What is Creativity Anyway?

I started Creating Brains.com because I needed to read it.  I have always thought of myself as creative but through years of having little children underfoot and family-size to-do lists my creative energy shrunk.  Still I read widely and went to graduate school. Then one sunny afternoon in May my oldest daughter died suddenly and cosmic entropy [...]

Death and Mindset

Sometime after the birth of my first child I read The Good Life: Scott and Ellen Nearing’s Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living. Self-sufficient living is a backward idea overall, but one powerful image of the Nearings’ story has stuck with me.   Scott Nearing died by choice.  He lived to 100 years of age and [...]

To Draw, to Cook, to Create?

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 [...]

Everyday Creativity–”Low Church”, High Creativity–”High Church”

Last Friday, my three oldest children put together a puppet show for little kids.  The puppets were fancy and store-bought, but the curtain behind which my children hid was makeshift, stained in various places and fraying at the bottom.  The audience, mostly small cousins and friends and their parents, clapped and laughed often enough to [...]

What Defines Creative Work? The Negative Spaces

The laws of nature not only describe the results of observations, but the laws of nature delimit the scope of observations. -Robert Oppenheimer (Theoretical Physicist, 1958) While in college, time stood still for me inside a speeding Benz one very black night. My hands, each white-knuckling a clutch of passenger-seat piping and leather. My arms, [...]

Creativity’s Terrain, Part 9: Setting Your Own Path

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Following Childhood Dreams . Right in the middle of my life,  I realized that I [...]

Creativity: The Mind’s W-A-T-E-R

Creativity has not yet found its perfect definition, one to encompass the full force of the idea. Humans live by definitions. Words order the world. With words we name our children and describe places we love. With words we immortalize today. Because words define our ideas, without them we stand in confused darkness. At night [...]

Is Creativity Undefinable?

Brand-new Porsche tires on my minivan we zoomed down the open highway to Monart School of the Arts this past week. Two kids spent 3 hours a day in flow, following step-by-step drawing-instructions to imitate the masters. One day Chagall, another, Picasso. The rest of us chilled at the local beach playground. But, for all [...]

Defining Creativity, Part 7: Creativity as Experimentation in the Enlightenment

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Cultural Suppression of Creativity. Sitting under an apple tree, Isaac Newton discovered gravity. A falling apple answered for him all questions regarding the mechanics of [...]

Defining Creativity, Part 6: Creativity can be Supressed by Culture

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers. China’s High Creativity first peaked while Europe wallowed in bloody Dark Age wars and then again during Europe’s [...]