A Creative Nudge and a Sunday Poem

While these days the Kreativity Network is the name I use for my business--primarily designing and facilitating events, meetings and retreats that spark innovation and creative collaboration in organizations--it was once a thriving network in the San Francisco Bay area supporting individuals to express personal creativity. The operative question then was this: How do we, as adults in a consumerist culture that often wants us to be a spectator more than a creator, actively engage and communicate our unique talent, voice, story, art? Our original name was the Multi-Arts Creativity Network--as I believed then, as I do now, that creativity takes many forms and it is our birthright and obligation to discover and explore our own means of expression, whatever it might be.

At Kreative Evenings, we got to witness and experience multiple ways people were called to create, from the more typical "arts"--writing, acting, music, singing, performing, visual art--to cooking, speaking, sharing a game, a healthy practice, a joke, a technique, a project, a dream. The type of "art" doesn't matter--it's the doing, the trying, the exploring your imagination that does.

So while this blog aims to increase our understanding of creativity and its cultural importance, and our ability to think differently, I also want to urge you to create. It's easy not to, to distract ourselves, so find support and community: team up to encourage each others' efforts and, ideally, have a goal, performance or sharing opportunity so that your creative work is put out into the world.

Today, as part of National Poetry Month here in Chicago, I'm stirring up my own creativity as a featured poet during a live event. Let me leave you with a poem I will perform later:

Dreaming in Corners

I was dreaming in corners today
but the wall split
and I reached in
without looking
and felt your voice.
It was soft
like the lake
we almost fell into.

"When does the summer dream of us?" you asked.

You answered yourself by spreading
our blanket
on the damp ground
near the bare feet
I had grown out of.

Earlier you dropped a whisper
in my shoe
and I was afraid that when I stepped,
it would pop

as secrets often do.