Despite the fact that I start every day by brushing off my overnight emails and then checking out the mostly depressing news of the moment from seven different news sources, I still arrive at the breakfast table carrying somewhere within me the idea that I’m living in a startingly wonderful and mysterious world.
As a devoted detective story reader, I know that mysteries bring up questions – “Who dunnit and why?” I can’t remember who wrote it, but I read recently that “sentences ending in questions are worth one hundred times sentences ending with periods.” I, myself, am much given to asking questions both in my essays and my poetry. I guess the practice lingers from my childhood when I was always pestering my parents with questions, some of them the very same that I am still asking today, having not received very satisfying answers in the meantime. Which brings me back to the mysterious world we live in for the most basic question I ask myself almost every day: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”
As a personal essayist and a poet of the domestic hearth, I like to pull everything close to me, so when it comes to the ‘something from nothing’ query, I refer it to my daily practice of looking at a blank piece of paper and 10 minutes later seeing it filled with words. First there was blank paper and then there was a poem, or an essay. Where did they come from? Of course, that is the most common question I am asked when giving readings in public – “where do your ideas come from?”
Creativity is certainly one of life’s greatest mysteries. Some say that first black word on white paper, that first note written on a stave, that first brush on the canvas is sent from some great storehouse in the sky.
Others claim they are channeling geniuses – Mozart, Picasso, Tolstoy. Most creatives, I suspect, don’t give the origins of their process much thought. They just go with the flow, or stop with it when writers’ cramp, say, comes over the horizon. They just assume that it is their own ideas that they are making manifest.
Originality, it is said, is in proportion to the distance from the source. A little cynical perhaps, but I find that, on thinking it over, many of my poems have been triggered by a few words that stayed with me from a book I had just read, or the memory of a strong image from the past, such as a time I saw saffron monks’ robes hung over a brilliant yellow wall for drying, from which I much later wrote:
monks’ robes
drying on a yellow wall
saffron and rust
Many of my essays also have been spurred on by others’ paintings, compositions, dance and words. Even when my writing seems to have come directly from me, say, when haiku jumps into my mind via my eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and fingers, they never seem to be quite my own. The other day I took a walk around the garden. I noted that the bulbs were pushing up and was surprised to see in one a sleeping bee. The following words immediately came to mind,
heavy frost
in the half-opened crocus
a sleeping bee
It was really a nothing much incident, yet those few words gave rise to a load of thoughts such as that I should be more patient awaiting spring and just put all those seed packages to one side. Which gave rise to the thought of my general impatience when things don’t go my way in life.
A thought I immediately generalized into the un-satisfactoriness of humanity always wanting what they don’t have or not wanting what they do. Yes, that is the way with the creative act, it can always be expanded to the ends of the universe in its significance.
But just consider, whether you pick up a crochet hook and yarn, or create a new dance form, or add an unusual spice to an old recipe, you are possibly seeing things in a fresh way, maybe a way no one else has ever seen things before.
As to whether it is your own inventiveness, or whether you are a channel for the great creative energy of the universe doesn’t really matter. Just allow yourself to grow with the joy of something arising when before there was nothing.
Naomi Beth Wakan is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo (2014-2016) and the Federation of BC Writer’s Inaugural Honorary Ambassador. She has published over 50 books. Her trilogy, The Way of Tanka, The Way of Haiku, and Poetry That Heals was published by Shanti Arts in 2019. Naomi is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, Haiku Canada and Tanka Canada. At 90, she continues to write on Gabriola Island, BC, where she lives with her husband, the sculptor, Elias Wakan. www.naomiwakan.com
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