Creativity can fester. The same way vegetables left too long in the fridge turn mushy and mouldy and rancid, creativity, left unused, festers in the internal organs and begins to feed on the flesh of your sanity.
The creative urge is the pulse of God and it must find a doorway to the outer world. If it cannot find this doorway, which is to say if you, as the vehicle, do not make time and space to give it a doorway, it will have no choice but to burrow downward into your belly, or upward into your brain, where it will wreak havoc with your life.
With each passing day that you deny the creative impulse within you, all of life becomes increasingly troublesome. You find you cannot sleep. You argue with your love. You cannot focus on a single practical matter. You are constantly irritated, agitated and on a very short fuse.
Finally, when you realise that you can no longer even fully breathe, you sit down and do what you should have done long ago. You coax that festering creativity back upwards from your belly or back downwards from your brain, back to where it originated, in your heart.
Once there, you do whatever must be done to make a doorway and finally swing that doorway open, releasing the creative spark into the blue sky and fresh air of the outer world.
Artists don’t create because it is a nice thing to do. Artists create to save themselves from the toxic fumes of rotting creativity. They create to stay alive.
Love and courage,
Leah