First a Decision– The Manifesto for Children (Of All Ages)

Posted on June 10, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Take thought of the seed from which you spring.  You were not born to live as brutes. –Dante

Creativity is a lifestyle.  You choose to leave something material behind–  some proof you once existed and contributed on Earth.  Then you build your life around that. You still bathe, eat, make love and nurse a hobby but those are all the negative space around your creativity.  Creativity itself is the main thing.  The happiest creative people throughout history finished their lives knowing they did this.

One thing I’ve found is that the seeds of such a big decision are almost always planted in childhood. And children who experience the creative spark never forget it.

Creativity scholar E. Paul Torrence followed 400 children from kindergarten, observing how creativity blossomed in some subjects and withered unattended in others throughout their lifespans. He began this project as a young psychologist in the 1950′s.  As some of his subjects entered their 30′s, he recognized certain characteristics of children who grew to lead Creative and happy lives.  Torrence wrote a Manifesto for Children, based on his observations.

The Manifesto for Children

E. Paul Torrance

Don’t be afraid to fall in love with something
and pursue it with intensity.

Know, understand, take pride in, practice, develop, exploit
and enjoy your greatest strengths.

Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others
and to walk away from the games they impose on you.

 

Free yourself to play your own game.

Find a great teacher or mentor who will help you.

 

Learn the skills of interdependence.

Don’t waste energy trying to be well-rounded.

 

Do what you love and can do well.*

 

Torrence’s Manifesto encourages children to stay true to creativity and childhood’s treasured dreams, but his advice applies to any person who, as a child, worked –full-to-bursting with creative energy.  As Nobel Laureate Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini says,

The moment you stop working you are dead…For me, it would be unhappiness beyond anything else. …I don’t work for the sake of mankind.  I work for my own sake.

*© E. P. Torrance (1983) Manifesto for Children, Athens, GA:
Georgia Studies of Creative Behavior and Full Circle Counseling, Inc.

Filed under: Childhood, Choice | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Talking Real Science.

Posted on March 2, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

This morning before breakfast, I walked up the hill behind my house with my 11 yr. old to check out her new make-shift ant lab. She walked with notebook and pencil in hand, ahead of me.  Still, she turned often to wait while I coaxed the toddler with us to keep the pace.  I recognized the ant lab’s layout instantly from a sketch she’d shown me earlier–  open roof,  six-inch high wood-plank outer walls and cross-walls placed to funnel ants to imported sugar-water.

So,  my daughter said and pointed to one corner,  that’s where I’ll bury one magnet.  And, she pointed at a different corner, that’s where the other magnet will go.  I asked her questions, told her the study seemed interesting and we started back home, both satisfied we had done well.

I need to backtrack a bit here.

Last week, a few minutes before we left home to attend classes,  this same 11 yr. old asked,  Oh, mom.  Did you sign my science project proposal? I had not.  But she had the paper at hand,  ready to sign and a pen to sign it with.

Visually scanning the paper, I asked What’s this?

She said,  Oh.  We have to turn in our science project topics today.  You see, she pointed to the top of the paper I held, there’s the question I will work on. I read,  ”Is the direction a plant grows affected by light?”   I faced my daughter.  She raised her brows.

I started, Darling? but paused to find the right words.  I asked how she planned to run her experiment.  She explained.  Then I let loose, Everyone in the world,  including you,  knows plants grow towards light.  Everyone!

She half-smiled.  So, what should I do then?  I have to turn this in a few minutes from now and it can’t be late.

I said,  Yes.  But you can’t turn this in.  It isn’t a question a self-respecting scientist would ask. I launched into a mini-lecture on how the scientific process is to catalyze new discoveries,  not to serve as an end in itself.  She ended up turning in a question she thought interesting–  about the possible musicality of pond frogs. We both knew the science teacher would deny this project.

But,  I told her,  while your teacher is rejecting that question, you buy time to come up with a really great new idea.  The science teacher did reject the frog idea.  And my daughter did come up with a much better project and re-submitted a question.  Neither of us knows the answer to this new question and (as far as we can tell)  nobody else (in the entire world) does either.  Her new project?  ”The effects of increased underground magnetism on red ant colonial patterns.”  She’s got six weeks to figure things out and a good plan sketched out.  What she does not have, is an answer.

On our walk down the hill this morning,  she told me about some of the questions other students had come up with and we talked about those.  One student is studying volcanoes ( there’s got to be at least one, right?),  another is studying whether fruit floats.  But who cares?   My daughter knows her question is good and she’s excited she will discover something new— something no one in the world yet knows.  Now we’re talking real science–  and I couldn’t be happier to see her excited about it!

 

* Wait.  Please stay a little longer:  You may have noticed I’ve changed my blog’s look.  What do you think about that?  Is it better?  Worse?  In bad-taste?  Tantalizing?  I’d love to hear your opinion.  If you’re new here… I’d still love to hear what you think about my site, creativity…the Universe!

Filed under: advice and expectations, Biology, Childhood, Creative Families, Parents, The Child, The Scientist | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Rousseau and Me, We Don’t Agree– A Post in Two Parts and a Coda

Posted on February 17, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

For five days I’m writing about the most interesting methods people have used throughout history to raise brilliant children of all types. Yesterday I wrote A Mad Poet and a Sane Mathematician.

Part I:

Around this time– a year ago, I longed to walk outside with my toddler or stand by the pond with my five-year-old checking out brand-new tadpoles. I wanted to bake bread or travel to Ethiopia or  just drive an hour to visit my sister. But I couldn’t. I could wiggle my toes a bit and shift my weight from left to right, but no more than that– doctor’s orders.  If I moved more than that, contractions began immediately. But the tiny person growing inside me needed to swim around in amniotic fluid another 15 weeks.

The slightly-open window behind my chair let in crisp air in waves.  I heard swallows swishing around high in the sky and chirping. Birds so happy to have arrived safe from Argentina and ready to build spring nests under the eaves of my house.  My toddler wanted to share my chair,  but we couldn’t both fit.  She cried and begged me to pick her up.  Later, she dragged her wicker rocker and set it next to me.  I read her books.  My 7-year-old and 5-year-old brought me little snacks of oranges or cinnamon toast.  My 10-year-old made pasta for lunch.

Several weeks later, resting still, this time in a hospital bed, I couldn’t focus to read.  I couldn’t think in complete sentences either. I just lay there, with my uncomfortably quiet mind.  Living requires action–  and without it you seem barely human,  let alone a competent parent of little children.  I stared at their photographs taped to the wall in front of me. All those smiling faces kept me company. But I couldn’t touch them or kiss them.  They couldn’t tell me the stuff they thought or what kept them awake at night. So still, I drifted in and out of mind for hours.  One night, in a moment of both subtle desperation and fierce maternal agency a thought came to me.   My mind’s eye followed the thought as it entered and spread across my consciousness.  It is time to study my children in the way that thinkers do, with closed senses but open mind.  The timing could not be better.

This thought– It is time to study my children in the way that thinkers do, with closed senses but open mind, expanded until it took up so much mental space it squished the limbic helplessness out of my soul.

I’ve wanted to study the lives of sixteenth century Spanish monks or figure out how the Universe really began.  But figuring out Creativity from its simplest reduction to viral idea-spreading– that I could study until I die.  And here I had time!

Instantly I felt the luckiest woman in the world– with a laptop, speedy internet access and several bright children with budding creative powers to think about and later observe. That night I started Creating-Brains, this blog.  I also e-mailed my friends with the link so they’d read my first post and make it all official before I chickened out.

Part II:

Months earlier, I had read the most interesting book on human development theory–  Jean Jacques Rousseau’s classic Emile. Here Rousseau writes the life story of his young aristocratic charge– Emile and chronicles his growth to astonishing mental independence. When Rousseau ends his tutorship (20 yrs. long)  he introduces Emile,  a virgin thinker, to the world.

So how did Rousseau raise Emile?  Here are some highlights:

Emile…

  • Never wore binding clothes.
  • Ran around barefoot,  even in Winter.
  • Took frigid showers outdoors, even in Winter.
  • Lived in a bare cottage, alone with his tutor, in the countryside.
  • Ate plain food.
  • Cultivated one habit– Have no habits (no bed time,  no wake time,  no set daily schedule whatsoever).
  • Knew no books, was not read to and did not know how to read until age 16.
  • Had no friends.
  • Learned through experience only ( i.e., poking a real skunk to learn it stinks, and not reading about it).
  • Led his own life with little human interference.
  • Had a tutor who followed him from afar outdoors, but sat with him to discuss humanity’s grandest questions to close a day.
  • Could ask his tutor anything and get a question for an answer.
  • Ran free.
  • Lived happy.
  • Thought for himself.

Rousseau’s Emile was an imaginary character (Rousseau was a philosopher, after all).  But the methods used to educate Emile influenced Western thinking about childhood development and education for two centuries.  The Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, the Idler in the UK and the International Unschooling movement are examples of today’s Rousseau-groupies.

But what does Rousseau’s Emile have to do with me hanging out in the hospital,  far from my charges?  Plenty (stay with me here). First, disclosure–  a host of loving , sometimes fun,  but always responsible people cared for the kids when I could not. Also, Super-man (a.k.a.my husband) cut his work days dangerously short to come home.  He also spent too many nights awake nursing sick kids (yes, they all got the flu) or warming midnight bottles for our toddler. But back to Rousseau and me: in gist– my children lived a lot like Emile. Rousseau theorized and Emile turned out super human. But real children, I learned by being away, do not thrive cultivating the habit of no habits. Also, real children grow confused, rather than fonder, for lack of gentle touch. But worse of all,  the independent life reeks of danger for little ones and free-thinking is small without limits.

I resolved, then,  as I began to study my children to also study their broken mama and by sheer mindfulness and consideration, we’d learn to live right.  Together we’d learn to live the Creative life,  which, as I’ve written often since my first post,  is not without habits or discipline.

Coda:

Several years ago,  I would have disagreed with every iota of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother– the book I’ve mentioned several times in this series.  I would have suggested Emile’s lifestyle as the enlightened (and opposite) alternative.  Not today– Chua’s not totally wrong.  Discipline does breed brilliance. But Chua is fundamentally wrong,  because disciplined skills without philosophy make for hollow output.

So there it is.  I’ve told you another piece of my story and dragged you through contrived concepts.  But, stay with me…there’s more to come!

I’d love to hear from you and learn what you think.  Leave a comment.  I love reading comments!

 

 

 

Filed under: Childhood, Complexity, Constraints, Creative Families, Parents, Philosophers, The Child, The Scientist, What Hasn't Worked for Me | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A Mad Poet and a Sane Mathematician

Posted on February 9, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

For five days I’m writing about the most interesting methods people have used throughout history to raise brilliant children of all types. Yesterday I wrote To Yell or Not to Yell.  That is My Question.

Young Ada Loveless lived on a grand estate with her noble mother in nineteenth-century England. The 9 year-old romanticized her father, a famous English poet living in Greece on self-imposed exile. She had never met him and as a child, knew very little of him. Ada asked her mother when he’d be back, but Lady Anne Isabella Byron never told her daughter the colorful truths about her dad– Lord Byron.  When he died a hero to the Greeks for financing their war of Independence from Turkey, all Ada knew is that he fell ill and died far away from her.

Ada’s father–no ordinary poet,  is regarded as one of the greatest British poets of all time and remains widely read and influential. He was also no ordinary man.  Good-looking to boot–he loved many women and men leaving broken hearts in his wake as he traveled the world. One English socialite once disguised herself as a page to enter his bed-chamber.  Of Lord Byron she said, he is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.“

Ada’s dangerous-to-know father’s father (her grandfather) was “Mad Jack”.   And his grandfather (stay with me here) committed suicide.  Lord Byron’s mother ran the Byron estate while the men made ill and herself suffered from ongoing melancholy.

When Ada insisted on hearing stories of her father,  her mother sought the advice of a trusted neighbor– the Scottish polymath, Mary Somerville.  Somerville provided a sure solution:  rigorous education in mathematics.

Lady Byron took the advice and hired mathematics tutors for her daughter at a time when girls did not study math.  The helpful neighbor, Somerville,  became Ada’s lifelong mentor.  Together,  the two women (and the many hired tutors) educated any potential “madness” out of little Ada.

I’d say they did well.  Ada became a prominent mathematician in Victorian England and never showed a traced of madness. She worked with Charles Babbage drafting the blueprints to the world’s first computer and she wrote the first computer program in history.  Ada turned out not mad nor bad and probably not very dangerous either.

Filed under: Childhood, Creative Families, Parents, The Child | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

To Yell or Not to Yell. That is my Question.

Posted on February 9, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

For five days I’m writing about the most interesting methods people have used throughout history to raise brilliant children of all types. Yesterday I wrote Poor Baby?  Nope.  Strong Baby.

Sirena Huang started violin lessons at age 4 and made her professional solo debut at 9 with the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra.  I watched her play on TED several months ago and she’s been on my mind lately.  Especially after reading Amy Chua’s book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I’ve seen musical prodigies before, but what blew me away when I watched Sirena, is how articulate she is and how at ease she seems on stage.  This kid must practice six hours a day,  just like Amy Chua’s pianist  and violinist daughters.

This is what I’ve thought: Does Sirena’s mom use the same techniques–mainly (as seen from a Western parent’s perspective), verbal and emotional abuse?  Is Sirena so well-spoken because her mother makes her practice (the Chinese way–i.e., a million times with no bathroom breaks or dinner) speaking as well?  And, does Sirena get as little sleep as the Chua daughters?
I will have to contact  and interview Sirena’s mom soon,  or at least before she writes her own book on raising a musical prodigy.
Musical prodigies–more common today than fifty years ago because of  Sinichi Suzuki’s method of music education, learn to play the violin or piano, like we all learn to speak–through immersion.  With the Suzuki method, children begin lessons at three years old. Parents attend all lessons and learn the instrument along with their child.  Practice sessions, ideally short–but plentiful throughout the day, become a main ingredient of early childhood. Perfection is the goal.
Amy Chua (a.k.a., tiger mom) got the perfection part correct. But she missed Mr. Suzuki’s core belief:  children learn best surrounded by lots of love and approval.  For Suzuki, the hard work of learning the violin, such as, is not experienced as hardship by a young student;  like learning to speak your native language is not a hardship.  The point of early music education is to make the learning seamless. And the point of music education is to uplift the human spirit through inspiration.  Suzuki said,
It is necessary to be concerned about the importance of educating a really beautiful human spirit.
But Suzuki wasn’t the first to think young children quick-studies of difficult instruments. The first young musical prodigies– Nannerl and Wolfgang,  lived in18th-century Austria.  The siblings (11 and 7 ) traveled Western Europe by horse-drawn coach on cobblestone streets and muddy roads with their father, who had taught them ( the piano and violin, also respectively) with love and encouragement.  The girl, Nannerl, played the piano for her family the rest of her days, and that is about all we know about her. But the boy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music.  His music became part of Western popular culture. You can hear Mozart’s music in TV commercials, movies and cartoons, even today.
When the Mozart children performed in Germany 235 years ago, a young tenor of the German court sat in awe listening in the audience.  Eight years later, when his son Ludwig learned to speak,  he began teaching him music. Beethoven’s father, Johann, used Amy Chua’s methods–well, she actually used his.  He yelled, screamed and beat his son to the point of sobbing at the piano.
Is there a lesson here?
Yep.
Here’s what I take from these stories:
I am partial to Beethoven because his music is so much more emotionally charged than Mozart’s– it makes grown men cry spontaneously, still today. But, both men were Highly Creative musicians.  The loving-inspiration method worked to make Mozart one of the top musician/composers of all time.  But the angry-yelling Johann, also seems to have produced musical genius–as shown in his son, Beethoven.  Regardless, both parents did have something in common. Both sat or stood beside their children as they practiced and helped them along every step of the way–in the beginning.  That, is the lesson.
The lesson for Amy Chua is: She did not have to yell at her girls to get them to Carnegie Hall, after all.  She could have been more like Mr. Mozart,  if she had been so inclined.
I’ve included Sirena Huang’s TED performance below.  For the sake of my personal comfort (and with best wishes for little Sirena) I will assume her mother raised her like Mozart –not the Chua girls.  Check it out!

Filed under: Childhood, Creative Families, Expectations, Music, Passion, The Child | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Must Squash Play-dough?

Posted on January 27, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

This morning, while the baby took a nap in her stroller, my two-year-old and I opened our little beach pop-up tent to full size in the Music Room. She ran to the game closet in the hall and brought back a small container of play-dough, entered the tent and zippered the entrance shut.  I sat inside the tent, on the carpet with her.  She took the play-dough out of its container and squashed it into a lumpy pancake. Then she poked the pancake with the container in time to the music playing. She had no plan–but kept herself totally occupied for at least a half hour.  Then suddenly, she stood and said, Mom, can you make chocolate milk?

My daughter plays without a plan all the time.  Until she needs help.  And she does need help often.  Toddlers generally need help every three or four minutes. Their impulses are bigger than their capacity. Still, she needs less minute-to-minute attention than my ten-month-old. Babies and toddlers require so much adult help on so many levels.  I often marvel at the resources necessary to raise just one little person to adulthood. But why is this so?  Why do young humans need so much care?  Why can we not be more like, say, puppies, maturing much sooner? Wouldn’t we progress faster as a species if adults weren’t so preoccupied, so much of the time, with the needs of children?

Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik has studied babies for more than a decade. She says,

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use.

Children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined.

The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

My two-year-old can keep the electric mixer steady in the batter bowl when she helps make pancakes and she can dress herself pretty well. Still, she spends hours following her whims–trying things out.  She hops. She puts on lipstick.  She cleans the interior of my car with baby wipes.

We all used to play this way, but most of us live very directed lives as adults.  Yet, Creativity requires us to play with thoughts, ideas and mediums, pointlessly–like a two-year-old.

Improvisational violinist Stephen Nachmanovich says,

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

Writer Julia Cameron suggests you take time to find this inner muse by taking yourself on an Artist’s Date.  She says,

The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly “artistic”– think mischief more than mastery.

If my two-year-old’s impulses are bigger than her capacity–my capacity is bigger than my whims. Looks like I need an Artist’s Date–but I doubt I’ll spend it squashing play-dough!

Filed under: Art Concepts, Childhood, Making Time, The Child, Time Alone | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Eating a Flashlight and Sucking Up Dust

Posted on January 16, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

My nine-month-old baby is definitely in the oral stage of cognitive development.  Just before sunrise this morning when she and I were the only ones awake in our dark house, I handed her a small, flashlight to play with.  I thought she would like watching the projected light move by her direction. But she didn’t give a hoot about the light’s movements–she just stuffed the thing, rather awkwardly, light side in, into her wide-open little mouth. She tests everything this way.   She’s learned puke-green pea puree from a baby food jar is bad.  If she sees it coming–she purses her lips tight.   She’s decided pretzel sticks sprinkled with sea salt are worth holding tightly.  It’s like her mouth is directly connected to her brain’s dopamine generators.  When an object or texture feels good in her mouth, dopamine is released in her growing brain and the moment turns into a pleasurable memory–an Invariant Representation or hook for pleasurable experiences to come.  When something is gross enough to spit out there’s no such rush of dopamine.  The momentary displeasure turns into a different sort of learned experience–knowing what to avoid.  Dopamine provides teaching signals to parts of the brain responsible for acquiring new behavior.

My baby’s dopaminergic engine is running on turbo at this time in her young life.  Her capacity to recover from downers is mythological, even phoenician.  She doesn’t stay down after a displeasure, no matter how intense.  She just flies again into the unknown assuming new pleasures and new life.  Creative people retain–or in some cases re-acquire, this ability to learn from mistakes and move on, fast. The more tries, the better.  Dopamine island hopping.

Several years ago, I finally bought a vacuum cleaner I liked.  It has no bags to empty and sucks up popcorn or long hair without a glitch even years after its first use.  Marine engineer and architect, James Dyson, created a better vacuum by using the same cyclone technology used in saw mills to increase his vacuum’s suction power lifespan to–virtually endless.  Dyson, like most inventors, first made a garage-full of very bad devises.  He could not stay depressed about mistakes for long but he did not repeat mistakes either.  The dopamine engine in Dyson’s brain worked overtime signaling and directing towards his final “perfect” vacuum system. Dyson says,

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.

Babies move on quickly, as do successful inventors.  But when creative-types linger over mistakes rather than moving forward quickly, they end up parched for lack of dopamine.  Then learning from mistakes is no longer natural or endurable.  James Dyson says,

I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.

Counting mistakes?!  Rocket on!  I’ve made several just posting this blog.  But who cares, I’m taking flight all over again.

Talk to you tomorrow when I’ll need it again.

Filed under: Brain Care, Characteristics of Highly Creative People, Childhood, Mistakes, Neuroscience, The Brain, The Child, The Scientist | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

I Already Am an Inventor!

Posted on January 14, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

As part of my Creating Brains project, I am keeping a close watch on my children.  I keep track of their interests and watch as they find creative ways to spend free time. Cognitive psychologist, Alison Gopnik says,

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Recently, I’ve noticed my eight-year-old son is growing into his true creative-personality. This often begins somewhere between your eighth and twelfth birthday. Some children simply spend more quiet time sketching or thinking about life.  But the more extroverted creative-types often bloom more–exuberantly. My son falls into the more exuberant category.

For example, he has decided not to take after-school science classes with his sisters this year. I asked him if he’d like to study science with me, instead.  He paused– then said, “Hmm“, as if to consider.  My husband walked in the room just as my son said,

Ah, no.  I’ll study more science when I get to college.

I nodded.  I thought, I had better come up with a more interesting offer.  But my husband said,

I thought you wanted to become an inventor?  You’ll need to study lots of science and math before you can become an inventor, you know.

My son said,

Dad.  I already am an inventor. I’ve invented hundreds–hundreds, of Lego designs and one-of-a-kind machines.  I already am an inventor.

My husband and I just nodded.  We both knew he was right.  He already is an inventor. Maybe he’ll make big bucks with his Lego inventions, someday. Or maybe he’ll make a living working at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where they test top prospective inventors by letting them loose to play with Legos. In any case, he’s on his way to making the world a better place, by inventing. And I’m very happy he knows what he is.

The next day, this same son surprised me when he ran into the kitchen and said,

Mom!  I finished my first book.

It’s Sci-Fi– I’m a Sci-Fi writer!

He hugged me. I said,

Wow! Wonderful.

He said,

And, Alliah says my writing reminds her of some of her all-time-favorite sci-fi authors!

Alia is my son’s favorite teacher, scribe and main consultant to “objectively” weigh his big ideas. She treats my son seriously–like he really is an awesome writer.  And she’s brilliant to inspire him so because aside from already  being an inventor, he is also already a writer–he has 4,000 words of story to prove it.

I hope as my son grows he’ll keep his confidence in knowing who he is as a creative-type.  Many of us lose this confidence. Many of us take on what someone else has planned and quietly set aside who we really are–our best creative selves.  I hope to be there if my son ever needs to be reminded–he was already an inventor and a writer before his ninth birthday.

Filed under: Childhood, The Child, Willful Children | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

To Draw, to Cook, to Create?

Posted on January 3, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Four of my children are gathered around our dining room table this morning, coloring with pencils.  An art-loving college student–Elizabeth, who is on Winter break, is sitting with them.  She says,

In realism, you never draw the sun in your picture because if you did all your figures would need to be shadows.  So, if you want the lighting to seem real when you draw, pretend the sun is at your back.

They follow her instructions and draw pictures with no sun in sight.  Are my children being Creative?

My children are just learning the most basic techniques of art–by following directions.  They are far from changing the domain of Leonardo Da Vinci or Andy Warhol.

Last night, I really wanted to make broccoli soup. I opened my laptop and Googled “brocoli soup”.  Several recipes came up and I began to gather the ingredients for the one with the most butter and onions. But as I started chopping those onions my nine month old baby started to fuss– warning me, she had no patience to wait around for me to cook.

I love following recipes when I cook because I like to be surprised with new tastes.  I often get bored with my own combinations and want to try someone else’s.  Am I being Creative when I cook  someone else’s recipe?

Creativity is not a moment,  It is process that grows developmentally.  The first step in the creative process is imitation, but if you stop your creative development there,  you never create anything new and you slide into non-creativity.  My recipe-following could lead to Creation–if I put in thousands of hours and invest my life for Creativity in cuisine. But I’m not planning on that.  I cook because I love to eat, essentially for fun and pleasure only.

My husband can’t understand where the joy is in following a recipe.  He makes his own dish every time–he doesn’t even follow his own recipes.  He cooks on the fly.  Is he being Creative when he invents a never-before-tasted-exactly-this-way combination of flavors?

Although he is not imitating–few of the world’s grandest chefs would call on him to improve a gourmet dish.  My husband wants no access to that world. If he made the planet’s tastiest lasagna,  he’d get a kiss on the cheek from me and not much more.  He cooks for the same reasons I do.

My eleven-year-old daughter paints in her spare time.  She often takes her easel out to the front yard and paints some part of the landscape.  She isn’t following someone else’s instructions–she’s letting her inner eye and outer vision dictate what goes on the canvas.  Is she being Creative?

Actually, when she’s painting with no recipe, she has moved to a possible second stage in creative development–she’s re-creating what she sees.  She’s painting  the truth in forms present in the natural world outside our home.  If she does this for the next forty years,  her creative development will continue. But when she stops pushing herself to improve, she’ll begin sliding into non-creativity and remain a technician.

Creative development is long and has many stages.  Imitation is only the initial stage–the door to eventual Creation.  Recording is the second base stage–the doormat to Creation.  Of all the above examples,  my husband’s recipe-free cooking puts him farthest along on the Creative development path.  But he has light years to go to change the foodie’s domain,–so he’s also pretty green creatively.

Creativity is life and time-consuming.  It is much more than coloring in flow or cooking for fun.

Filed under: Art Concepts, Childhood, Defining Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

What’s Your Childhood’s Calendar?

Posted on January 2, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

The roots of Creativity spread in childhood. If you are a creative-type and are not sure where to start Creating, remember your childhood.  What did you love to do or think about when you were 9 years old?

This year I’ve chosen to remember a personal childhood pleasure by purchasing a wall calendar featuring shoes.

Every year, as the year closes, I take time to browse the calendar section at my local bookstore. I look for calendars with beautiful photos placed just so to frame the 365 days of the coming year.  It’s a personal little ritual that brings me hope and makes me smile inside.

After reading a stack-full of escapist travel lit in the Autumn of 2009–all of which romanticized Paris, I bought last year’s calendar, which featured Paris. January displayed a fabulous photo of the Louvre Museum and it’s glass pyramid out front, at night. April had a shot  of a walk along the Seine, lined with trees in glorious light-pink bloom. Each time I caught my calendar hanging there, tacked on my wall for practicality’s sake, or when I stopped to pencil in a dental appointment, I thought “Maybe I’ll live in Paris one day.”

This year, my chosen calendar is not escapist. Rather,  I chose a shoe calendar because I have always loved shoes. Even as a child, I imagined the lives people lived by analyzing their footwear.  I took mental photographs of interesting shoes and told myself each person’s story by what their shoes gave away. Shiny black shoes on a man means he does not come from a dirt farm. It also means he won’t visit any kind of dirt-rich place, any time soon,  if he can help it. Dusty shoes on a woman means she either steps on some unpaved portion of earth everyday or she grew up a country-child and never incorporated cleaning her shoes as part of a morning routine.  A man wearing boring yuppie-wear, accented with red Nikes sneakers wants to reveal his secret identity as a creative-type.

The shoes on my 2011 calendar are all beautiful, museum quality creations.  Their stories are harder to weave, but I’ll try. But more importantly, I’ll evoke and revive that child-like fascination with the world that Highly Creative people keep at hand throughout their entire lives.

If you could choose a calendar to evoke your childhood curiosities and thought-patterns, what kind of calendar would it be?

Filed under: Childhood, The Child | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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