What Does It Mean to "Create"?

I lost a friend to suicide several years ago. The grief got stuck in me because life got busy and I was consumed with taking care of business, including memorial preparations, writing a speech, holding space for others, and so on. Shortly after the service, though, I broke. So I took my little guitar to the coast by myself, and sat by the Pacific ocean every day, finally letting myself feel everything I'd been comparmentalizing inside.

In that quiet space, a song I'd set aside after struggling with it for months suddenly emerged. In one grief-filled episode, sleepless in the middle of the night, words and melody poured out. It was almost like a hallucination. A spontaneous purge of emotion. What had been awkward and incomplete became an homage to life, love and loss. But here's what stopped me: I didn't write that song, I received it. Something moved through me from a source outside myself. I felt it, viscerally.

If we're truly "creating," where does the idea actually come from?

To be clear, this isn't about dismissing craft or technique. Once an idea arrives, the real work begins. You may spend months refining, editing, revising, getting every detail right. The technical skills matter enormously. And plenty of our work is entirely derivative--reworkings of other artists' ideas, variations on our own earlier work, deliberate homages. That's perfectly fine and part of the process. But sometimes there's an initial spark that comes from somewhere else entirely. Where does that come from?

We carry this illusion--a burden really--that we must use effort to surface our ideas. And we get something from this too: the ego gets to take credit for inspiration, and we can claim ownership of what emerges. This creates enormous pressure. We exhaust ourselves trying to generate from nothing, believing creativity depends entirely on our individual will.

But what if creative blocks are actually spiritual blocks? What if the struggle to access our creativity comes from being disconnected from something larger than ourselves? I spent years as a young man feeling like I was an artist without a creative outlet. I kept searching for different mediums, different approaches, thinking the problem was technical. If only I had the right skills, or a different instrument, then I could create. But I couldn't. So I copied instead.

I borrowed, or outright stole every idea I ever put into a composition. Yes, it was filtered through my perspective, and touched by my gifts and my imperfections, but there was no creation of my own. Perhaps you could say that I made something new, but only in the way that a remix is something new. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't diminish the value of what I was doing, but I was craving something I couldn't access--that sacred space within where pure inspiration could emerge. It wasn't until I realized this was a spiritual problem that things started to change.

Some ideas arrive like visitors. They come through us, not from us. In this case, the artist is the antenna, the one who gives form to what wants to be expressed. Think about those moments when something flows through you that surprises even you. Are you creating, or are you getting clear enough to let something move through you?

This type of creation could be seen as a collaboration between your consciousness and an infinite, universal source of creativity. Some may call it source, or God, or the Divine creator. I don't think we necessarily need a name, but I think it helps to acknowledge the inherent mystery within the process. To access it, we need to let go and start listening in order to be open to receiving. This requires stepping away from the noise and finding quiet space.

The path to that quiet space varies for each person. For some it may be a meditative practice, or journaling in the quiet of dawn. For many, it is a substance that creates that opening, a potentially effective, especially at first, but increasingly inconsistent shortcut. For me it is getting lost in nature. Sitting and listening to the water... really listening. Feeling the earth beneath my feet. Watching the sun reflect through the leaves of the trees. Returning week after week, and month after month to witness the changes as nature is constantly evolving. It is this practice of presence, of truly paying attention, that allows you to receive inpsiration rather than always having to manufacture it.

Even when inspiration arrives as a gift, craft is required to transform it into art. The idea may have come in a moment of openness, but then our dedication to the discipline gives it the form it deserves. The spiritual element is the beginning, in receiving the seed. The majority of the work comes after.

There is a spiritual path to this openness, and it is available to all of us. When you stop trying to force ideas and start creating space to receive them, you will discover that the deepest art emerges not from our effort to be brilliant, but from our willingness to get out of the way and let the sacred move through us. We become the vessel, the translator. All of our percieved flaws--the singers wide vibrato, my wrists rendered useless by severe pain that forced me to adapt--make us the unique instrument through which the infinite expresses itself. Perhaps we're all drawing from the same source, the same collective consciousness, each of us giving it our own voice. And in surrendering to that, we find not less of ourselves, but more.