

There is such a fullness brimming in the divine presence that had God not created, he would have imploded. God had to come to expression. Just as a true artist is always haunted by the desire to bring the dreams of the imagination to expression, the failure to follow one’s calling to creativity severely damages one’s spirit.*

Imagine that. Without the opportunity to create, there would be no God.

Whether we believe there’s a God or we are open to the unfolding of the universe, this creative imperative makes sense in our experience.

We are aware of a deep surging within, such energy that must be provided expression.

The vast unfolding of the of the universe is fastened within each of us in miniature.

We’re not able to separate who we are from what we do.

My true self and my contribution are one.

There’s something very practical and critical in this.

For hosts of people made unemployed in a marketplace that was changing before the pandemic arrived, discovering and developing creativity – think talents, passions and energies – will be the way some choose to free themselves for moving forward.

They will find themselves and then each other, forming new cooperatives, collectively using their social media groups to be seen.

We can begin today, without someone else’s permission, following the creative imperative.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.