Co-Creativity

A few years back, I was on my first retreat at Eastern Point, and the more I gazed at the ocean, the vibrant colors of sunrise, the shells on the beach, the rocks, the more I felt compelled to try to draw them. This was weird, because I don’t draw. But the colors and shapes were so beautiful I felt the need to somehow respond. I was so excited about this idea, but when I finally went to put colored pencil to paper, it was frustrating and discouraging. My friend the artist offered to help me get started. She put a drop cloth on her dining room table and filled it with supplies. “Just play” she said. I stopped trying to make something in particular, and just figure out how to make the brush work. I learned that afternoon that there were certain things each brush, and those acrylic paints were good at-- bright bold colors, layering, textures. None of it looked like anything, but some of the shapes and textures pleased me. I learned that day that if you are going to make something with paint, you are going to have to do it in partnership with the paint, and the brush, and the canvas or paper or whatever you are painting.

This is true no matter what we are creating, no matter what medium we are using, whether we are making dinner, or a worship service, or a raised bed garden. When we bring any idea into the world, it is made out of matter that has its own nature, its own capacities and limitations. Even the most faithful reproduction is a new creation.

We too, the makers, have our own capacities and limitations. I was listening to an interview with singer songwriter Diane Cluck one time, and she asked the interviewer to name something he disliked about his own voice. He had a wobble, he said, that he never felt good about. They talked about how such a characteristic of the individual voice was part of what made your voice distinct, could be a foundation of personal style.

It occurs to me that whenever we create something, we are never creating something out of nothing, we always begin with what is already there. Even when we make a cake “from scratch” we mostly don’t mill our own flour, or grow our own wheat. In fact, wheat only evolved about 10,000 years ago, before that it was something else. Our unique bodies and selves shape what we are creating, even without our conscious choice. And everything happens in a community of living and non-living beings in a landscape that has been shaped long before we began.

And much as we try to make things that last unchanged, creation continues working on what we have created almost immediately once we have finished making the thing. Consider how a cake changes once out of the oven, over hours and days. The raised bed for our garden, how the natural forces work on the wood over time. Life itself is ceaselessly creating, as it has been for millennia. In truth, whenever we create something, we are actually co creating.

Consider, for example the creativity of the tree that became the wood for the raised bed. As William McDonough & Michael Braungart write in their essay "The Extravagant Gesture"

“Four billion years of natural design, forged in the cradle of evolution, has yielded such a profusion of forms we can barely grasp the vigor and diversity of life on Earth. ... “

and how the creativity of one species shapes the response of other species:

“Responding to unique local conditions, ants have evolved into nearly 10,000 species, several hundred of which can be found in the crown of a single Amazonian tree..”

And you yourself are no less unique, and your unique way of creating is vital and full of life, whether it is extravagant or simple, practical or whimsical. Whether what we create is exactly what we had in our minds, or full of mistakes and missteps that we never imagined or wanted.

As we do our creative work, whatever that may be, it becomes a spiritual practice as we consider how it is working on us, connecting our own spirit and self to the work. How does it feel as it moves through us? Is it fresh and vital? Does it touch something new and inspiring? Is it steady and patient, does it calm us and those around us. One of the things I like about the hug shawls is that I use a simple pattern, and so not only do I create a shawl I hope will be soothing and comforting to another, but the repetitive act with the soft yarn in the pleasing color is soothing and comforting to me as well. As Matthew Fox has said “…the most beautiful thing a potter produces is... the potter.” As we are drawing or singing or building or cooking, we make not only the cake but we make ourselves. I will tell you that one of the reasons I like being a minister for these congregations, and can see myself continuing into the future, is because I like the self that is created as I do this work.

Our creative work also connects us directly to one another and to the web of life. My raised bed garden is co-created with and impacts thousands of species seen and unseen. The cake I bake has in it the contributions the farmers who grew the wheat, the ecosystem where the wheat was grown, and in turn helps form the bodies of those who will eat the cake when it is finished.

This is a time when great creativity, in the sense of innovation, is needed. We have enough things, too many things, the great industrial machine creating great quantities of things must be replaced by a calling to create of the right things, for ourselves, for our world. We have an opportunity to co-create our world in a way that will impact our communities and our ecosystems and generations to come. Paying attention, noticing, and responding is important in our acts of creation.

Consider a common way we have of constructing, say, a new development or shopping center. Step one is to bulldoze everything, to create what we imagine is a blank slate on which to build our human vision. But of course even once a field is leveled down to bare soil, still we build in a watershed that rains and floods and is shaped by weather beyond our control, we build for people with growing evolving needs, we build in an ecosystem with the beings who have always lived in that place, whose displacement impacts other communities and ecosystems.

Perhaps it is time to think creatively about creation. If we understood creation as not the heroic act of an individual, but as an inherently collaborative act, a communal act, we might stop as Wendell Berry said in his essay “Solving for Pattern” creating “Solutions that cause a ramifying set of new problems”

“A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained ... most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them. A bad solution solves for a single purpose or goal, such as increased production. And it is typical of such solutions that they achieve stupendous increases in production at exorbitant biological and social costs.

"A good solution is good because it is in harmony with those larger patterns ... the way a healthy organ acts within the body.” ... “A good solution causes a ramifying series of solutions.”

A collaborative style of creation that is in harmony with larger patterns is all part of what I mean when I say “Co-creation.” Co-creation is an idea that works well with our Unitarian Universalist theology- that we are forever collaborating with the Spirit of Life and all other living beings in the continuous creation of the world we live in, of all we are and all we see. In our story that creative force is called God -- a personified being with a voice. Many UUs struggle with a personified God, but there’s a school of thought called “Process theology” which is a better fit for many UUs. It was founded by a mathematician in the 20th century who describes a God that could be found in nature, and harmonized with reason and the evidence of senses. Imagine if what we called God was a process working within and among all processes. To Henry Nelson Weiman “God is a part of nature, the part that brings forth the increase in good…. In short, God is creative transformation, the growth of meaning and value in the world.” It’s an interesting way to look at the world- that God is more like a process than a being, that this process God is inseparable from transformation, from the ongoing reality of creation, which we are all involved in together.

Consider taking this as a spiritual practice- as you are creating whatever it is you create, notice those sacred intersections of your own creative efforts with those of our community, our web of life, and the mysterious spirit of life that works with us and through us. Notice the ways we create together what one individual cannot create in isolation.

Music producer Rick Rubin writes in his new book “The Creative Act: a Way of Being”:

"Every manifestation of this unfolding is doing its own work on behalf of the universe, each in its own way, true to its own creative impulse.

"Just as trees grow flowers and fruits, humanity creates works of art. The Golden Gate Bridge, the White Album, …, the Sphinx, the space shuttle, the Autobahn, … the Roman Colosseum, the Phillips screwdriver, the iPad, Philadelphia cheesesteak.

"… Each of these is humanity being true to itself, as a hummingbird is true to itself by building a nest, a peach tree by bearing fruit, and a nimbus cloud by producing rain. "

I encourage you in the coming days, to notice how you are participating in the creation of our world, how you are co-creating with the creative force some call divine, how you are co-creating with your community and with the web of life. Listen to and collaborate with all who co-create with you, and in so doing, observe how you are co-creating your self- your great masterwork.