My journey to creativity

As an adult I am lucky to be surrounded by creativity. There is music which whispers to me in the night as I sleep. Art that tugs on my sleeve when I happen to be looking the wrong way. Books which find their way into my bookshelves without me quite knowing how they got there. As a child I remember staring at sculptures in  shopping arcades which pulsed with creative invisibility, which seemed to be hidden from everyone but me.  A small child with dark eyes, a wonky fringe and a predisposition for finding the hidden things no one else saw. 

I would point and ask questions no one knew the answers to; ‘Why is that man’s hair blue?’ pointing to a scary-looking punk on the bus. I soon learnt not to ask. But it didn’t stop the questions from forming in my mind. ‘Why did they choose that? What moved them? What told them to?’ At the park I would look under swings and slides at scrawled graffiti, marvelling at initials carved into walls. 

And then one day I picked up a pen and began to write. The muse smiled in her silent room. My poems began as descriptions, lists of colours and textures.  A leaf in the wind. A tree on the way to school. Words inside arguments which cut like knives. 

My mother would stare at me when I shyly showed her the words which tumbled from me, ‘Did you write this? You didn’t copy it?’ Ours wasn’t a overly creative household. I wasn’t submersed in poetry or art. It was a normal house in the normal suburbs.

I stumbled around in my normality, pen in hand, until one day I heard the opening lines of the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. I was moved to tears by the poetry which I hadn’t heard before and rewound the tape again and again, listening with an open mouth. I found myself in the library, looking up ‘Funeral Blues’ by WH Auden and found his moodier counterparts. I found what is now one of my favourite poems by Louis Macneice ‘Prayer Before Birth’ which rang in my adolescent ears in its beauty and hope and desperation. 

It turns out that the world is full of beauty and hope and desperation. I happened to open my eyes and see it. My favourite poems now span generations and range in depth and genre. Some of my most treasured poems are unpublished, written by people I’ve met through writing groups, or at spoken word events. All of them move me. All of them show me another way to think, to feel, to be. All of them add to my experience as a creative person in the world.

What marked your journey to creativity? Was there a pivotal moment of YES! Or was it a more gradual immersion in the things which speak to your soul? I’d love to hear your stories. 

Clever Monty