the act of creation

Yesterday, I had the day off work and spent it sewing, punctuated only by coffee dates with a couple of friends. The sewing machine currently resides in the bedroom, so I set up the ironing board and a cutting table, put my music on shuffle, and had a wonderful day stitching bits of brightly-coloured scrap (thrown all over the bed and floor) into crazy quilt blocks. I’ve also been knitting, for the first time in over a year, and that’s felt good too.

I have come to realize that I have an inherent need to create, and when I am not exercising it, I feel out of sorts – much in the same way as I do if I am not exercising physically or giving my social and intellectual muscles a stretch by spending time with interesting people.

There was an article in Geez a few issues back that outlined a theory that God is creativity. Not that he is the creator, or the source of creativity, but that creativity itself is actually the embodiment of the divine spirit. I was intrigued by this concept – it’s maybe a bit further than I am willing to go, but I cannot argue that there is something integral in the experience of taking raw material (whether it’s a pile of fabric, a bushel of cucumbers, or a blank piece of paper) and making it into something.