Guest Author - Deb Bonam

I jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to write this article down on paper. My point of telling you this will be made clear as I write on. Inertia sometimes pulls at your heals and begs for you to live out your days in creative passivity. Despite waking to vivid, fantastic images that tantalize you as you dreamt, you just don’t get your feet on the starting blocks. I’m not talking about a writer’s block or an artist’s lack of creative juices. I speak of something for more insidious…it’s the conscious decision to not create.

Creativity takes a will of passion, activity, commitment, enthusiasm, imagination, lack of fear and a total leap of faith. One cannot create and yet remain inert. Even Emily Dickenson, with her bouts of severe depression, actively produced melancholy poetry. She took pen in hand and wrote out her pain, her art, pushing past her inner demon that would have her lie motionless in bed.

In creating you must become fully engaged as an artist. Your passion must become alive 100 percent in order for you to ignite your creative talents and desires. If your dream is to write a book and you keep saying, “My dream is to write a book,” but you never seem to start chapter one, inertia has sapped all creativity. Again, creativity is born out of action. Passivity creates nothing.

I said you need a lack of fear and a total leap of faith because many of us are held back by the fear that “what” we’ll create will be rejected. It goes much deeper than that. When we create we create from the deepest, most spiritual place in our hearts and souls. To expose our vulnerability to criticism takes boldness. Our art isn’t just something we do, to a great degree it’s who we are. Having a total leap of faith is when we take ourselves outside of the realm we normally function in and trust the Universe that everything will come together as it should. When you’re totally immersed in the creative process a light bulb goes off in your head, more like the untapped area of your right brain turns on and in this dimension incredible creative feats can be accomplished with your intuitive sixth sense in high gear.

Amazing things can come out of the darkness into the light of creativity as long as we’re willing to go that extra step, or take that first baby step. I started out in high school writing in journals, which then turned into poetry, which then turned into painting and so on. One thing I want you to take away from this article is creativity is a privileged talent bestowed upon each of us to express ourselves in our own unique way. To deny that expression is like trying to cap off an active volcano. It’s unnatural. If you do in fact create from the deepest parts of your soul, then giving of yourself creatively unites your soul to other souls on this planet in a more peaceful, elevated, enlightened, spiritual way.